Bark, Saucers and Barns

I love tree bark. I know, it sounds a little bit like "I love lamp", but I do. (BTW Areli didn't know where "I love lamp" came from. Do you?) I love the texture and with these particular Birch trees (I think that's what it is) you get some very interesting detail and colors. These trees are part of the landscaping at the new Holston Medical Group office building. I was photographing them after I was picking up my hearing test results today and I locked myself out of my car. I called Areli to come pick me up and took some pictures in the mean time. Meanwhile, I am deaf and need hearing aids, but that is another story. I also took the following pictures of the log cabin barn and hub-cap on a fence post (VW).

I am always asking Areli, as we drive around East Tennessee, if she notices this, or knows what that is, or why do they do that. She rarely sees, or notices or knows. I wonder what she is spaced out on while I am driving and why she doesn't possess an adequate knowledge of farm handy craft and methods. But, never-the-less, one day I asked her if she knew why there were coffee cans on top of the wooden fence post we were driving past. She didn't know so I proceeded to tell her it was to keep the rain from running down inside the post and rotting it out. Other methods are to cut the top of the post off at a slant, use a flat rock or cap it by some other means. Today I found a fence post with a Volkswagen hub-cap nailed to the top. I liked this method but it does not seem as economical as a flat rock. I mean, how many Volkswagens were in Tennessee when they were building barns from rough hewn logs in the stile of a log cabin? I also wonder if she really appreciates my practical knowledge or just feels degraded by my feeble attempts to impress her by poking pin-holes in her self esteem. Which leads me to- if you look close you can see my reflection in the edge of the hub-cap. It's like I've been abducted by the alien mother ship and my distorted visage is last thing anyone will ever see of me. The latter is probably my best assessment in this whole paragraph.

The sign on the door is posted by the insurance company offering a one thousand dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone vandalizing this property. The property stands adjacent the new medical building which you can see blurred to the left of the image. Why it is still standing in the first place is probably a matter of historic disposition. I would love to take it apart and restore it in another location... another story. The barn, as you can see, is completely charred on this side, but not on the others, and the door was probably added again after that. I'd say more than ten or fifteen years ago and since the seventies when the Volkswagen Beetle was first popular. Who knows? It was probably in use still around that time and most of the development probably came after, the tools and implements still appear to be inside along with the mummified, now hairless, remains of a rodent, probably a musk rat (I have a picture if you ask). Now only the pasture is used and that for a lone red horse, wet and matted by the recent rain and humidity. It wouldn't come to the fence so I refused to photograph it with my macro lens. In the future, please use this illustration to explain the mechanism of chinking logs the next time the subject comes up with your spouse.

Following Father

We often expect our children to follow us into strange places. Last Saturday, the family and I were out on on of our East Tennessee excursions, following the the narrow mountain roads around hill and dale to see-what-we could see. I guess it is my grown up version of traipsing through the woods that I remember so fondly doing as a boy. I loved to walk in the woods. But, I was never pretentious enough to call it a hike. It was always too unofficial for me and I assumed it required hiking boots and a pack piled high with provisions and paraphernalia. Only lately have I dared to call them hikes, or as Areli like to coin them, "death-hikes". Well, needless to say, no one has ever died on one. Maybe a bug-bite or scrape, but definitely no death.

In fact, they are life to me. They are the life I share with my children. I always see in the future. In this instance I am envisioning Mammaw Hailey laying in bed next to her grand children and telling them fanciful and captivating stories of how her wild and adventurous father led them through timber and train tracks in search of fairy houses and mysterious waterfalls. Wide-eyed the wee ones peer into the darkness of their imagined yester-year when Great-Papa Jon roamed the earth with a whittled walking stick in hand and camera at the ready; packing little Emma on his hip while fishing Abby out of the creek. Then wading with all three in tow, knee-deep into the babbling brook and dare I say it, into the tunnel with the dark slippery mud signed by raccoon and littered with cobble. Listen over-head as the train rumbles down the Clinchfield Rail Line. Great Grandma Areli could be heard laying on the horn as the noise from the train subsides and we ran splashing and slipping in the dark mud, out of the tunnel and up the spring planted weedy banks of the creek to the CRV. "Where have you been? You said five minutes" Great Grandma says. "Sorry, we found a magical water-fall and had to explore it", replies Great-Papa Jon.

Kingsport Greenbelt with Great Blue Heron