House on Utica Avenue
Dog Days
At the height of our summer, the winter constellations begin to be seen in the eastern dusk, which at this latitude (Jackson, Mississippi is 32.2988° N) is between July 21 and August 3,. Among the brightest of these starry arrays is Orion, and close on the heels of the great hunter is his big dog, Canis Major, with the brightest star in the night sky, brilliant Sirius, the Dog Star. With the rise of Sirius our dog days begin, and for the next forty days or so, it’s just hot as hell all the damn time.
Magnolia on High Street
Parakeets in the Pines
It was a beautiful little bird; brilliant green, with a yellow head, and a line of red around the face, the wings were edged in orange; in flight, a jewel, in flocks, a mandala, Carolina parakeets provided fleeting, noisy spectacles in the virgin rain forest that blanketed the frontier South. Audubon kept one as a pet; Wilson found them in Natchez in 1811, but records are spotty. Chances are they were never that numerous. Their diet of green fruit doomed them, and they were easily exterminated by settlers establishing orchards; when one bird fell to a gun, others descended around it. Inevitably, gunfire resumed, and they were slaughtered without pity.
Carolina parakeets died out in the early 20th century. The last known wild specimen was killed in Okeechobee County, Florida, in 1904, and the last captive bird died at the Cincinnati Zoo on February 21, 1918. This bird, Incas, died within a year of his mate, Lady Jane. In a case of what has been termed tragic irony, Incas died in the same aviary enclosure where the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died four years earlier.
By 1939, the Carolina parakeet had been declared extinct by most authorities. Some believed a few may have been smuggled out of the country and repopulated elsewhere, but that’s the same wishful thinking that buoys up news of ivory-bills.
Standard Life Gloaming
Underground Club
Cuties
Utility Art in Jackson
Old Rain
Every childhood has a Radley house, a Boo around the corner that opens our eyes to a world that doesn’t appear or work the way we thought it does or will.
Old Rain spooked my little world. Some said he was a freakish child abandoned by a troupe of carnies, others said he was a lost baby Bigfoot come south. When he wasn’t brooding in a boarded-up house in Pittsboro, he haunted the woods and hollows feeding the creeks and streams that make the Skuna River. I don’t know why we called him Old Rain, but what else is the Skuna–or any other river in Mississippi–save rain that’s found its way from the hills to the bottoms and over-wintered in owl-hooted sloughs, distilled and aged, steeped in the character of the land, an inspiration of earth itself?
We bury imaginary monsters under the baggage of adulthood, so I folded Old Rain away after finding far more frightening things than whisperings, thumps, and shifting shadows on lonely pathways, but I’ve grown to believe he was a faunus of the little river bottoms and low wooded hills that my Choctaw ancestors knew and loved. They would call him a thrower, a poboli of the hidden people of the woods; my Welsh ancestors would call him a woodwose, both beings living vestiges of the vital, spirit of the old forests which were themselves a manifestation of divinity on earth.
Old Rain is now–in mind and memory–a companion in those places I still cherish most: bright spring hills, close, dark summer woods, and open fields in the clear cold horns of winter.
Parking
