The Margins

When I set down the phone yesterday, I remembered the place where I grew up. Not the house where I lived, but the places I went to escape it. As a kid, I spent as much time as I could somewhere else, exploring the wilds along the fringes of suburbia. Most of that land was overgrown pasture broken by a grid of windbreaks on some sides, drainage ditches and dirt roads on others. A patchwork of weed-choked fields interspersed with palmetto brakes and pine scrub forest, all laced with trails worn by the passage of many small, quick feet.

In that world, the children were the natives, the adults the invading Puritan settlers. We blended into our surroundings and watched their continually encroaching world from behind the borders of our childhoods. We were seen only in flashes, heard only in laughter before disappearing deep into our tribal territories where we ran wild and half naked in the sun. We divided ourselves into clans based on neighborhoods whose boundaries in the margins ebbed and flowed with the tides of our interests, ages, explorations and numbers.

Ours was a bright world bordered by darkness. Bright long and wild grasses, bright, hot sand baking in the bright Florida sun, bright green palmetto fronds, all fenced by double rows of dark, Australian pines that whispered in the wind like Celtic spirits singing a lament in a Grimm Germanic forest, and tannic waters that flowed just above stagnation within moat-like ditches patrolled by the alligators and moccasins we thought would defend our primeval world from mass incursion. In winter we kept to the marches close to home, tunneling through seemingly impenetrable saw grass to hollow out natural shelters from the wind. In the summer, we dug like wild dogs, like angry gnomes carving out chambers with sandy gray walls that we would roof with plywood to disguise. The cool pits served as our refuge from both prying eyes and the blazing sun. Each spring and fall, we felled small trees to bridge the ditches after our parent-settlers had cleared them away. We kept our crossings half submerged to conceal them, knowing the Puritan giants didn't like to wet their feet. Beyond the bridges, we built forts and temporary shelters, migrating from isolation to isolation as our gathering places were discovered.

Alone or small bands, we crossed that bridge and explored the windbreaks farther and farther back to the where an earlier generation had sunk a standpipe to free an artesian well rich with sulfur and other elements that trailed in yellow and white streamers flowing along the dark and rotting detritus that had settled from the trees. The windbreaks ran for miles, broken by twin-rutted roads with grass between their tracks and weeds climbing along their shallow embankments. Deeper to the east were the berms, a perfect backstop to perfect our aim with BB guns or the occasional .22 caliber rifle. Some were topped with scrub oak sheltering high and narrow trails rife with rumors of arrowheads and Indian mounds, signs of our adopted brethren.

In isolated stands of woods between neighborhoods along the now-paved back roads and trails we took to school, we found older, abandoned settlements. Rusted barbed-wire lay coiled between rotting posts that once fenced primitive, three-sided barns that had sheltered horses just a few years before. We would seek refuge beneath their corrugated roofs when they rang with the rain that brought out the faint traces of horseflesh still embedded in their dark and deeply-grained posts. We scouted two-story homesteads with collapsed roofs and open walls, complete with moldy furnishings and housewares, the artifacts of failed colonies that gave us hope that a war against progress could be won. To us they marked a high-tide, the wrack line of an unsuccessful invasion into our wilds at some distant point in history. We didn't realize that the nearby orchard of houses were heavy with fruit ready to drop and spread their seed through our demesne.

I haunted that under-populated territory more than most. I spent my evenings, weekends and summers there, sometimes in the company of friends or rivals but more often alone with a book, a gun and some food so I wouldn't have to return home until dinner or dark. The woods and wilds were my escape from the more dangerous, common world safely hidden from view. The margins became my sanctuary.

Now that sanctuary is gone, built up and paved over. Year by year, the bulldozers have uprooted the trees we used to climb, leveled the ditches we traversed and filled in the abandoned quarry where we used to swim. They have pushed the border beyond the interstate into the last stronghold of original homesteaded pasture being sold off by the parcel, places our feet never ran unless they were prepared to dodge rock-salt or birdshot while being pursued by galloping hooves. Soon, that border will migrate to the river dividing one county from the next until the margins, squeezed from both east and west, shoot up along its banks toward the urban sprawl astride its outlet to the sea.

I don't begrudge these new settlers their homes. Progress marches onward whether I approve or not. New families need new places to live. Our families were once the intruders on someone else's sacred childhood. But when events in my life stir unpleasant memories like decay from the bottom of a still pool, I wish I could escape to the solitude of the margins, and the sanctuary they provided.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Feeling Fay

Or is that fey? After this weekend, I get the two confused.

I am waiting here to see what this storm will do, where she eventually decides to go, left, right, near, far, dead-ahead, engines full, damn the torpedoes, full stop. The models are making me dizzy. And does anyone else lie awake at 2 a.m. in mortal fear of being wiped out by the middle name of a notorious tele-evangelist's wife so desperately in need of an ironic queer eye intervention?

For all the blogs I've read, all the models I've studied, and all the analysis and discussion to which I've listened, I've found the experts seem to have missed the most telling predictive statistic of all: the perishable to comfort food ratio.

Before I explain, a full disclosure: This is a personal tracking model, not meant to guide anyone but FEMA and the criminally insane in whatever passes for their emergency storm preparations. This is one in a long line of models I've found to be mildly predictive only to be discarded for an unspecified draft choice at a later date, as I'm sure this one will become early Wednesday morning.

First I had the George W. Bush a.k.a. "Bring 'em on" model. In that one, the probability of landfall is inversely proportional to the individual desire of me and my friends to see what would happen if it did. I highly recommend this model to renters, the very young and anyone who has an evacuation room on retainer and speed-dial in the Atlanta Marriott Marquis and is already on the way. Oh, and the more than adequately insured, if that endangered species hasn't been entirely snuffed out by the good hands of Allstate around their neck as our good neighbors at State Farm enthusiastically cheer them on. This model worked really well at keeping the storms at bay in Florida through the seventies and eighties, at least until they did the transgender surgery that transformed half the hurricanes into him-icanes and David left me without power for ten solid days. Though that did teach me the powerful lesson of doing laundry BEFORE landfall. Key safety tip, half a score of sultry days in un-air conditioned as the natives and settlers experienced it Florida really leaves one wanting for a fresh and clean change of underwear each morning.

Next came the Fools and Small Children a.k.a. "Where Angels Fear to Tread" model. Ok, I never tested this one on hurricanes specifically. But initial results seemed quite promising as I listened at the back door a few months after we'd bought our first home as a freight train rolled one hundred yards behind the house around tree-top level before slamming down into the power substation half a mile away and sending pretty green and pink fireballs reflecting off the low and looming clouds, one of seven tornadoes that spun through the county that day. But once I saw the custom modifications to the house I'd just moved out of with its cinderblock wall bowed out as though following a French curve, and its garage to sliding glass door through the living room now a breezeway with its porch still intact and screened, I set this one aside with a full field testing. Scares me and I'm fearless.

Now I've settled on a new predictive tool, the perishable to comfort food ratio, a corollary of the preparation to paralysis principle. It works like this. You see a storm develop in the basin, so after a few days of constant panic on every station you watch you start tuning in to see where the weather experts think it might go. Or, if you're really lucky, an expert you know nails an e-mail to your electronic door every few hours when you've just convinced yourself after the last one that if you ignore it, perhaps Ms. Martin Luther and her hurricane reformation will eventually go away. It worked for a few generations of popes, didn't it? As you watch the black center line dance just left and right of your current coordinates in a personal cone of uncertainly over the one weekend you'd hoped to kick back and relax before the other four bowling balls you have in the air simultaneously come crashing down on your head, you think, hmm maybe I should do something to prepare. The problem is, you know the more you do, the less likely the storm is to actually affect your location.

This is a model rich in irony. Flood insurance due to kick in next Friday? Oow, three points toward landfall. Hurricane windows ordered but not installed? That's a five point deduction, mister. Have all your wood and shutters pre-cut though buried under the pile of donations to Friends of Strays in your garage, that's one point in your favor. Full tank of gas that you didn't have to wait four hours in line as they raised the prices ten times at twenty-five cents a pop while the state price-gouging inspector topped off his personal fleet of SUVs at a discount? Another point. Larder stocked with military-grade surplus rations designed to survive the nuclear winter? One more against landfall. Have enough camping equipment and shotgun ammo stockpiled in the back closet to turn an Army Ranger green with envy and send Dick Cheney's logistics officer to note your precise location for a midnight raid to restock the Vice President's secret bunker? Sure, take another point. A whole house generator that you had to fight off a pack of eight other rabid homeowners from a co-op and their children Florentine-style with only a bonsai potting spade and a cast-iron garden rake during a hurricane-preparation tax holiday weekend? That's two more to your running total. Finally, spending two hours pulling all the brick-a-brack, whirligigs and potted plants from your porch and yard then digging out your pre-cut shutters from the detritus you've buried them beneath since 2004 instead of watching Olympic sports you didn't know had been invented but are suddenly consumed with a burning desire to see the medal ceremony for just so that you can hear what the National Anthem of Balukhastan actually sounds like nets the same three points you will lose by sitting on the couch until midnight to see if the Tamil True Hollywood Story athlete gains the first ever synchronized shuffleboard bronze for his country in Olympic history despite being afflicted with dengue fever and the overwhelming case of steroid-induced munchies that caused the diplomatic incident with the prime minister elect of India during the opening ceremony that has now led to the inexplicable civil war in nearby Myanmar.

And you can blow that hedge simply by going to the grocery store for a few last minute food stocks, and loading up instead on five pounds of fresh Alaskan sockeye salmon on sale for a tragically deep discount while thinking, what are the odds that we lose power for more than two days like we did after every storm in the 2004 season, even the ones in the Pacific? That type of catastrophic maneuver is only fractionally compensated for by the two jumbo cans of Hormel chunk chicken-flavored meat-like product and the last box of stale Triscuits whose seal is broken that you purchased anyway, you know, just in case.

But the real test comes when you get home with your largess and weigh out the total amount of perishables in your freezer, with double points for steak and any fish for which you paid over $10 a pound, against all the cookies, cupcakes and chocolate you splurged on and started sampling on the drive home to comfort you through the coming multi-day power outage that inevitably comes with any rain more severe than an afternoon thunderstorm, and, you know, to keep your energy up for the ensuing couch potato marathon as you wait. You may add to that the half-gallon of ice cream you just have to eat before the Florida Flash and Flicker melts it to the consistency of coffee creamer perfectly convenient for your cold morning cup of instant Joe from your overflowing supply closet. Bet you didn't know that Starbucks made an organic, free-trade, free-range, freeze-dried blend specifically for the Pentagon, did you?

I'm sad to say that alcohol consumption actually weighs in on the non-hurricane provision side of the equation. The more you drink pre-storm, the more likely it is you will need to stay frosty as the roof peels back from your only retirement investment and your neighbor's garden gnome slams through your front picture window to raid your dwindling supply of D-cell batteries. Though, oddly, the more you've consumed, the more likely you are to survive the Wizard-of-Oz-esque, we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore-but-I-sure-wish-I-was-wearing-ruby-slippers-anyway tornadic event only to be rescued by the Coast Guard three miles out in the Gulf drifting on your neighbor's stained and sagging mattress in your wife's anniversary-only, special black lace underwear with the local Geraldo clone from Fox News covering the event live from Chopper 5 for Bill O'Reilly the full national feed. But that's a whole other formula.

And there lies both the beauty and bliss of this particular model. The more you do, the less likely you are to need it. But count on that, and, Wha-Bam, the next thing you will remember is waking up with Katie Couric interviewing your neighbor's garden gnome who has miraculously carved someone else's insurance claim number into your suddenly overgrown and weed-infested lawn with pruning shears in a crop circle reminiscent of "Signs" while you sleep under a lean-to constructed from the last intact piece of your roof sheathing within one thousand yards until the postal carrier wakes you to sign for the return-receipt final-notice bill from FEMA enforceable by Homeland Security for the truck-load of ice, gasoline and generators they dropped off to your neighbor three doors down who proceeded to black market it at prices that would shame a rogue Halliburton buying agent in the Green Zone under your name.

Yeah, that will probably be me you see in my fifteen minutes of fame next weekend.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Black Fingernail Polish

Today, I'm a bit pensive. Just over a year after Karen completed her adventure and three of the people reading this are having adventures of their own, one today, two tomorrow.

Which has me thinking about waiting in various hospitals during Karen's surgeries last year. Of all the things I remember from those hours, black fingernail polish is the one that stands out most.

It was the day of Karen's primary surgery. I'd been sitting in the fourth floor waiting room since they wheeled her through the maze of corridors on the ground floor of the hospital, you know, the one where the minotaurs like to hang out and have a smoke with their axes propping open the emergency doors. I'd just done a drive-by of the Starbucks clone in the lobby, wondering that if "whiskey" translates to "water of life" from Gaelic, what "coffee" means in Arabic. Probably the same thing.

Waiting is not my forte. I had a book and a pair of earplugs, two essentials in my hospital survival kit. An older volunteer had taken my name and handed me a pager. The first buzz would be notification that the surgery was over, the second that the surgeon was on her way out. The TV's were loud, the chairs uncomfortable. My cohorts in the holding cell were each wrapped in their own individual crises, some major, some minor, some as yet unknown. I'd found an alcove by the elevators where I could hide out with my book and my own thoughts. I was tired and nervous though I tried not to show it. Karen had been more of each when I'd last seen her disappearing into the inner sanctum where the surgeons perform their rites. I still had my game face on. I read but the lines of my book refused to make any fundamental sense.

The first buzz of the pager shocked me alert, the second had me edgy with anticipation. A few minutes later, the surgeon emerged through the backstage doors marked "Doctors Only." She began telling me the details of what she had found.

My mind entered a schizophrenic mode, the one I found so handy in compartmentalizing secure information from unclassified impressions back when I had a clearance so many years ago. The logical segment of my brain listened and absorbed what it was hearing. The emotional portion drifted inward, as it is often wont to do. On one level I noted the information the surgeon related, while on another a memory surfaced of her in an examination room during one of Karen's appointments. It was Monday morning, early. Not 5 a.m., hospital early, more like 8 a.m. first appointment. I remember looking at her hands as she was talking to Karen and noticing her fingernails. Being that she was a surgeon, they were neat and short, shorter than mine generally. They were also painted a deep and glossy black. I remember thinking, there's something you don't see every day, a surgeon with black nail polish. Perhaps that revealed more about her weekend than I really wanted to know.

Oddly, I drew comfort from that nail polish. From that moment on, I trusted her, I'm not sure why. Perhaps because she went from being just an abstract title, a doctor, a surgeon, an archetype or a caricature, to being a complete human being, one with unique tastes not usually associated with her profession. That black fingernail polish was like the device on a knight's shield, a declaration of who she was for all the world to see. Tiny, black enameled bucklers on the end of each finger that would protect Karen while she excised the beast within.

All that flashed through one of my segmented minds as another glanced down at her nails to see that they were still black then back up to meet her eyes while the lowest portion searched them to see if I could trust her, if she was telling me the truth. Of course she was. But the animal mind is always hungry for that confirmation in whatever form it comes. With that need sated, all three of my minds merged back into a unified whole. I smiled and shook her hand as she said goodbye and not to worry. I knew that I could trust her.

So, S. and J. and H., I hope you each find some black fingernail polish of your own to comfort you and shield you through your day. Know that Karen and I will stand beside you each in spirit.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Lughnasa 2008

The year moves in cycles, a wheel with eight spokes, eight standing stones dividing spring from summer, winter from fall. An eight-act play in which we accept the roles for which we read early on and hope our lines make sense, the hero and her fool.

Today is Lughnasa, the watershed cleaving summer and the fall. The first day of the harvest whose bountiful berries preserve a taste of sunshine beyond the bitterness of snow. The last of idle somnolence as the dream of midsummer fades like the faeries whose whispered conversations murmur beneath the rain.

Sprites and water nymphs frolic in the jeweled world of a sun shower encased by tiny beads of glass, fragile. Like iridescent dragonflies, they hover and flit, dodging raindrops above the misty road whose destination they dare not reveal. Their pearls blossom in a grove atop the jungle of grass, casting starburst reflections off a spider's radiant loom as she weaves in omens to snare the Norns. Raindrops echo across the rippled surface of a pond casting uneven images like a hand mirror to the wyrd. As sunlight sparkles upon that dappled water, an empty hammock beckons in a cool but gentle breeze, a foreshadowing the fall.

One year ago we strained to read the oracles thrown at our hero's feet as her long battle waned toward victory. Her sword and banner have been returned to the stones above the watchtower mantle, polished yet stained by weather. Outside the vines have grown thick and heavy with midnight fruit, concealing her former encampment, softening the scars of her erstwhile war as the gloaming slants across the hazy forest path shrouded beyond the wall.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Body Language

Grazing through the channels last week, I stopped to watch some of President Bush's press conference with the sound off. I generally find his speeches easier that way. Despite his being muted, I noticed that his body language, the shrugs, the slouching posture, the sly half-smile, the avoidance of eye contact, might not have reinforced the overall message he intended.

Up to ninety percent of human communication is nonverbal. We rely heavily on tone, posture and gesture to understand one another even when we don't actually listen or absorb the individual words. If we see a man and woman in conversation, we all have an idea of her intentions with the hair twirl, the downturned eyes, the half-bitten lip, the over-the-shoulder glance and the upturned face, regardless of the words of being exchanged.

If you want to see the epitome of body language in action, just ask a married couple a question, preferably one where neither is certain how the other will want to answer. Scheduling, especially an event one or the other might not want to attend, is always a good choice. What you will witness is a hive mind being born.

Sure other cliques have their own communication shorthand. They can welcome or reject a new member, even admonish an existing one, all without a word being said. As an outsider, you may understand what's happened but not always how or why. If you are very observant, you might pick out the bellwether, not the obvious leader of the group, but the social force that gives it life. The individual who guides the others without exposing himself to danger, shielding himself in the center of group.

With a married couple, that shorthand is refined down to its essence. Confronted with the right question, they will lock eyes with slightly confused expressions, staring at one another for a moment in silence. With newlyweds, you might spot a subtle hand gesture or the nearly imperceptible nod but such extraneous expressions fade with time.

That eye contact intimacy masks a high-speed data link being engaged. Behind the quiet facade, a contact protocol has been initiated. Once the link is up and operational, information packets are exchanged from separate databases stored redundantly, but incompletely, in each mind as a security precaution. After the combined data set has been reassembled, each partner enters an internal review cycle. Here both inspect the joint data, performing checksums and decryption to verify its validity and authenticity. The reconstructed file is reviewed to ensure no meaningful gaps exist. If a hole is detected, one partner may request duplicate information from the other. If the missing packets aren't forthcoming, say due to a garbled link, a compromise to the secure channel or the lack of proper clearance, one or the other will each briefly enter an extrapolation mode. This breach of the trust protocol could impact future negotiations.

Once both partners are satisfied with the assembled data, they enter a negotiation phase. Bursts of information are exchanged, request/confirm/acknowledge messages gauging the interest in the event, whether it must be a shared venture, and the cost to the more desirous party, even if that is only an unspecified draft choice to be named at a later date. Once the terms have been agreed, they nominate and elect a spokesperson. This may or may not be the more appetent party depending on the analyzed strength and clarity of the link. This likely initiates a second round of negotiation and a price adjustment. Then the precise language of press statement both parties are willing to release is negotiated. Like a SALT II discussion or an Arab-Israeli peace accord, the terms of this joint message could result in further, prolonged negotiations and significantly alter the final cost.

Once the white smoke has cleared, one of them will slowly turn to speak, perhaps trailing his eyes toward his partner as if reluctant to venture out on his own. If he violates the negotiated terms, or his volatile memory corrupts some vital portion of the script, he may hesitate, and his partner will take over mid-sentence, perhaps without a pause.

The entire exchange requires no more than three seconds. Outside the eye contact, the only other visible body language will be perhaps a slight squinting of the eyes or a furrowing of the brow. Should a compromise not be reached within that three-second window, the party breaking the link will likely offer to get back to you noncommittally. If entrenchment results in a forcibly aborted protocol, the aggrieved party may attempt to renew negotiations verbally and sway inconsequential allies to his side. This is a dangerous act of desperation. Immediately change the subject, or glance at your watch and remember somewhere else to be.

Intimacy breeds understanding. Humans are the only animals that mate face to face. Women often complain about where a man's eyes gravitate, not realizing that both genders' gazes subconsciously drift there during a conversation with a woman. When conversing with a man, both stray farther south. We size each other up instinctively, both our prospects and our rivals. Watch yourself more consciously during your next interaction. You might be surprised at the thoughts your eyes betray.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Shadow Play

I talk a lot in these messages about the natural environment, flowers and trees, birds and squirrels, snakes and hawks, light and shadow and color. Generally, they provide my inspiration. They anchor me.

When I started this message, I had a different exercise in mind. Books on writing dialogue recommend exercises in eavesdropping to get a feel for how people actually talk to one another. The point is not to capture the exact manner in which people converse, it's more to get an impression of it, then distill it down to its crucial elements, boiling away all the ers and uhms, the pauses and non-productive tangents to capture the essence of the exchange.

When I sat down to write this, I had a particular theme in mind: watching the people outside my window and what I could learn from the few seconds they are within my sight each day. My notes included things like who had become pregnant, who had hired a nanny, who had gotten a new dog. A husband and wife walking together but separate, her several feet behind as though they shared a completely separate world. Who had started on an exercise routine, who was trying out for cross-country. Who was gleaning extra money by picking through their neighbors' recycling.

The first rule of inspiration is that it's capricious. The muse changes direction without warning or explanation, like a butterfly on the wing. At first I felt resistance, though I couldn't figure out why. Resistance turned to judgment, the idea that the original concept had never been worthwhile and never would be, not matter how long I struggled with it. It is easy to tip from there into melancholy, doubting everything from my talent to my purpose, my direction and my voice. Those are the inglorious moments that few people witness. The joys of being a writer.

I set the message down to salvage another message, another errant child who didn't want to be led down the path where I thought it should go. If anyone is looking for an insight into writing, into creative endeavors of any kind, it is that sometimes you have to force your way through the resistance no matter how wrong it feels. Not your original idea. If you get too rooted in that you will get frustrated and give up. You have to travel where the river takes you, not swim against the current, and trust that you will end up at a pleasant destination. So I sat back down with this message and kept typing, just to see where the stream of thoughts would lead.

People tend to see nature as something different from their everyday surroundings. I'm not sure a bright line exists between natural and man-made environments. Where does my yard end and nature begin? Do the snakes notice the lines of demarcation, or do they just circumvent them like so many thickets and brambles and fallen logs? Do the squirrels notice any difference between the acorns in the oaks on either side of the ditch? Do coyotes discern between a cat on the prowl in the park and in my yard? Does a fox care where it finds a rabbit? Does a hawk think of our chainlink fence as anything more than a cool and slippery perch?

We like to think we control the environment around us, but we don't. Sure we clear land, build houses, transplant non-native species, exterminate pests. Everything we do has an impact. At the same time, other species, pigeons and cats, squirrels, roaches and rats, are at least as adaptable as we are. While we push some creatures to the verge of extinction, others flourish in the margins we've created and thrive on the detritus we leave behind. I'm not saying our impact is value-neutral. Nor do I see it as an anthropocentric manifest destiny. As long as we see ourselves as separate from our environment, we will continue to cause unintended consequences as we alter the complex systems upon which our lives depend. As long as we see ourselves as separate, we are benign dictators, Marie Antoinettes trapped within our Versailles gardens while the countryside erupts and the flames entertain us by casting shadows on our walls.

That was the beginning of my tangent as I sat back down to write. I wasn't sure where it was going or what it had to do with watching people, so I set it down again, waiting for another inspiration, some combination of man and nature to draw it all together.

On Saturday morning, our neighbor had a yard sale. She had one last weekend but didn't get the numbers she'd hoped for so she advertised and tried again. This week the turnout was brisk. Cars came and went, parking on both sides of the street, often across our driveway. But there was not so much traffic as to scare the blue jays off the birdfeeder out front. While we ate breakfast, Mara, our youngest cat, sat in the front window watching them. A car parked beyond our mailbox and a couple got out to see what treasures might lay hidden amongst the castoffs scattered across our neighbor's drive.

For an instant, those elements of man and nature came together. The sun, just high enough to reflect off the curve of the car's windshield but low enough to sneak beneath the trees, passed through the low, bare myrtle branches, then through front window and past the cat to paint a perfect silhouette in shadow on our living room wall. Something about the balance of images caught me, the crosshatch of muntins defining the window broken by the sweeping curves of branches, the shadow cat below with ears erect balanced by the squares of light above, all overlaid onto the everyday items that occupy our painted wall. I pointed it out to Karen who, in her own creative moment, captured the portrait with her camera. A moment later the couple returned from their outing and drove away. The scene before us faded.

Some days, I only get a glimpse of an inspiration, cobbled together from the elements at hand. Like a signpost on a switchback path, the way is only visible for a moment before it darkens and is gone. Like the sunlight dancing across the wall of Plato's cave, that shadow play made it difficult to tell where nature ends and man begins, which was real and which an illusion. Or whether the combination of both had created something else completely.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Scents

Descriptive writing engages all the senses, immersing the reader in an imaginary world, helping them suspend their disbelief. Most authors do well at describing sights and sounds but too often overlook the remainder of our highly sensorial existence.

Of all our sensory systems, smell is the most strongly linked to memory. Scents have the power to carry us back to even our earliest experiences with vivid detail. The fragrance of the lip gloss worn by the first girl I kissed still propels me back to that nervous moment with all its associated sensations and feelings. Even the details of my surroundings, her street, her house, her room, flash across my mind whenever I catch a hint of that cloying and artificial adolescent scent. Remembering it makes me smile.

On a warm, spring day a few months ago, Karen and I explored Heritage Village, a park recreating life early in Pinellas County's history. It is composed of historic structures relocated from around the county, several houses, a barn, a garage and general store, a water tower, a train station and railroad passenger car, a carriage house, a bandstand. As an exercise, I tried to catalog some of the scents we encountered that day as we wandered.

First, we toured the houses, mostly multi-storied affairs from the turn of the last century. Each was a collection of small and simple rooms that reminded me of my grandparent's house on Ocean Street in Quincy. Some were built from light and rough-cut cypress, others from oak darkened and polished smooth by many hands. In every one, the scent of lumber had long been replaced by a musty odor I associate with a Weymouth basement, not unclean so much as slightly damp and under-used. The smell of dust stirred from where it had settled in the corners mixed with a hint of mold slowly spreading its tendrils into any unsealed crevice and a suggestion of compacted dirt somewhere beyond the light.

Another New England memory drifted up in one entry with the smell of dusty cloth rising from a well-worn rag rug whose once brightly colored braids had grayed and were in need of a serious beating. Upstairs, the bedroom was an overlay of a cedary top note from long stored linen recently aired as a toile spread was snapped across the bed to prepare the room for guests, and the tangy base note of lemon oil applied in rich, gleaming layers to the dark, walnut furniture like we smell when opening a drawer in Karen's grandmother's china cabinet, or folding down the writing surface of her great aunt's secretary. The parlor contained the musty-dusty scent of long undisturbed crushed velvet mingled with that of brittle paper captured in cracked cloth bindings. The dormant kitchen still held the clean scent of flour mingled with baking powder and darkly seasoned cast-iron cookery ready to be pressed back into service baking biscuits at any moment.

In a garden beyond the kitchen door, a chest-high rosemary bush's sage green leaf-like needles emitted a pungent cloud of essential oil that hung in the air whenever anyone brushed past, reminding me of the savory aromas of a Mediterranean kitchen. Down the path to the bandstand, a blanket pine needles baked in the bright sun, emitting a dry, slightly resinous odor I've long associated with August hikes and sunny afternoons at summer camp.

The rough and mismatched slats of a barn were still enough to trap the scent of old, mostly evaporated gasoline emanating from the rusty tractors stored within. The simple, open-air stalls lining the outside held the more familiar smell of trampled hay mixed with manure, long un-oiled leather and a hint of musk from horsehair hanging in the combs. In the nearby carriage house, the smell of hardwood charcoal bellowed to nearly smokeless orange embers almost overpowered the lighter scent of red-hot iron being pounded in horseshoes.

More modern, industrial scents clung to the other spaces we visited. The couplings of the railroad passenger car near the train station were heavy with the smell of thick, industrial grease, which gave way to hot, painted metal as we ascended the steps to look inside. The fainter smell of pitch-preserved railroad ties greeted us as we descended. The lighter scent of motor oil and other lubricants clung to the Model T parked inside the mechanic's garage. You could just detect the sweet and tangy hint of oranges near the packing crates in the general store.

In the field beneath the water tower, I could almost smell the thick gray, sharply sulfurous smoke of black powder from the muskets and the cannon clinging to the warm wool Civil War uniforms from recreation of a skirmish they hold there every year. As we headed home across the pine bridge, the dank, earthy smell of mud mixed with decomposing leaf litter by the stream bid us a pungent Florida farewell.

Cats live in a world where scents paint a picture as clear to them as the view outside your window. In order to understand and accept something new in their lives, they have to sniff it. Fragrances and aromas permeate every moment of our lives, but unlike cats we rarely take the time to notice. Even you don't live in such a rich and redolent environment, I hope something in the above descriptions stirred a pleasant memory within you.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III