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The Artist’s
Almanac
July 2005
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O beautiful for spacious skies, for
amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
- Katherine Lee Bates
Summer is upon us.
Cousin Allen brought in fresh yellow
squash, new potatoes, a huge head of cabbage and cucumbers, which
Claudia marinated in sugared vinegar as a side dish for a vegetable
dinner with iced tea. Later this month there’ll be corn on the cob,
to be boiled straightway and slathered with soft butter, salted and
devoured.
Roses are in their second flush of
bloom and daylilies spread their luxuriant gold. Watermelons are
sweet and pear trees bend with pendulous fruit. But the pick of the
garden, Tennessee tomatoes, ripen mid month and we can’t get enough
of them.
It’s been dry. Tommy Barton says he’s
never seen the creek this low. He and Owen took Hayden to the
spring-fed Cold Hole, where the boy enjoyed wading and catching
crawdads more than the bream. He said it was the funnest day of his
life.
The dry weather suits the haymakers,
as long as it doesn’t turn into a drought. The rolled bales are
placed at just the right intervals on the stubbled hill fields to
please the artist.
Artists have always liked hay.
Millet’s peasants binding the sheaves, gleaning, or pausing to say
the Angelus are artistic icons. Monet rendered his famous haystacks
in every light. Nearer to home Thomas Hart Benton, whose grandfather
left Nashville because of a near-duel with Andrew Jackson, counted
July Hay as one of his most successful paintings. Tom came back to
his roots to complete the mural for Nashville’s Country Music hall
of Fame the very day he died.
Haying evolved from loose sheaves
through stacks to square bales. These cubed mechanical excretions
are not very attractive to the artist. But windrows, those lines of
cut grasses trailing the mower, drying as they await baling, are
another matter, naturally caressing the curve of the earth’s bosom.
Today, rolled bales restore hay to the artist’s repertoire, cocked
as they are at their jaunty angles and displaying the texture,
colors and shadows of grass.
Grass is the sun’s natural child. It
is friend to both the land and to the landscape artist. Whether
pastured or baled, grass protects our topsoil from eroding and it is
more sparing of soil nutrients and fertilizer than are the money
crops of corn and cotton. It is converted to milk and meat by the
grazing herds on thousands upon thousands of Tennessee hillsides.
Grass is our state’s biggest crop and is a reliable friend to our
economy.
Our economy was much on the minds of
the farmers and merchants of our land who set off the first
fireworks in Massachusetts in the 1770’s. When Mad King George
determined to reduce his colonists to tax vassalage, they weren’t
having it. One thing led to another, with blockades, boycotts,
firefights, and forced quartering of troops, until July of 1776,
when the representatives of the thirteen colonies gathered in
Philadelphia to give us a national holiday like no other.
How a ragtag gathering of short-term
militia outlasted the strongest military force in the world is a
miracle we still cannot get over today. Defeat, disease, desertions,
disloyalty, and retreat were Washington’s weekly agendas – New York,
New Jersey, Charleston, Boston, and Philadelphia. His
second-in-command, Gen. Gates, counseled surrender. Thomas
Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was
minutes from capture at his hilltop Monticello by the British
cavalry that he could see ravaging through Charlottesville below.
Yet in a day when leaders led from the
front, George Washington shook bullets from his greatcoat after
battles, but was never scratched. At one time his Continentals were
down to 1,000 barefoot and starving effectives, yet he never quit.
At each low point, we were saved by stunning victories – Trenton,
Saratoga, King’s Mountain. The greatest of these, Yorktown, presents
a confluence of events the probability of which a statistician might
measure as one in a thousand.
General Nathaniel Greene harried
Cornwallis into backing into the Yorktown peninsula of Virginia
where the British Fleet could support him. Force marching his little
Continental army and militias south, Washington persuaded the
hitherto idle French regiments under Rochambeau in Rhode Island to
accompany him in enveloping the British. Meanwhile, the French fleet
in the Caribbean under Admiral De Grasse was brought up for a mere
two weeks to blockade the British from the sea.
The timing was perfect. The French
fleet was gone in a matter of days. The huge British fleet arrived
shortly with reinforcements. But it was too late. Cornwallis had
surrendered his army, effectively ended the fighting in America. We
were free.
We have hot, humid days in Tennessee
in July. But things cool down after dark and the starry skies are
visible after the last light fades about 9:30-10. On the evening of
the Fourth of July I will gather as many children and grandchildren
as I can in the recently mown hay field on a hill overlooking the
river to watch the fireworks shows- at Fairvue, the Boy Scout Camp,
Lebanon, Mt. Juliet, Hendersonville and Nashville - and recount to
them once more the miracle which set freedom loose in the world.
Let the fireworks begin!
America! America! God shed His
grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!
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