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The Artist’s Almanac
November 2005
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My Sorrow, when she's here with
me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
- Robert Frost, My November
Guest
The leaves underfoot
crunch and rustle like old memories, and the sounds, no matter how
hushed, are as crisp as autumn air. The rich smell of leaf mold is a
pungent reminder that nature wastes nothing. Otis, the setter,
enjoys it even more than I, as he frolics through a supermarket of
smells.
November is the season
of recollection.
 Smell,
our surest animal memory, recalls the absent scent of mothers and
fathers, old roses, autumn’s first wood fire at Stonehearth, fresh
coffee and roasting turkeys. A forensic handler once told me that
dogs remember and accurately catalogue thousands upon thousands of
scents and, properly trained, can even track fugitives in cars.
Humans retain but a few hundred markers by comparison, and we are
slightly embarrassed watching our pets sort out their social affairs
with their noses. Perhaps that’s how kissing began. Marketers
understand this and tempt us in the shopping malls with potpourri
and scented soaps, while masseurs tout a new service they call
aromatherapy.
Here in the woods
there are no malls, though my dog shops about for trails of coon,
possum, and squirrel and noting the boundaries marked by coyotes. I
find beneath the largest red oak a rough vertical slab unnaturally
placed and wonder what memory it marks. The prehistoric Indians used
stones to line, not mark, the site of their graves; we walk
unknowing over them. With no written language and only a few rough
pictographs we do not even know their names. Their memory is lost,
at least to us.
Memories need names.
Of course, it could be a slave grave, as these were usually marked
with rough vertical stones, though in family graveyards, not in the
woods. Slaves were regarded as personal property, and as only
three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating votes in the US
Congress. They were, however, granted first names, usually adopting
their owners’ last names for legal purposes. Many of their
descendants, such as Alex Haley, search old records for their roots,
while others have thrown out the whole regime and taken new names
and memories. Memories are our identity.
The Indians whom our
ancestors first encountered had colorful names, such as Old Hop,
Sequoyah, Dragging Canoe, Mad Dog, or Little Carpenter, their
diplomatic chief who cobbled together peace treaties. Their names
were often chosen to characterize the individual, while our surnames
are chosen by genetic lottery. Given names offer more latitude and
reflect our culture. I admire the pioneer women, with names like
Patience and Hopeful. But my favorite is Thankful Doak. Inspector
Morse hid his Quaker appellation of Endeavor, and I have always been
fascinated by that of the furniture maker, Consider H. Willett. In
the awesome process of naming offspring many today have discarded
memory in favor of caprice or celebrity and given us names today
like Rock, Misty, Tanya and Moon Flower.
Place names are
another matter. I feel sorry for people who have to live on 38th
Street. Often, a developers’only lasting renown is in the streets he
names after himself. Imagination often trips into folly, as in the
ungainly name for Rivergate Shopping Center, after the nearby
Cumberland and the Gates Rubber Plant. Irony abounds, as well, as in
the description of shopping malls such as Hundred Oaks and Hickory
Hollow, the development of which removed the last of the towering
forest from the site. Similiarly, Green Hills and Cool Springs malls
all share a common focus, not on the exterior surroundings for which
they are named, but on their air conditioned interiors with
synthesized sounds, aromas, and environments catering to every whim
and fantasy.
Celebrity is what
counts in our fast-moving cities, and the news media are its agents.
Names are borrowed, emulated and stolen. Dr. Johnson points out that
folks in the country remember longest the history of places and the
battles fought there or the outrages among families two centuries
before. As I shuffled through the dried leaves along DeShea’s Creek
yesterday in search of the perfect sycamore to paint, I reflected on
the passage of the General’s name from our county, as have many of
those of the early pioneers such as Asher, Trousdale, Guild, Rogan,
or Bledsoe. Their names survive only as the places which remember
them or in the local descendants of the slaves they once owned and
named, while their progeny have moved on to California.
 Only
corporations are perpetual, at least in the eyes of the law, and
these often preserve the memory of their founder, long after he is
gone. Fakes and Hooker is still a lumber company in Lebanon,
celebrated in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, while the owner of the
latter name has forgotten lumber and move on to political notoriety.
Perhaps the best inspired business name was Piggly Wiggly, the
brainchild of the Memphis genius Clarence Sanders, who once came
near to conquering Wall Street with his dazzle and who invented the
grocery supermarket.
Few places are graced
with a names as evocative as Falling Water River, Red Boiling
Springs, Hidden Valley, Harmony Church and a wooded cove north of
town, Cool Springs. Its name, used during three centuries by our
family, has now been adopted by a mega-mall south of Nashville,
confusing the reference. But the woods raise no protest, so long as
the afternoon sun picks out the silver smooth trunks of beech and
the spring still seeps from the rocks into this secluded hollow,
sheltered from noise and wind by the hills around. In the woods
today it all seems to turn to a millennium of mulch, marked by the
rich aroma of leaves melting to earth.
Later this month we
welcome the memory of our dear ancestors to our bountiful table. For
this, for November, for shelter, and for memories of this good earth
- of which we now have a greater store than do we of earthly
expectations - for all of these, and for our names, we are all of
us, Thankful.
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