Author Archives: gedwardjourney

About gedwardjourney

Edward Journey is a writer, theatre artist, and retired university professor. "Professional Southerner" is an online journal focusing on topics -- Southern and other -- that stoke Edward's interests. Edward may be reached at likatrip@yahoo.com.

Wanderlust: My Grandfather’s Travels

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My maternal grandfather, Leonard C. Harbison, was a wanderer all of his life. When I was young, he and my grandmother, Eula McCarn Harbison, lived in Fairfield Highlands in the western suburbs of Birmingham. From their house, you could see the Fairfield Works of U.S. Steel and the Ensley Works in the distance.

When Grandmother would hang clothes on the line to dry, she’d walk up and down the line with a damp rag to clean off the industrial soot. Even though it was bad for pollution, I loved to watch the robust factory activities, the trains coming and going, the smoke rising into the sky, and the orange glow when molten steel was poured at night.

Their street dead-ended at land that belonged to Woodward Iron and Granddaddy loved to take a walking stick, a dog, and a grandson on hikes along the creek in the wooded property. He had five grandsons in all and when one outgrew the walks, there would be another to fill in. When my brother was very young and I was a teen, I heard Granddaddy tell Grandmother “I like them when they’re that age. When they get older, I don’t have much use for them.” It wasn’t personal; he always had a sense of wonder and a love for nature and animals and he found that the younger boys would tend to get more excited about sharing it with him.

The federal interstate system eventually claimed the Fairfield Highlands house for right of way for I-20/59 but if you know where to look from the interstate — near the Allison-Bonnett Parkway / Jaybird Road exit – you can still spot a large oak tree that was in the backyard of that house. I used to climb that tree.

When the interstate moved in, my grandparents moved closer into Birmingham in the Central Park neighborhood. There was less space for nature walks but Granddaddy still would take a stick and a dog and walk the alleys of the neighborhood and sometimes over to the nearby Bessemer Super Highway to go to the pharmacy, to the grocery store, or to get a haircut.

Granddaddy often talked of his travels as a young man but nobody showed a lot of interest and I don’t remember a lot of the details. I just knew that he had travelled a great deal before he married and remembered comments about making tires in Ohio, working the oil fields in Oklahoma, and working on movie lots in California. He mentioned working with Tom Mix, a silent film actor who was the first “King of the Cowboys.”

Mother recently rediscovered a newspaper article about Granddaddy Harbison that was published in The Cullman (AL) Times in 1997, four months before he died. Under the headline “One Roaring Twenties Train Ride Was Enough for Young Hobo,” the article profiles some of Granddad’s adventures when he was a young man. Some of the time lines seem a bit skewed but he was recounting memories from seventy and more years earlier and small inaccuracies are to be expected.

Granddaddy grew up on his parents’ 500-acre farm in Trade, Alabama, in Cullman County. Charlie and Mary Lott Harbison farmed and raised livestock and Leonard, the second youngest of fifteen children, recounts idyllic days on the farm and hanging out at Luther Perdue’s general store.

He talks about hopping trains and “hoboing” – a popular activity for many young men (and some women) during that time. Woody Guthrie is perhaps the most famous proponent of that lifestyle. I was surprised to read that Granddaddy’s total “hobo” history consisted of one short trip from Cullman to Birmingham and back. He says that he met up with a “Yankee hobo” in Cullman and rode on top of the train, ducking for tunnels and overpasses. By the time he got to Birmingham, he had seen enough of the world and was ready to turn around and go home.

But his wanderlust continued and soon after his hobo adventure he moved to Akron, Ohio, working in the Firestone tire factory. After returning to Alabama from Akron comes the most intriguing part of the travel lore. Leonard, along with a brother, cousin, and friend, hopped in a Dodge and headed out west. I know he spent time in Oklahoma, Oregon, and California and he often mentioned Tom Mix and those Hollywood studio lots.

Why don’t we think to listen more when we’re young? I would love to hear more about the western travels – and especially about the movie lots – but at the time it just seemed like listening to somebody talking about the “olden days,” as we referred to them. My students now tend to say “back in the day” if I start to reminisce.

My grandfather loved all animals and he loved to hunt. He always had hunting dogs in a pen in the backyard of his Fairfield Highlands house. He was one of those southern hunters who was not that interested in the kill but in the “chase.” In fact, I’m not sure he carried a gun on his hunting trips. Instead, he and his hunting buddies would stay up all night drinking coffee by a camp fire and listen to the dogs run; they recognized the individual barks of the hounds and would listen to the chase until dawn. If the barking got too distant, they’d pick up and move to another location and listen.

His love of hunting is mentioned in that newspaper article as well as the fact that he met my grandmother at Ryan’s Creek Baptist Church after an all-night hunt with Rev. Charlie Johnson, the Ryan’s Creek preacher. He and my grandmother are laid to rest at the Ryan’s Creek cemetery, across the road from the church where they met.

Leonard and Eula married and had three children; they farmed in Cullman County and eventually moved to Birmingham in the ‘40s for Granddad to take a factory job until he retired in 1968. They maintained land in Cullman County and frequently went up for weekends during retirement. Granddaddy would go out into the woods and wander on those trips; he never tired of nature.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem that I have a lot in common with my Grandfather Harbison. But I love to take walks in the woods.

I inherited his love for plants and my house is filled with houseplants now that will be moved to the yard as soon as the weather gets reliably warm. In fact, I still use some of his containers for my plants.

I inherited his affection for “volunteers,” those plants that just pop up in the pots or in the yard. This has been an extraordinarily mild winter and I already have volunteers all over the yard. I don’t like to weed them out; they chose to grow there so I choose to let them. I’ll make the final decision in the spring when I see what my volunteers plan to do.

And I inherited his wanderlust, although I’m afraid my travels cannot compete with the style and romance of Granddaddy Harbison’s.

Note: The photograph is of my Grandfather Harbison (C), my brother (R), and me (L), taken at his and Grandmother’s Central Park home in 1988.

The Legacy of Mose T

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Moses Tolliver (c. 1920-2006), more popularly known as Mose T, is one of the best-known of Alabama’s many self-taught artists. During the years that I lived in Montgomery, I would often see the artist sitting on the front porch of his house on Sayre Street when I would go to Martha’s Place, a soul food place a few doors down from Mose.

I heard that visitors often went by the house and invited themselves in to Mose’s place to check out the art and occasionally buy pieces. Each time I saw him sitting on the porch I considered going up to chat but it seemed rude to just drop by without asking or an invitation.

Moses Tolliver started painting in the 1960s. Most sources say he started painting after a work-related injury left him crippled and unable to continue his job in a furniture shipping warehouse. Mose T always said that he painted prior to the accident but that the accident left him more time to devote to his painting. Either way, a colleague at the furniture company, who painted as a hobby, suggested that Tolliver take painting lessons. Tolliver rejected the lessons and continued to develop his own style in his pictures. He often said that he wasn’t interested in “art,” just in making “pictures.”

The first pictures Mose T made and sold featured a red cardinal as the subject. Throughout his life he painted many subjects including birds, snakes, fantastical animals, buses, watermelons and other fruit, erotic pictures of women straddling bicycles and tricycles and assorted objects, self-portraits and portraits of historic persons, and a world of imaginative, colorful paintings on an assortment of topics. His self-portraits feature him standing on crutches and he sometimes mixed his own hair in with the paint.

The paintings are brightly and boldly colored; house paint on plywood seems to be his preferred medium but he also painted on random objects including tree stumps, Masonite, cardboard, table tops, and jigsaw puzzles.

I became aware of Mose T when I first started seeing museum shows featuring artists, usually self-taught, who operate outside the mainstream art establishment. It was around that time when one of the Birmingham-based department stores (either Parisian or Pizitz) promoted a line of tee-shirts carrying images of Mose T’s distinctive watermelon paintings.

Collecting original Mose T paintings is challenging. As the demand for his work increased he began to let some of his children do the paintings and he’d sign them if he approved of them. He had thirteen children and it is known that his daughter, Annie, and two of his sons, Jimmy and Charles, created works that Mose T signed and sold.

Eventually Annie Tolliver began to sign her works as “Annie T” and developed her own distinct style and Jimmy and Charles began to produce their own work. I received a gift some years ago of a watermelon in the Tolliver style that was signed “Mose T Jr.” I was confused about the painting’s origins so when I purchased an “Annie T” watermelon from Annie Tolliver herself I mentioned that I had a watermelon signed “Mose T. Jr” and wondered who painted it. “That’s my brother,” she replied tersely and returned to another customer. I still don’t know which brother signed the painting but I assume it’s either Jimmy or Charles.

Even though watermelons are Tolliver’s most iconic image, my attention was drawn to another subject to which he frequently returned: buses. The bus as subject matter for a Montgomery-based artist is evocative of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott which is such a seminal part of Civil Rights-era lore. I once read Mose T quoted as saying he preferred to paint empty buses but that people seemed to like them with people in them so that’s why he added people.

While I lived in Montgomery, I began to search out an empty Mose T bus for purchase. I did find one that I liked at a dealer but the price was prohibitive at the time and by the time I returned the painting had been sold.

Later, at another dealer, I spotted a bus with passengers with a price I could consider. It’s a green bus held up by four big black tires with muddy green swirls for hubs. A driver carries three passengers. All four have their legs dangling down and their arms sticking out. One can’t help but think of Mose T’s bird paintings with the four men’s arms resembling bird legs and their mouths that recall bird beaks. Each sports a broad-brimmed hat. I thought about it for a couple of days and went back to the dealer and owned it.

I had hoped to find an empty bus for the Tolliver collection but I really enjoy my frolicsome bus with its passenger load. I have no idea if Mose Tolliver painted it or just signed it but, either way, I love to look at it. And when you live with art, loving what you look at every day is the most important element, I think.

Note: A great resource for learning about many of the self-taught Alabama artists is Kathy Kemp’s Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists (Crane Hill Publishers, 1994) with abundant photographs by Keith Boyer.

Christopher Fennell’s “Light Tree”

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Sculptor Christopher Fennell’s sculpture “Light Tree” has made an appearance on the sidewalk in front of a downtown Huntsville development and, even though it isn’t lit up yet, it is already a lively and striking addition to the Huntsville townscape.

Outdoor installations made from recycled materials are Fennell’s specialty. When I became aware of the artist and his work, I began to run across his pieces as I travelled. “Rail Wave,” beside the river in Chattanooga, features railroad tracks across wooden ties that rise up into a cascading wave tunnel – one of Fennell’s recurring motifs.

“Magic City,” Fennell’s temporary installation at an annual Birmingham art fair, featured boards covered with imaginative self-portraits made by Birmingham school-age artists. Fennell shaped the boards into a massive wooden flame that the viewer could walk inside, around, and through.

Browsing through Fennell’s website (www.cfennell.org), one sees recycled wood, boats, windshields, rods, baseball bats, ladders, garden tools, car parts, etc. transformed into installations – both permanent and temporary – and located throughout the country. The beautiful sculptures are often rooted in the shapes of nature and often tempered with a charming whimsy. Fire, water, wind, fish, and fowl are among frequent natural motifs. Also recurring are industrial relics redefined; one of my favorite Fennell incarnations is an old school bus transformed into a bus stop in Athens, Georgia.

I met Chris Fennell and began to grasp the method behind his art when I tagged along with Scott Smith – another artist who makes frequent use of cast-off and recycled objects – and Chris to scope out a barn near Tullahoma, Tennessee. The barn was on a family farm that spanned generations and its razing was imminent.

Scott was contacted about the possible availability of tin and wood from the structure and contacted Chris to plan a trip. Chris and Scott examined and photographed the barn. Chris later went back and spent a couple of weeks taking the barn down and used the wood for future projects.

After earning degrees in mechanical engineering and sculpture at South Florida, Christopher Fennell got his M.F.A. in sculpture from Georgia. He uses his engineering background to assemble complex sculptures, often from hundreds of assorted pieces meticulously melded together for an effect that seems airy and effortless. Fennell is now based in Birmingham.

The new Huntsville sculpture is something of a departure from the typical Fennell piece. It is composed of sleek slate grey tree-like structures with “branches” topped by sixty lamps of different shapes. The graceful structures bend together forming a passage through the “Light Tree.” As one enters the downtown on Jefferson Street, the sculpture appears as a beacon to the area, even on a bright sunny day before its lights are shining.

My favorite view of “Light Tree” is in my rearview mirror as I drive past it. After passing the vibrant energy of the soaring sculpture, it becomes a calm and tranquil afterimage for the traveler moving on down the road.

“Light Tree” currently stands in the middle of a streetscape construction zone so it is hard to get up close right now. It will be lit nightly when the street project is done. I find myself taking detours through town on the way home these days just to check on the progress and anticipate the time when it will shine brightly and complete.

Another Roadside Attraction: The Corn Palace

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When I was growing up, we didn’t often travel too far from home. There were picnics and day trips but most excursions were of short distance and duration. I mostly grew up in Birmingham but when Dad’s work began to transfer us fairly regularly we moved around a lot; most of the moves were fairly close to home: Jackson, Nashville, Tuscaloosa.

The lengthier vacations were usually to Panama City, Florida, on the Gulf. My Journey grandparents had a fishing cottage on the Black Warrior River in Walker County, not far from Birmingham, and my Harbison grandparents had a weekend place on their farm land in Cullman County near Smith Lake, about an hour away. There were occasional trips to New Orleans, Atlanta. Montgomery, and we often went on overnight business trips with Dad to nearby towns. The bulk of the travel was within a 350-mile radius of wherever we lived at the time.

I wasn’t widely-travelled, but I had limitless wanderlust. In that heyday of magazines, my family’s magazine rack was always full. I was a voracious reader from an early age and I would read anything in the house from cover to cover whether it matched my interests or not. My Granddaddy Harbison raised hunting hounds and subscribed to The Hunter’s Horn, a magazine about hunting and hounds; I avidly read that also, even though I had no interest in hunting and my only hound was a pet beagle named Spotty with an ear-splitting bark back when I was in elementary school.

Any book was fair game. I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged and never censored my reading and I attribute much of the success of my education to my reading habits. I would walk in a room and instantly sit with my face buried in a book. My teenage nephew now does much the same with his electronic gadgets and I’m hoping that is enhancing his knowledge the way printed matter enhanced mine.

In every magazine I read, I was particularly attentive to the travel ads. If there was a coupon to order a travel guide I would carefully clip it and send it to the address that was advertised.

So, even though I wasn’t widely-travelled in my actual life, I would sit for hours and ponder travel guides that took up a full drawer in my bedroom dresser. Through those printed guides I travelled the length and breadth of the country and the world. On my first trip to New York City, friends tried to surprise me by pointing out landmarks and asking if I knew what that building was, what that church or museum was, what park I was entering. I always knew the answer from reading books and magazines and watching movies. It all felt familiar even if I was seeing it live in person for the very first time.

In one 1960s South Dakota travel guide my youthful imagination was captured by an image of something called the “Corn Palace” in Mitchell, South Dakota (www.cornpalace.com). It was a multi-use municipal auditorium such as most communities built in the early twentieth century. What set it apart was its Moorish-style adornment with onion domes and minarets. Most exciting of all was that the Corn Palace sprang from a turn of the century movement of building “crop palaces” throughout the Great Plains. Mitchell’s iteration of this trend was entirely covered with corn murals.

I vowed then and there that if I ever found myself in South Dakota I would have to make a pilgrimage to Mitchell’s Oz-like Corn Palace.

Over time I grew out of my childhood travel guide obsession and eventually cleared my drawers of the books and brochures. Fast forward to 1989 and I am hired by Omaha’s Nebraska Theatre Caravan to stage manage their east coast tour of A Christmas Carol. Even though it was billed as an East Coast tour, our show had to get from Omaha to the East and tour dates were scheduled along the way in South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio. Looking over the itinerary in a phone conversation with one of the Playhouse staff, I was told we would play Mitchell, South Dakota.

I stopped her immediately. “Are we by any chance playing the Corn Palace in Mitchell?” She said we were – did I know the Corn Palace? I told her that indeed I did and that I had planned to visit it for years. She was amused that someone in Alabama had a mission to visit the Corn Palace.

Mitchell was one of our first stops on the tour and we drove there from a gig in tiny Sioux Center, Iowa. We arrived on Mitchell’s main street just at sunrise on a bitterly cold November Sunday morning. I was driving and most of the technical crew in the van was sleeping. I caught a glimpse of sunlight glinting off an onion dome a couple of blocks away and knew that my childhood goal had been reached. I shouted “There it is!” and woke several crew members who did not share my enthusiasm and were annoyed that their sleep was interrupted.

We were early for our load-in and had time to go grab breakfast. But first, one of our tour crew took pictures of me standing in front of the Palace. I know those photos are stored away somewhere but I haven’t been able to find them for years. All I can find are blurred photos of the Palace taken as we were leaving town that night and of a mural inside the auditorium.

The Corn Palace continues to be a busy venue, I hear. Our show followed a Barbara Mandrell performance the night before. Mitchell is a small town but the great local crew was I.A.T.S.E. union members and I found out that many of the union guys were also local farmers, at least one of whom provided the corn for the murals. The Palace’s exterior murals have an annual theme which changes each year so the façade of the building takes on a whole new look from year to year.

The crows were having a field day on the façade of the Corn Palace. Our show was on Sunday afternoon and we didn’t spend the night in Mitchell so I spent as much of my break time as I could exploring the unique roadside attraction appeal of the facility and the town.

As we reboarded the crew van and set off for Des Moines, I vowed to return to Mitchell and the Corn Palace some day when I had more time to absorb the unique local vibe. I haven’t returned yet but when friends tell me they’re going anywhere near South Dakota I always implore them to take the detour into Mitchell and gawk at what bills itself as “The World’s Only Corn Palace.” I think their effort will be rewarded.

Legion Field

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The massive steel girders and beams of Birmingham’s Legion Field have thrilled me since I was a kid growing up in the city. “The Old Gray Lady” is 90-years-old and, even though her best days are likely behind her, she maintains a majesty and charm. Another proud old sports arena, Rickwood Field, sits a short drive from Legion Field and is the oldest remaining professional baseball field in the country. Rickwood opened in 1910 and the first Legion Field game was played in 1927.

When I was in college, the University of Alabama’s significant games and major rivalries were played at Legion Field. In those days, Denny Stadium on campus in Tuscaloosa was a perfect little 60,000 seat bowl and half of the home games were played there while the other half went up the highway to Birmingham. This is years before Bryant-Denny became the 101,000+ seat behemoth that it is today and before big-time college football had become so “corporate.”

Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was the coach then and, depending on which national polls you’re counting, my freshman year was the year of Alabama’s ninth national championship and Bryant’s fourth of six. The most enduring memory of my years attending Alabama games at Legion Field is the image of Bear Bryant, hat always in place (despite the legend, it wasn’t always a houndstooth hat), leaning casually against the goal post and watching the team warm-up. One time, when Alabama offered Bryant a significant boost in salary (which would be paltry by today’s standards), he commented that it would be unseemly for the football coach to make more than the college president. Times have changed.

In those pre-ESPN days of a finite number of television channels and networks, the weekly choice of televised college football games was limited and it was always a treat when Alabama football was nationally televised – usually on ABC and usually with the great sports broadcaster Keith Jackson calling the game (“Whoa, Nellie!” and “Hold the phone!” Jackson would say at particularly exciting moments).

In 1981 Bryant broke the record of the most wins by any college football coach up to that time. Keith Jackson was in the booth. The opponent was Auburn and the game was played in Legion Field. The final score was 28-17. At halftime, Bryant growled to interviewer Verne Lundquist that his players were acting “like they’re afraid they’ll hurt somebody’s feelings or something.”

During those years the upper deck was in place on the east side of the stadium and the capacity of the stadium was around 70,000 with more expansions to come. For many years the words “Football Capital of the South” were displayed inside Legion Field and for most of those years that was true. At its peak, Legion Field could hold over 83,000. When a structural review in 2004 determined that the upper deck was not up to code, the city removed the deck and the stadium now seats about 71,000.

With the increased capacity of Bryant-Denny in Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama began to schedule more home games away from Legion Field. The annual “Iron Bowl” between Alabama and Auburn was always played at Legion Field from 1948 to 1988. Tickets were split evenly between the schools and they alternated the “home team” each year. After Auburn moved the game to Auburn in their “home team” years, Alabama would continue to play the game in Birmingham in their “home” years until the end of the century. The Birmingham location is the reason that the game is called the “Iron Bowl” in the first place. And the game is still and forever the “Iron Bowl’ even though it will probably never be played in Birmingham again.

The last time I lived in Birmingham, I could see Legion Field across town from my apartment on Red Mountain. When an Alabama game was televised I would host watch parties at my place; if the game was at Legion Field and something went wrong I was known to go out on the balcony and yell toward the stadium (a couple of times, maybe more …).

In the heyday of big stadium concerts, Legion Field hosted acts like the Rolling Stones, U2, and Pink Floyd. The last time I saw the Stones live was at Legion Field for the 1989 “Steel Wheels” tour.

Among the monumental architecture at the entrance to Legion Field, which was named to honor the American Legion, are two reclining lions and, at the base of the two flag poles, American bald eagles. A later monument, centered between the flag poles, memorializes Bear Bryant. A quote from Reagan at the time of Bryant’s death is engraved beneath Bryant’s bust on one side and Bryant’s own words about what it takes to be a “winner” are on another. On the façade of the stadium these days are the words “Built by Legends.”

The Iron Bowl is gone but Legion Field still hosts annual games like the “Magic City Classic” between Alabama A&M and Alabama State. The Classic has been played in Birmingham for seventy years. The Birmingham Bowl is the latest and longest lasting in a series of post-season bowl games played in the stadium. The first two SEC championship games were at Legion Field. The stadium has been the site for high school football and major soccer events and was home to local football teams of the several short-lived efforts to challenge the NFL (WFL, USFL, XFL, etc.).

Legion Field will once again be the home field for the resuscitated University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers football team in fall 2017. For those of us who remember the Old Gray Lady’s glory years, it’s somewhat sad to see the mostly empty stands for UAB games.

Legion Field was already in its fifth decade when the Houston Astrodome opened and was declared the “Eighth Wonder of the World” in 1965. These days, the Astrodome is virtually obsolete — empty and avoiding the wrecking ball – but Legion Field soldiers on.

Long may she live. Roll Tide.

Walking in Your Own Landscape

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The end of a year is a time for reflection — not only on the year that’s passing but on the events of one’s life. It is a time also for looking ahead.

For years I would spend a part of the new year’s eve speculating about where I might be living when the next year rolled around. As a youth, my father’s job transferred the family frequently; as an adult, my work often required me to relocate. My speculations were rarely correct and I would often welcome the new year from a place I never imagined I would be.

With time, the reflections become more textured and poignant and contemplative. One of my favorite quotes from the painter Willem De Kooning was this: “There is a time when you just take a walk and you walk in your own landscape.”

Poet May Sarton’s “New Year Resolve” captures a tone that I find fitting, reflective, and hopeful for the days to come.

New Year Resolve

by May Sarton

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

“New Year Resolve” by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.

Have a hopeful and clutter-free 2017.

Conecuh Sausage for the New Year

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Traveling north on I-65 from Mobile Bay, the aroma of hickory smoked sausage is too tempting to resist at exit 96 in Evergreen so I had to stop to check out the Conecuh Sausage Company’s store.

Conecuh Sausage (www.conecuhsausage.com) is made in Evergreen, Conecuh County, Alabama, in a factory visible east of I-65 about halfway between Montgomery and Mobile. The business, still owned by descendants of founder Henry Sessions, has been in operation since 1947. The family protects Sessions’s original recipes and still uses his distinctive smoking techniques. It is only fairly recently that the products have been available on a wide scale. When I followed the enticing smell of hickory smoke to the factory recently, trucks were bustling in and out, headed in all directions with their tasty cargo.

Conecuh Sausage Co. products include hickory-smoked sausages, hams, bacons, and turkeys in a variety of flavors and with a range of heat. A unique blend of seasonings makes the flavors stand out and it quickly became my sausage of choice. I always keep Conecuh sausage on hand and I have to be careful when I open a package; once it’s opened, it’s quickly gone.

Fortunately, Conecuh brand sausage is available throughout Alabama and is featured in restaurants all over the state. On a recent visit to Mobile Bay, I saw dishes featuring Conecuh sausage on three separate menus.

Not that long ago Conecuh sausage was only available in south Alabama locales so I was surprised to find out recently that it is now distributed in over twenty states throughout the southeast, as far west as Kansas, along the Great Lakes, and up the east coast into New England (where it would be an excellent addition to a clambake or a lobster boil). The products are also available for shipment throughout the continental U.S.

Conecuh sausage is great on the grill or cooked in an iron skillet on the stovetop as an appetizer. It’s my favorite for turnip green soup or jambalaya and is a good seasoning for greens and pots of beans. The company’s website includes a variety of recipes.

Here’s one I particularly like, just in time for New Year’s celebrations:

New Year’s Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cups chopped yellow onion

2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic

1 pound Conecuh Hickory Smoked Sausage, chopped

3 quarts chicken broth

1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained

8 cups chopped fresh turnip greens

1 tablespoon Conecuh Pork, Poultry, and Wild Game Seasoning

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1½ teaspoons salt

3 15.8 ounce cans black-eyed peas, drained

In a large Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium high heat. Add onion, garlic, and sausage. Cook, stirring frequently, until lightly browned, about 6 minutes. Add broth and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Add greens, Conecuh seasoning, vinegar, salt, and peas. Reduce heat to low; simmer until greens are tender. 10-12 servings

“In the Bleak Midwinter”

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Point Clear, Alabama. The thing that makes me happiest about the Winter Solstice is that the daylight begins to creep up minute by minute and the days begin to get gradually longer. I do not care for long dark nights and cold temperatures when my seasonal allergies are always at their worst.

I made my annual escape to the Grand Hotel at Point Clear, Alabama, on Mobile Bay this week before Christmas – a pleasant and much needed break in a challenging year. When I arrived, temperatures were in the 70s and shorts and flip flops were much in evidence.

The seasonal shift became tangible and abrupt on Sunday. The morning was still warm and I was drinking coffee on my balcony when a dark cloud appeared over on the Mobile side of the bay moving rapidly toward the eastern shore. Suddenly the wind was howling and vicious, the trees were bending, and the ducks in the lagoon were quacking crazily. There were whitecaps on the bay and in the lagoon as the rains moved in. Minutes later the temperature had dropped drastically and monsoon rains enveloped the area. The good part is that this area, like the rest of the state, is suffering a drought and rains are much needed.

After a couple of dreary days, the first day of winter is showing some promise for rising temperatures and more sunshine. Last night’s final sunset of fall was stunning. The sun, which had been invisible all day, suddenly dipped beneath a heavy layer of grey cloud cover and provided a bright brief and brilliant fuchsia flash to what had been a colorless cold day. Just as quickly, it was gone.

Early now on the first day of winter, as I pack to head north, temperatures are brisk but climbing and the sun is promising to make more than a perfunctory appearance. Christmas day temperatures here are projected to be back in the 70s.

It has always pleased me that there is a Christmas carol that captures the gloomier aspects of the season. “In the Bleak Midwinter,” with 19^th century lyrics by Christina Rossetti of Pre-Raphaelite fame, does not skimp on references to the gloom and dreariness of the winter. Years ago, in my directing days, I opened a production of A Christmas Carol with a group of darkly-clad carolers singing “In the Bleak Midwinter” in a dusky light. It seemed a fitting way to introduce Ebenezer Scrooge’s pre-transformational world.

“Earth stood hard as iron,” Rosetti writes, “Water like a stone / Snow had fallen, snow on snow / Snow on snow / In the bleak midwinter / Long ago.” I particularly like that repetition of “snow on snow” – it gives me a chill to type it now.

Fortunately the bleak midwinter I am heading to in Birmingham and more northern climes of Alabama will not hold snow on snow. In fact, warmer temperatures are forecast. and it promises to be a warmer contemplative time after a difficult year.

Here in Point Clear I have reunited with old friends, had some memorable meals both at restaurants and at the home of friends, and started some new traditions. It is a preview, I hope, of pleasant hours spent with family on Christmas day and a hopeful new year ahead.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, wherever you may be, and however bleak the winter.

More Brief Meditations

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My Christmas cards went in the mail this week. Previous essays have chronicled my long-standing project of photographing old Alabama churches during the month of December for my next year’s Christmas card. I have written about how signing and addressing each card has become a “brief meditation” on the recipient.

2016 was a challenging year for my family and me. Last year at this time Dad was already hospitalized and there was no opportunity to go on photography expeditions. But many of my friends have begun to expect my annual Christmas card and I feel a responsibility to complete the task. The process of choosing the annual design, verse, and photo has become a welcome annual ritual that I use as an escape from day to day pressures.

Since I didn’t take any church photographs in December 2015, I went back through my files to look at previous photographs of churches that I haven’t used. I kept returning to a 2007 image of Havana Methodist Church, an 1870 structure visible on Highway 69 in the small Black Belt community of Havana between Moundville and Greensboro.

The Havana church was a frequent subject of artist William Christenberry, whose long career was centered on photographs, paintings, sculptures, and assemblages inspired by the Black Belt, especially Hale County where Christenberry’s grandparents lived. Christenberry visited and photographed his humble architectural and landscape subjects year after year, photographing their decline and bringing fame to a green barn, a Sprott church, and a Palmist sign hanging upside down in the broken window of an abandoned store, among other iconic images. When I photographed the church in 2007 I visited the family plots of Christenberry’s ancestors buried in the small churchyard cemetery.

Christenberry always photographed full images of the Havana church so I decided to use a detail of the church’s handsome roof as the main image on the front of my card and put a thumbnail of the full church on the back. The church’s elegant simplicity inspired me to use a verse from Joseph Brackett’s “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker dance song, as the inside message for the card. The “Simple Gifts” tune is probably best known from composer Aaron Copland’s orchestral adaptation of it for “Appalachian Spring,” the score he first composed for a Martha Graham dance.

On the back I provided the photograph credit and the note that the photograph was inspired by Christenberry along with a memorial statement for Dad, who passed away in the spring.

Ironically, as I was leaving the post office on the day that I mailed my large batch of cards, I heard the news that William Christenberry died at age 80 on November 28. That news about one of my favorite artists and fellow University of Alabama MFAs (who received his three decades before I received mine) made a bittersweet holiday season even more so.

Even bittersweet, I still look forward to a bright and pleasant holiday season full of comfort and joy and I still have a fervent hope for a better and more restful year to come.

Happy Holidays.

Miss Jane’s Solitary Life

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When Brad Watson’s remarkable short story collection The Last Days of the Dog Men first appeared, I kept gifting it to readers I know. Read it, Read it, Read it I would say and let me know if it’s as good as I think it is. Those who followed my exhortation tended to agree with me. Finally somebody said to me “I love it, but you gave me this same book last year.” I told her to keep it and pass it on and I gave her another book to replace it.

I have known great dogs all of my life and no writer has ever captured a dog’s essence in quite the way that Watson does in that compulsively readable and often brilliant first short story collection.

Watson followed up Last Days … with the fine novel The Heaven of Mercury and then Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a second short story collection full of mystique and wonder. Now his second novel, Miss Jane, is on the shelves. It is a book of painstaking empathy and precision inspired in part by the true story of one of Watson’s great-aunts.

The title character, Jane Chisholm, is born before her organs are fully developed and has a genital birth defect which obliterates the demarcation between her reproductive, bowel, and urinary functions. This does not sound like a promising premise for a fascinating and distinctive novel but in Brad Watson’s skilled hands Jane overcomes the odds and her handicaps to live a full and courageous life and that singular life is the book’s clear focus.

Watson tells the story in a straightforward and fluid way, avoiding maudlin sentimentality, and exploring the life of Jane while skillfully rendering the few people in her orbit in a rural area near the fictional town of Mercury, Mississippi (which has much in common with Watson’s home town of Meridian).

Jane’s parents, Ida and Sylvester, are stoic and grim, accepting their troubles as their due and finding ways to blame themselves for both Jane’s careless conception and her physical challenges. The married couple has long drifted away from each other and each tries to find ways to find peace and calm in their existence. Jane’s older sister, Grace, is anything but graceful as she schemes and connives to remove herself from her parents’ farm and move to town.

Most interesting of all Jane’s acquaintances is Dr. Eldred Thompson, the country doctor who makes a special effort to cultivate and educate Jane from the moment of her birth. The frank and honest relationship between the woman and her doctor makes a striking centerpiece for a unique and brave novel.

Watson’s ability to provide much detail in a sparse and efficient matter is a hallmark of his work and he is at his peak in Miss Jane. He weaves his story seamlessly and compellingly and a life passes before the reader without interruption. Jane is a toddler and suddenly five years have passed and she’s going to school; Jane is an adolescent and suddenly she is working with her sister as a young woman in Mercury. Jane becomes an old woman.

Without dwelling on Jane’s challenges, Watson shows a girl – later a woman – who finds ways to control her incontinence and mostly successfully keep it from interfering with her functioning in the world around her. He presents a vivid character forced by biology and culture to live a solitary life but shows that it can be a satisfying and fulfilling one, and one perhaps more successful than the flawed conventional lives of those she encounters.

Jane comes to an early realization that child-bearing and a “normal” sex life are beyond her capabilities and comes to a calm and healthy acceptance of the facts of life as they apply to her circumstances. Even so, a beautiful young man, Elijah, falls for her and she for him and Jane immediately begins to calculate how far she can allow the teenage romance to progress. Jane and Elijah’s delicate and bittersweet relationship is acutely explored until the time when the doctor and Jane’s family decide it is in the best interest of both to put a stop to it. It’s interesting that this same theme of the world making decisions about the sensual life of one with disabilities is also explored in Jeannie Thompson’s The Myth of Water, a series of poems about the life of Helen Keller. Well-meaning “normal” people are not always aware of the spiritual harm they might inflict by looking out for the perceived “best interests” of others.

I knew Brad Watson casually when we were both students at Alabama. He was known as a serious and skilled writer even then and his composure and bearing always seemed to take him above the muck and petty politics that occasionally mar the creative graduate school experience. Writer Barry Hannah was teaching at Alabama at the time Brad Watson was there and when Watson’s work began to be published Hannah’s great quote was “Only the Irish geniuses wrote like this.”

It is always an especially exciting time when one can open a crisp new book by Brad Watson. With Miss Jane he has created a character that will endure and inspire. Read it, Read it, Read it …