Out on the very edge of North Carolina, where it touches the sea, I greeted the new year.

Some wind must have blown there from the islands, it was so gentle and warm.

The colors out at the edge of North Carolina in deep winter tend toward white. There is a huge expanse of sky constantly color shifting, and brilliant oblique sunlight. The ocean, so stirred, sends out foamy fringes, white and lacy, like the shells on the oysters at supper.

This afternoon I was torn– should I take a nap, or maybe work in the studio, or grab a last perfect warm day to go out in my kayak. I’m so grateful my sense of adventure called out to me and I loaded up the kayak. It’s Indian Summer here. Seventy degree days, and forty-ish nights. A few lovely colored leaves, but mostly green. Winter is slipping up on us, behind our backs.

I wore layers, and took only a camera, a sketchbook and an apple. Once there– at Mountain Island Lake, the boat slipped easily into the water, and I set off at a leisurely pace, shucking some layers to bask. The light lured me–its extremes of bright and dark. The shadows were bluer and the sunlight yellower than normal. I took a few easy strokes and let the currents drive me into my favorite cove.

Nobody except two other kayakers seemed to be on the whole immense lake, and we were all bent on the same thing– the zen paddle. One paddler had her dog trained to stand on the back deck of her kayak, and they toured the opposite bank. Another appeared to be napping in the middle of the lake. Like them, I didn’t go for an upper body workout, or for some competitive need to reach Australia. I went to drift. I like to feel the water move through the thin skin of the kayak. I go for the silence–and I practice making my strokes soundless and invisible. I like to think of myself as some latter day native American, sneaking up on the woods. This behavior has its rewards. As soon as I hit the edge of that cove the world opened up and the act of being alive on that day in that place became the whole point.

First I scared up a small duck who flew deeper into the cove to evade me. Then I found myself, the water clear as clean glass, looking down on some huge fishes. The were the size of a man’s forearm, and just as muscular, arching in S formations, and when they’d gotten enough of me, they muddied the shallow water to throw me off. A kayak will continue moving forward in only a few inches of water, so I can go all the way to the back of that cove, and always do. Sometimes, back there,I can look down and see the tracks left by a wading heron printed into the undisturbed mud.

A little turtle the size of a silver dollar jumped off the limb he was sitting on and hid in the water as soon as he realized I was there. The water’s surface was patterned with the first fallen autumn leaves. Some were long and narrow shapes that curled up at one end. And when the wind blew they moved across the surface of the water like little gondolas headed for shore.

I took perhaps 75 photographs, and never drew. I didn’t want to stop long enough to concentrate on a drawing. But I did stop, in the middle of the quiet cove, to put my feet up on the deck and just BE. Floating into the sunlight of a clearing the air would wrap around my bare arms like a warm sweater, then a few seconds later it would gently cool. The little duck, wary of my presence at the back of the cove, flew in the other direction.

Over and over I thought to myself about what a blessing this afternoon was. I thought of my friend Beth, who once went kayaking with me, much to her delight, and has now left this earth. I thanked God for allowing me this day. I reminded myself to do this again and again. I told myself it probably didn’t take 100 calories to make this afternoon happen and that tiny expenditure took me to the head table at the Feast. When the sun dropped almost behind the high banks I paddled back to shore, and headed for home. And when I got there I left the kayak in the back of the truck to tip the scale in favor of waking up in the morning and going right back.

Remembering this past summer calls up dozens of images of shimmering overheated days spent working on the details of the barn project. There were light fixtures and hardware to install. There were shelves and a deck to be built, and a floor to be put down.

I found myself growing accustomed to the intense heat, from being outside in it every day, and hardly ran the air conditioner at all, once back inside. When it was time to lay the floor, Jose and I pulled out all the dusty original boards that had been the barn floor since 1890, milled originally in my great grandfather’s saw mill. My friend and neighbor, Rodney Readling, a real Renaissance man who can make almost anything, agreed to plane the old barn boards for me and to serve as my floor supervisor.

Rodney sent me to an exterminator supply company for the appropriate chemicals for treating historic lumber, and I mixed it up and sprayed both sides of the newly planed boards. Once run through the planer their million worm holes showed up. The heartwood, full of 122 year old resin, was, of course, bug free, but the soft wood was riddled with tiny tunnels. It doesn’t matter how old heart pine is, when you sand it or plane it or cut it, it smells like wind blowing through a pine forest.

Rodney gave me a wonderful concise tutorial on how to lay this unconventional (today) material as a finished floor. He also showed me how to use a speed square in conjunction with my saw to get straight cuts. As a young girl I attempted to sign up for Industrial Arts at my school, was hauled into the principal’s office and told girls weren’t allowed in Industrial Arts. So every scrap of learning I’m able to get about the workings of wood and tools and metals is precious to me.

Jose, my helper, and I started off a little on the rough side, trying to understand the natural curvature of the wood, and its reluctance to butt tightly up against its neighbor. Our first couple of rows went slowly. But we persisted. Things got better when I realized that Jose knew more about carpentry than I’d suspected and that I should follow his lead. He learned that I could be trusted to measure and cut the wood accurately and we developed a floor team that was pretty professional by the time we got half way through the space.

Stewart came out to help me with the floor finishing, which involved hand sanding the wood. The job was complicated by our allergies, and by the boric acid which the wood had been treated with. The resins in the dense old wood also clogged and coated the sandpaper within seconds of contact. It was brutal. But Stewart stepped up to the plate and we took turns being beaten up by the very heavy , violent floor sander we were using. Rodney sent me to a wooden floor company to research finishes, and the varnish went down, revealing the beauty of the tiger striped heartwood.

Paul Hollar, recovering from his chemotherapy and radiation, agreed to be my shadetree foreman, and instruct me in how to get my deck built. He arrived with his folding chair, parked it under a big pecan tree, and proceeded to never sit in it. He showed us– the laborers, what had to be done, and usually moved in to do a lot of it himself. Like any job, I learned this summer, a rhythm develops as the job proceeds, among the people working on it. Paul, so sure of what he was doing, pretty much dismissed my help, and proceeded with Jose, to build the deck. I worried about his working in the heat, but it seemed that every day, as he worked, he forgot about being ill, and his spirit lightened a little. He would pick up his hammer and swing it with the grace of a true carpenter, from the whole body, not just the arm, in a way that seemed effortless.

Frank Cheney, the architect who made the space coherent and poetic, came back and drew the plan for finishing the entrances, and is advising me on a canopy for the front door. It’s almost time to warm this barn with a gathering of friends. I treasure the hard work, the talents, the altruism and kindness, the level of engagement each person has brought to the Cotton Barn project. It has been a labor of love, and for me of learning. My brother and I like to imagine our father and mother, our grandparents and great grandparents looking on the little barn with pleasure from some place, we hope, not too far away.

For a while I have been silent, watching myself try a new kind of life, observing what emerged, not sure what to say. Finally in the last couple of weeks things have settled enough for me to write about this part of my passage.

For the first time in many years, when the school year began I was not there. I was, instead, on the beach, drenched in bright light, wrapped in blue water, eating local shrimp. A few weeks later I realized I have not retired; I have resigned from my teaching job and gone to work full time as an artist.

For a long time I didn’t paint. I did chores. I worked on farm buildings. I tried to refind myself. A week long study session at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, initially, just further confused me. In that intense week, paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts, I lived in a beautiful small apartment in the buzzing, humming hub of Chicago, walking daily to my studio behind the museum.

Once there, I would internally rebel. I don’t work well in an urban studio, cut off from nature. This stuff doesn’t come out of my head. It comes out of a dance with the natural world. And since the death of my mother I had not painted. So, with the sole assignment of feeding my soul for a week, and exploring art, I would jump up from my easel and go look at something in the museum for a while, then go back and kick it around.

Finally, one morning I walked down the street to a strange storefront where dusty fabrics were sold. Amid the bronze satins and leopard prints I found a transluscent fabric, dotted with tiny spots– like stippled painted marks. I took it back to the studio. In my overnight kit there was one of those traveling sewing kits with needles and thread. I started creating a fabric sculpture.

For some reason, I wanted this to describe my re-emergence– a piece about my mother, found dead, too soon, and unexpectedly. I recreated her hand, as I found it in death, and remembered it in life. Very soft. Beautiful. Turned in upon itself. Passing from materiality to immateriality. In the hour in which I sat with her body I studied and held her hand. That hand I know so well. I can’t remember so many things about my father, dead now for 37 years, but I can see his hands with perfect clarity. Once I complained to Mom that my hands were so ugly, but, she said, they can do anything. Always hers were beautiful.

So I made this piece. I avoided painting. Finally, as the week drew to a close I realized I had kept myself from taking any benefit from a brilliant painting exploration by obsessing instead over this sculpture. So I asked my instructor to look at some images of my work from the last couple of years and talk to me. He was a brilliantly fluid young man. He could spin out a rapid fire line of discourse about the work that was as evanescent as champagne bubbles. I tried to capture, in my notes, the essence of what he said. Like he was channeling some spirit from the other side, he was almost unconscious of the content of what he was saying. I asked him to repeat something and he looked shocked, saying he had no idea what he’d said… it was already gone. But I dutifully did the best I could to write it down against a time when I might be able to use it.

When I returned home to my own studio I struggled with the words of advice he’d given me. First, I recognized that both my instructors made work I didn’t understand or particularly appreciate. They had MFA seals of approval from vaunted institutions. One made all gray minimalist paintings, for which he had airtight arguments. The other revered the work of Jacques-Louis David, and did reiterations of David in hot pink. These two facts were sufficient to cause me to take their advice with a grain of salt. How relevant could it be to me, a naturalist who loves to render. But, beyond what they themselves made, there was some serious wisdom.

It took me three months to find the central message I most needed to hear in all the notes I took. The message was– do what makes you different and do it a lot. So that is what I have been testing. In the last couple of weeks I have discovered that time-freedom allows me to get lost in a piece and give it the kind of obsessive attention that feels right to me. There is no deadline. There is no schedule. There is just me, paint and discovery. Suddenly I am in love with working again.

The new pieces are small and experimental. Until I find my sea legs there is no need to shout my message on a large scale. I had piles of small stretchers made so I can explore. The background music is often the French Suites by Bach, played so many times it’s starting to take on the familiarity of pop music. And lots of Latin Jazz. These intricate musical pieces parallel what’s happening on the surface of my canvas. There is point and counterpoint. There is intricate afro-latin rhythm. It’s all pixilated, stippled, dappled light and shadow. It is time to say what I can say, in the clearest voice I can muster, and to do what makes me different and do it a lot.

With Paul Hollar recuperating , Andy Knox  agreed to take over the completion of the barn interior.  His crew moved quickly to bring things together.  Over time the vision for what the space should do became clearer– it would be a sculpture studio, and a summer painting studio for large scale work, and on its walls I would hang paintings.  It would also store all the tools I’ve collected over time.

Just before work on the interior  began I was introduced to an eminent architect– Frank Cheney. Frank has had an illustrious career, working for I.M.Pei and Charles W. Moore, as well as Cambridge Seven and Associates.  In grad school at Yale he was Teaching Assistant to Vincent Scully. Now he heads his own firm in Greensboro.

Frank asked to see the barn I’d told him so much about, so I invited him down for dinner and a look.  It was his first visit to the farm, so we walked around the place, the garden and the studio, and then stepped into the barn.  I told him about my plans for the space’s layout and he suggested that there might be a better way to structure the interior spaces.  While I put the finishing touches on dinner, Frank sat down at my desk. Without  a second look at the structure he drew a plan, freehand, in  perfect proportion, incorporating his new ideas.

My first stubborn reaction was to cling to my old notions, but sanity ruled and very quickly I  released them and yielded to the genius of Frank’s plan.    In a couple of days I was ordering more windows and  revisiting everything with the builder.  The humble cotton barn, wracked with age, rescued by a 17 year old, bearing second hand windows, was about to enter a new phase.  It was moving toward clarity and functionality.  But best of all, it was moving toward the divine.

Through my friendship with the sculptor Tom Sachs I’d become intrigued with the idea of the studio as a sacred space.  Tom put out an amazing film called Working to Code. It’s an instructional video for his studio assistants which is both tongue-in-cheek and very serious.  In it he refers to the studio as sacred space.  The film’s illustration  of sacred space is three women waiting on the curb for a Muslim counterfeit handbag salesman , who is  kneeling on the sidewalk on a scrap of cardboard, occupied with his prayers.   At our first meeting a couple of years ago the first thing Tom and I discussed was the way work was a conduit to the divine.  He quoted, at the time, the Benedictine maxim “to work is to pray”.

Frank and I never discussed this, but from his intuitive and experiential wisdom he invoked the sacred space archetypes in this humble barn.  He urged me to admit the light from the north and east by adding more windows high up on the walls.   He redesigned the storage so it emphasized the verticality of the space and created a focal point for the room. The 130 year old church shutters moved to this focal point, where I’ve been wrestling to make their 378 moving parts (I counted) line up and act right.

On a brief visit a couple of weeks ago to the Turchin Center at Appalachian I saw an exhibition based on research about sacred spaces. The wall text asserted that there were three characteristics shared by nearly all sacred spaces. A sacred space is:
-a place where an individual finds solace.
-a space free from distraction which allows inward reflection.
-a place of rejuvenation and inspiration.
I know that now, since Frank’s plans have been made real. When I am in the barn I do not want to go back to the house. And when I am in the house I want to get back out to the barn. It has become the most compelling space in several thousand square feet of spaces. It is where I can go to greet my truest and best self.

Thank you, Mr. Cheney.

People  outside Raleigh might not know that a new museum has opened there.  I had heard vague rumors in the Charlotte area, and was in town overnight, so I went for my first visit to CAM Raleigh. 

 Catching a glimpse of the building I was immediately glad I’d set aside the time to explore this new museum.   Raleigh is unlike any place else in North Carolina.  Because of the powerful presence of its architecture and design schools, it is loaded with brilliant visual experiences.  It might be as simple as the typeface on the menu you’re studying, or the choice of a particular piece of hardware on a door.  Everywhere you look there is visual sensitivity, engaging detail,  funky juxtaposition and imagination in evidence.

 So I’m standing there, engaged with the canopy over the glass vestibule of the museum.  I’m noting the funky juxtaposition of this glass box and lacy metal cloud canopy with the softened-by-age red brick building it’s attached  to.  And I haven’t even seen the art yet.  It’s a façade that sets me up for the excitement inside.  It’s a let-your-mind-float welcome. 

 Once inside the visitor is greeted by museum employees who are clearly engaged by the art.  They are likewise welcoming, and well-informed.  I surprised myself with the number of questions I came up with which then spawned a couple of great conversations.  They were keen observers of the artists’ processes, and were able to deepen my appreciation for what I was seeing.

 The inaugural exhibition features two artists—Naoko Ito, based in New York, and Dan Steinhilber, based in DC.   Ito’s work is a distilled reaction to the natural world, titled “Urban Nature”.  It has a spare, poetic feeling, and focuses on the truncation and controls we as humans exert on the natural world. 

 Steinhilber’s work is also poetic and wildly playful.  He has created “paintings” using plastic wrapping materials, and constructions using coat hangers and cardboard boxes.  But the show-stopper is an environment he dreamed up.  Operative word: dreamed.  Once inside, you are in a dreamscape.  You might possibly be walking somewhere out in the Milky Way.  You could be snorkeling in a huge reef with the sun filtering through the water.  You could perhaps be in an opulent tropical garden. 

Get this:

The Process—take a football field’s worth of white plastic greenhouse covering.  Next, you will need a lawnmower and a bunch of post consumer colored plastic shopping bags.  Run over the bags with the mower to “mulch” them up.  Spread them on the plastic in painterly abstract configurations.  Then attach electric pancake griddles to the bottoms of your shoes with a long extension cord and walk over the plastic so it sticks to the greenhouse material.  Then seam it up, colored side in,  again using the griddles, so it creates a crazy three dimensional form with all kinds of caves and caverns and trajectories. Inflate it, and take an old refrigerator door and its seal to create the entrance.  Now invite everyone you know to enter your dream universe.  

Pretty fantastic stuff.  If I knew any children living in Raleigh, or any erstwhile children, I would drive them over there right now and put them inside the dream.  I don’t think any child who experienced that could go away unmarked by the magic of this experience.

I love a good story about an old building, so I will have to hold myself back from making my Story of a Barn series into a nouvella.  Oh… maybe I should just give in to that impulse…

Once the big panel truck took Gordon and all his many possessions  to Brooklyn to live I still held out hope, for a while, that he might decide to come back home and finish the barn.  But, after a couple of years passed and he signed a five year lease, I realized the barn was going to remain a lumpish half done reminder if I didn’t take it on myself.  We negotiated the transfer of his project to me, and I hired some help.

Paul Nelson Hollar is a third generation carpenter.  His grandfather built the house I grew up in.  His father helped my father with the construction of our mountain house.  And Paul had helped me and my brother since we were all very young, with various jobs we undertook.  Paul had just finished rehabbing an old tenant farm house for my brother when I asked him if he’d help me put a floor in my barn.  He agreed and he and his wife Joan  showed up on consecutive Saturdays to work on the framework and  put down plywood.  We’d have lunch and laugh  a lot.  Joan could easily be a comedienne.  It was like potato chips– I couldn’t stop there.  After the plywood we decided to work on the siding, and on installing windows.

Paul knew the owner of the local sawmill and arranged for the wood to be cut, and hauled in.  He patiently worked with me, picking up second hand windows and doors, trying to keep the project on a budget I could afford.    Out of the attic came the wonderful turn of the century beveled, leaded glass window Paul’s father had given me 30 years before– just because I admired it.  I had driven by the Hollar’s house at sunset, and the west-facing window tacked into the shop out back caught the sunlight and refracted it like a thousand diamonds.  It was breathtaking.  Nelson removed it and gave it to me– because that’s the kind of people they are.  Paul and I picked a west-facing wall and figured out where to install it.

Paul is a cowboy and most of the people who work with him  are cowboys.  Lamont, who helped with the barn, also helped my brother train his beautiful American Paint/ Percheron to wear a bridle and pull a plow.  Paul and Joan have a business boarding and caring for horses on the grounds of their early 18th century home.   They come out of that culture– love of the land, love of the old ways, abject honesty, total integrity, and a strong belief in helping one’s neighbors.  Paul grew up on a gentle rise  in my rural community, on property that had been farmed by his family for generations.  Like many people in our community, all around him were cousins, aunts, and uncles.  And it’s still that way.  We used to love to get his Aunt Belle to tell us stories of the old days.  She told us how our grandfathers would all thresh together.  They would go from farm to farm, as a group, threshing.  And the womenfolk at whatever farm they were threshing would feed them all that day.  It was a competition to see who set the best table.  Our community is still known for its fine cooking .  It was rural, but it was interdependent– black or white, modest or well-off, everyone depending on the help of the others.  Even into our parents’ generation they still particpated in barn raisings, and assisted neighbors in need without a second thought.  So Paul, almost as an act of neighborly love, took on my project, and gave a lot of care to helping raise my barn.   Every Saturday, after he left I would take a photograph of what it looked like and email it to Brooklyn with the subject line “Today”.

All along Paul and Joan asked me “what are you going to do with this barn”.  At first I didn’t know.  I just knew I wanted to resolve the unfinished quality of it, and I knew that if I coexisted with it, time would tell me what to do.  With 10 foot louvered shutters discarded from the 1881 church in our community, I first planned a storage closet, with shutters for doors.  I would store tools in the space, and maybe have a covered workshop.  In that big expanse of wall I thought I might hang some of my extra paintings, so collectors could see them assembled.  But it was a vague plan, without much form.

Things ground to a halt when Paul told me he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer.   A cowboy doesn’t take much notice of things like that.  He just keeps right on going.  He was told it was totally curable, but there has been chemotherapy and radiation and a cure that’s worse than the disease.   And just for now, this big old cowboy’s hammer has been silenced.

Yesterday was my last day as a classroom teacher.  After 15 years I’m ready to “graduate” from high school.  I’ll be closing that door, but opening another door to a secret garden– my life as an artist.

On the other side of that door are mornings watching the sun rise and move across the pasture– the most beautiful time of day on my farm, and one of the things I most look forward to.   There will be long days in the studio with music blasting, and colors colliding.  I expect there will be expeditions to creekbeds and hillsides, and sandwiches drawn from a backpack and eaten over  half finished paintings.  But yesterday, teaching stood up tall and asserted itself to remind me of all that’s good about it– sharing the magic, alchemy and inquiry of art with hundreds of kids.

Yesterday my sculpture students pulled together an extravaganza– they showed off their body sculptures and light sculptures in a fashion show, complete with a red paper covered runway.  They blacked out all the hall lights and the hall windows and brought in the perfect hip hop recordings for an ultra-hip show.  They recruited willowy girls to model, and lined one side of the hall with their Noguchi inspired light sculptures.   The lights and music were so magical that many people  sat in the hall just to soak it in.  I found myself hanging out there too, enjoying the transformation of the cinderblock public school hallway.  The body sculpture assignment had been to create  something that related to the body, but was not intended for actual practical use.   They’d been plotting this fashion show for weeks.

At the assigned hour students started appearing, having found ways to persuade their teachers to release them from class, or having tricked their teachers into not noticing.  They assembled along the wall opposite the lightshow.  The first model hit the runway moving at a high rate of speed, but once she realized she was the center of attention, she slowed down and started to enjoy it.  The mood was contagious, and each model seemed a little less self-conscious and more inspired by the music, the lights and the admiration of the audience.  Eventually they achieved the kind of strut that the show’s organizers had been encouraging.  Among the creations were a headband with a bow on top, and a metal mustache attached;  a mirrored shield which hid half the face from view and had large metal archs attached, bearing more mirrors; an apron with a barbed wire neck piece, and detergent labels sewn all over it;   a piece worn on the torso that looked like the orbiting moons of some far away planet; a headpiece with a medieval quality;  a bracelet that looked like  an exploded atom on the arm.  There was a headpiece made of peacock feathers and a chest piece made of forks.  There was a metal beard, which I preferred used as a breastplate.

I had doubted that we had enough energy and work to put together a show worth skipping class for, but I was wrong.  And on my last day of teaching it felt great to have this ebullient, raucous, funny and imaginative experience.    What a spirit, and what a sight on which to close the door.

It’s mid-week in mid-May and I have the good fortune to find myself on a little adventure.  After school I drove up to the mountains to the lovely, rambling house of friends.  They loaned me their mountain house so I could transact some business in the vicinity.  Lucky for me, it’s very cold so I’m sitting by a blazing, snapping fire with a glass of wine, and taking time to write in unfamiliar and friendly surroundings, far away from the rest of the world.

This house is built to accommodate four children, their spouses and fifteen grandchildren so it’s jolly even when it’s empty– echoes of optimism all around me.  The house sits on a hundred acres designated as Stewardship Forest and on the walls are hundreds of photographs of easy, happy family times, collections of arrowheads, wild turkey feathers and stone age tools.  It is a place that’s all about love of family and love of the land.

I’m tucked in amongst the books and the stonework, socked in by fog and toasted, on the front side at least, by my cozy fire.  What a luxury to be alone with one’s thoughts; to be removed from routine and exploring new places; to be alone on a mountaintop.  This big echoing house must be startled by its lone guest, accustomed as it is to a huge family that enjoys its time together.  Big and empty as it is, it’s doing its best to embrace me.

In the morning the house is still cold.  I have clearly not decoded the furnace.  So first thing I start a fire in the wood stove from last night’s coals.  In my robe, with a cup of coffee, I prop my feet in front of the fire.  Outside, the house is blanketed in a smoky white fog and the fire and fog trigger a favorite memory.

I am 20.  I have been camping at Linville Gorge near the falls with  my boyfriend.  We have spent a cold night sleeping on a 30 degree incline, deep in our down bags.  This is the boyfriend I let slip away, though he earnestly held a ruby engagement ring out to me in the front seat of a Toyota in city traffic.  Upon waking in Linville Gorge with the sound of the falls all around us on that long ago morning, we broke camp and drove away in search of some creature comforts.  We found a rustic restaurant with a hearth and a blazing fire, and early on that foggy mountain morning we gratefully ordered huge breakfasts and produced our own bottle of campsite-chilled champagne to go with it.

In memory there is laughter, firelight, bubbles and complete relaxed pleasure in the company of another.  How, I have asked myself many times, did I allow myself to discard that for the company of less joyful, more tortured souls?  Thousands of firelit mornings lie between this one and that.  But none so crystal clear, with a sense of wholeness and happiness.  I was accepted as I was.  I was encouraged to be more wholly myself that I ever had been.  I was truly loved by another joyous and playful soul.  In my innocence and ignorance I did not know the purity with which a boy first loves.  Instead, I presumed a good deal less.

But I have, as a kind of marker, that memory.  When I feel that whole and happy again I will recognize it and cherish it.  And should that not happen I will simply hold as dear as a blood red ruby in a small box the memory of that morning.  I believe the value of memories is as great as the pleasures of the moment, or the anticipation of the future.

The fog is lifting and I have my first sighting of what might lay beyond this porch.  It promises to be a ravishing day.

the cotton barn c. 1976

My son, Gordon, at about age 16, became deeply interested in graffiti as an artform.  He pleaded with me to allow him to cover the bare side of the cotton barn with OSB so he could have his own graffiti wall.  I relented, and for a time the barn, on three sides, was a rustic remnant, and on one side, an explosive artwork.

Gordon  was also becoming deeply interested in composing, performing and recording music around this same time.   He decided one day to make a sound booth in his room using his closet.  Clothes tossed out, he lined the walls  with soundproof foam.   I would look up from my chores to see an  unending stream of young people in various states of dress and body decoration carry their instruments up the stairs to spend a day in one of our closets.

Time came for Gordon to leave the south, and head to New York to college.  He hatched a new scheme: persuading  me that he should be allowed to rebuild the cotton barn as a recording studio.   I think I hoped it would draw him back home when he was finished with college.   I knew it made sense to allow some improvements to the crumbling ruin I had no time or money to bother with.

About this time, a new Gordon began to emerge.  This boy, with no knowledge whatsoever of  building, became a student of construction.  He turned to his father for advice and counsel.  He read.  He enlisted the help of a friend’s father who was a structural engineer.  And because he lacked better, I became a sometimes carpenter’s helper.

Often all I did was clean up the jobsite, or move things from the barn to another space.  Sometimes I removed nails from old weathered barnwood, or handed up the sheets of tin to reroof the building.  I came to relish the shared goal, the time spent watching Gordon’s spirit and imagination at work.  When he came home for breaks from college he would  work until the light was all gone,  sometimes with my help, growing faster as  he lost the light to try to propel the job as far forward as he could.  I began to sense that the barn project was one way in which Gordon could grasp with both hands his home, and do all he could to  set things right.  Lacking money, materials, and knowledge he gave it heart instead.

On the  last night before he would leave to return to New York, he would always  push himself into the night, dirty and tired, tucking things away.  I hold in memory one powerful image from those days.  It was late January, the last night of winter break.  We had worked so hard we didn’t feel the chill.  The  sun was setting in a cherry blaze behind the field across the road.  We both stopped to go look at it.  As we soaked it in  a hawk came from behind us, flying low toward the sunset.  A golden halo  formed around its silhouette.

Another scrap of memory I cherish– we were both stooped over at the foundation of the barn, just under the dripline from our new roof when, at my feet, I found the first arrowhead of my whole life.  ”Untouched for 5000 years” as my friend Frank Bragg would say.  I grabbed it and cherished it like a gemstone.  But after graduation, when Gordon filled a moving van and climbed into the cab to go live in Brooklyn, I gave it to him.  His is the native spirit, the hawk spirit, with whom it should always reside.