Intimations of Spring...an Odyssey

Wayne jammed the breaks of the old pickup truck. It swerved and skidded to a sudden stop in the soft sandy back road of Atkinson County.

“What the…?” I yelled.

“Look,” he shouted, “there, through the oaks. See ‘em?”

Barely visible through the thick undergrowth, a pair of black, accusatory eyes stared at us as if we were two desecrators violating the sanctity of a place occupied only by ghosts.

“Let’s check it out,” Wayne said. That’d be my friend Wayne Morgan, an excellent photographer with a country boy’s eye for all things offbeat. Slightly twisted myself, we made a perfect pair.

We slid out into the eerie and windless silence of a timeless place captured in the suspended animation of the forgotten past. The mid-day sun’s rays warmed the forest surrounding the former homeplace as we trod up yesterday’s driveway.

In a clearing a derelict structure emerged, bleached from years of decomposition and unrelenting sunlight. It appeared as a whitened skull. Peering from it were two hollow and blackened holes, like empty eye sockets, adding surrealism to the marred relic. Like a descending mist, hoary beards of Spanish moss hung from large water oaks. The scene evoked a gothic sense of foreboding. We stood in stunned silence at the discovery. Nothing moved.

We found ourselves here by chance, the way most photographers and writers find themselves. We weren’t lost, just confused. Country dirt roads always lead somewhere, even if to nowhere special, which is exactly where we wanted to be. Nowhere special is where the exceptional is found, and that’s what we were looking for…intimations and confirmations of spring.

The winter had been long and arduous. Nerves were frazzled, tempers short. Hope saw its shadow and returned to its den. Our mission was to locate some signs of spring.

Atkinson County is basically nowhere. Nothing much has happened here since old Bill Atkinson was governor in 1894. It was a perfect place to find genuine evidences of spring.

The artifact we now beheld was a ruined vestige of the tenant farming era. We took turns describing its former occupants. A black, moldy velvet sofa sat on the rotting porch, surrounded by beer cans and broken glass. Clearly others had found this place useful for something. The sofa seemed to be alive and crawling with vermin, so we moved inside.

Debris littered the floors, and what furniture remained was broken, having been apparently used for fire wood. Glass shards lay on the decayed boards and faded wall paper seemed to be melting from the walls. Mildew was everywhere. Nothing useful remained, having been ravaged by scavengers.

We sifted through old papers yellowed with age. One was a postcard with palm trees in Miami, addressed to Waldo Winslow, Sandy Bottom, Georgia. It was terse and barely legible from water stains. It read, “I’m not coming back, Waldo. I’m sick and tired of the cold and picking tobacco and cotton. You can take those 80 acres and…” Nothing more was legible. It was signed “Goodbye, your wife, Yolanda.”

“Can’t much blame her, you?” Wayne said. “Must have been a hard life here. Heck, those palm trees look inviting to me, too.”

“I guess,” I replied, “but I feel sorry for old Waldo. Wonder what happened to him?” A glance through the black eye revealed a weathered marble tombstone, half hidden in the privet shrubs. “He’s still here, Wayne, out there. See?”

“Yep,” he said. “He’s here to stay.”

Walking through the dark hallway I picked up an old Prince Albert tobacco can. It was closed tightly. I pried the top open and was shocked to see its contents. “Wayne, here’s what we’ve been looking for, right here inside this old tobacco can.”

In the sunlight we emptied the can of its effects. Inside were dried daffodils, like the kind found pressed between old book pages. “What do you make of this?” Wayne asked. But he knew, even as I did.

Old Waldo had saved some daffodils from another time as a reminder that though winter slays, spring resurrects. They must have nurtured his hope that better times were coming. “Guess Yolanda wasn’t convinced,” Wayne sighed. “They don’t compare to palm trees.”

“Let’s give ‘em back to Waldo,” Wayne said. We did, scattering them on the sunken earth that held his dust beneath the tombstone. “So long, Waldo,” Wayne said, uttering what may be the shortest eulogy in history, as he put the Prince Albert can into the back pocket of his jeans.

We stood at the homeplace among last year’s leaves, knowing with Waldo that fallow fields will soon explode with new life, and birds will sing again. Wayne’s Nikon shudder clicked, capturing the moment, and we turned and walked back into today. “What did you see,” I asked?

“Look closely,” he said. Around the base of that wrecked skeleton of a house were myriad shoots of green, springing from the ground, their yellow blossoms bursting in the sunlight. Daffodils, hundreds of them. “There’s today’s evidence of spring, Bud, just what we were looking for.” Mission accomplished.

With a smile and a high-five, Wayne ground the gears, and the truck lurched forward, speeding down the dirt road to somewhere.

Intimations of spring are everywhere, even in Prince Albert tobacco cans. It was a good day to be alive.

Bud Hearn
March 9,2010