Intimation of Spring … an Odyssey

Wayne jams the brakes of the old pickup. It swerves sideways and skids to a stop in the soft sandy back road of Atkinson County.

“What the…?” I yell.

“Look,” he shouts. “There, through the oaks. See ‘em?”

Barely visible through the undergrowth thicket is a pair of black, accusatory eyes. They glare at us as though we’re rogue grave robbers, desecrating the sanctity of places occupied by ghosts.

“Let’s check it out,” Wayne says. Wayne Morgan is an autodidactic photographer. His ideas are slightly twisted, but he has a country boy’s eye for the unusual. We’re a perfect pair.

A foreboding, windless silence grips the timeless place. Its forgotten past is captured in suspended animation. The morning sun dances through the trees surrounding the former home place. We walk up a barely discernible driveway carved into the red Georgia clay.

In the clearing sits a derelict structure. It’s bleached from years of unrelenting sunlight. Decay picks at its bones. It appears as a whited skull. Peering from it are two hollow and blackened holes. Like empty eye sockets, they add surrealism to the marred relic. Hoary beards of Spanish moss hang from large oaks like a descending mist. The scene evokes a gothic sense of dread. We stand in stunned silence at the discovery. Nothing moves.

We’re here by chance, where most photographers and writers find themselves. We aren’t lost, maybe 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. That’s what we were looking for…hints of spring.

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

The artifact before us is a ruined vestige of the tenant farming era. We take turns imagining its former occupants. On the rotting porch sits a moldy velvet sofa. Beer cans and broken glass surround it. The sofa appears to be alive. It crawls with vermin. We move inside.

Debris litters the floors. Remnants of broken furniture, ravaged by scavengers, lay broken throughout. Shards of glass lay scattered on the decayed boards. The faded wall paper drips from the walls. Mildew is everywhere. Nothing useful remains except memories.

We sift through old papers yellowed with age. One’s a postcard from Miami. It pictures palm trees and is addressed to Waldo Winslow, Sandy Bottom, Georgia. Its terse message, barely legible from water stains, reads, “Waldo, I’m not coming back. I’m sick and tired of the cold and picking tobacco and cotton. You can take those 80 acres and…”

Nothing more is legible. It’s signed “Goodbye. Your wife, Yolanda.”

“Can’t much blame her, you?” Wayne says. “Hard life here. Heck, those palm trees look inviting to me, too.”

“I guess,” I reply. “But I sorta feel sorry for Waldo. Wonder what happened to him?”

I glance through the black eye. Half hidden in the privet shrubs is a weathered marble tombstone. “He’s still here, Wayne. Look. See?”

“Yep,” he says. “He’s here to stay.”

We walk through the dark hallway. I pick up an old Prince Albert tobacco can that’s rusted shut. Inside something rustles softly. I pry the top open and look inside.

“Wayne, here’s what we’re looking for, right inside this PA tobacco can.”

Standing in the sunlight, we empty the can’s contents. Scattered in our palms are dried yellow daffodils like those found pressed between the pages of old books.

“What do you make of this?” Wayne asks. But he knows, even as I do.

Waldo had saved some daffodils from another time. Must have reminded him that even though winter slays, spring resurrects. They apparently nurtured his hope that better times were coming.

“Guess Yolanda wasn’t convinced,” Wayne sighs. “They don’t compare to palm trees.”

“Let’s give ‘em back to Waldo,” Wayne says. We scatter them beneath the tombstone on the sunken clay indenture that held Waldo’s dust.

“So long, Waldo,” Wayne says, uttering what might be the shortest eulogy in history. He slips the Prince Albert can into the back pocket of his jeans.

Standing among last year’s leaves, we know what Waldo knew. That fallow fields will soon explode with new life, and birds will sing again.

Wayne’s Nikon shudder clicks and captures the moment. We turn and walk back into today.

“What did you see?” I ask.

“Look closely,” he says.

Around the base of that wretched skeleton of a house myriad shoots of green were springing from the ground. Hundreds of daffodils emerge, their yellow blossoms bursting in the sunlight.

“There’s today’s evidence of spring, Bud, just what we’re looking for. Mission accomplished.”

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

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


Bud Hearn
March 6, 2015

Photography courtesy of Waynemorganartistry.com