The solar calendar still reads winter. The South Georgia almanac says: “Spring.”
* * *
We’re driving on a sandy dirt road somewhere in Atkinson County, Georgia. No map, no GPS, no hurry.
The morning sun casts long shadows through the oaks. A sack of sausage and biscuits sits on the seat between us. Cups of steaming Starbucks are squeezed between our knees.
Without warning Wayne jams on the brakes of his old red pickup truck. It swerves and skids sideways in the soft sandy backroad. It stops just short of the ditch.
“What the…?” I yell. Tiny drops of coffee slosh on my jeans.
“Look,” he shouts. “There, between the oaks. See ‘em?”
Barely visible through the thick undergrowth a pair of black, accusatory eyes stare at us. We feel like grave robbers, violating the sanctity of a place occupied by ghosts.
“Let’s check it out,” Wayne says.
Wayne is Wayne Morgan, a noted photographer with a country boy’s eye for the unusual. Slightly off-center myself, we make a perfect pair. We slide out of the truck.
An eerie and windless silence of the timeless place greets us. It seems locked in suspended animation of a forgotten past. We walk cautiously up the overgrown driveway while shards of sunlight warm the forest floor. Steam rises, dissipates and slowly disappears.
A derelict structure emerges. Its boards are blanched from years of neglect and decomposition. Peering from it are two hollow and blackened holes, like empty eye sockets in a bleached skull. The vision adds surrealism to the marred relic.
Gray beards of Spanish moss descend like a mist from the gnarled limbs of the massive water oaks. The setting evokes a gothic sense of foreboding. We gaze in stunned silence at the scene. Nothing moves.
We’re here by chance. Life led the way. Country dirt roads always lead somewhere, even if to nowhere special. ‘Nowhere special’ is where the exceptional is found. Which is our mission…affirmations of Spring.
Atkinson County is basically nowhere. Little has happened here since Bill Atkinson was governor in 1894. It’s a perfect place to find genuine evidence of spring.
The artifact we see is a ruined vestige of the tenant farming era. A black, moldy velvet sofa sits on the rotting porch. Beer cans and broken glass surround it. The sofa seems to crawl with parasitic tenants, giving the illusion it’s alive. We walk inside by a sagging screen door hanging by its hinges.
Debris litters the floors. Splintered remnants of wooden furniture lie scattered throughout. Broken glass covers the discolored linoleum. The wallpaper, long since faded and green with mildew, appears to melt from the walls. Nothing of value remains.
We sift through papers yellowed with age. One is a postcard with palm trees, postmarked Daytona Beach. It’s addressed to Waldo Winslow, Sandy Bottom, Georgia.
Terse and barely legible from water stains, it reads, “I’m not coming back, Waldo. I’m sick and tired of the cold and picking tobacco and cotton. You can take your 80 acres and…” Nothing more is legible. It’s signed, “Goodbye, your wife, Yolanda.”
“Can’t much blame her, you?” Wayne says. “Must have been a hard life here. Heck, those palm trees look inviting to me, too.”
“I guess,” I reply feeling a tinge of sorrow for old Waldo. “Wonder what happened to him?”
Through a shattered kitchen window we see a weathered marble tombstone. It’s half-covered by Carolina jasmine vines. He looks at me, “Waldo’s still here. See?”
We walk down the dark hallway and go outside. I pick up an old Prince Albert tobacco can. It’s closed tightly. I pry the top open, look at the contents.
“Wayne, here’s what we’re looking for, right inside this tobacco can,” I say.
In the sunlight we empty the can. Inside are dried daffodils, like the kind found pressed between 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 as a reminder that though winter slays, spring resurrects. They apparently nurtured his hope for better times, and that his fallow fields would soon burst with new life.
“Guess Yolanda wasn’t convinced,” Wayne says, “They don’t compare to palm trees.”
“Let’s give ‘em back to Waldo,” Wayne says. We scatter them on the sunken earth that held his dust beneath the headstone.
“So long, Waldo,” Wayne says, uttering the shortest eulogy in history. He shoves the Prince Albert can into the back pocket of his jeans. We leave.
Wayne’s Nikon shudder clicks, capturing the moment, and we turn and walk back into today. “What did you see?” I ask.
“Look,” he says. Around the base of that wretched skeleton of a house, yellow blossoms of daffodils were bursting forth in the sunlight. “There’s evidence of Spring,” Wayne says.
Wayne grinds the gears
and the truck lurches forward, speeding down the dirt road to somewhere. It’s a
good day to be alive.
February 24, 2023
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