Editor’s Note: Minor chaos at The Farm this morning. Joyful but tinged with more mildly alarming financial news from the Fed. First off, and with joy, Marlow and W have a postscript to their rumination about rural rambling. Here in Culpeper? A Presidential visit to our little town yesterday presented the divide in current American life, rural and city, in a stark manor. The Presidential arrival was by Marine One, his helicopter transportation. He landed at the local airfield where we support a small squadron of WWII propellor-driven aircraft that fill our country sky with the roar of old, strong sounds. Demonstrators lined part of the road to the local college with what are now predictable signs. We were warned about the cost of insulin from the temporary Presidential podium at the Tech Center. And about the inflation caused by our own government’s wild spending spree, blamed on “supply chain” problems caused by the same government we once served. Strange times here in the country. So for this first outing of the morning, take a ride with Marlow & W in their Coastal Empire, and raise a cup of steaming java to a great nation we do not recall voting to “transform” into something else. The discussion at the last election was about “getting back to normal.” Let’s try that.
– Vic

Author’s Note: My recent brief Ebenezer visit remembrance visit triggered the following.
-Marlow

creek at Ebenezer

We heard soft voiced drawls in Ebenzer that could only be those of the greater Savannah area merchant-class from before Georgia was marched through — antipodes of our current world’s judgmental sentiments of redneckedness. Yankee born and bred, I’m always charmed by these voices but slightly wary when I’m introduced to someone new at post church meeting Sunday brunch at the Crystal Beet Parlor to hear them reply “I’ve heard so much about you.”

I’ve been tempted one or two times by my inner “aren’t you special” smart ass to respond “Oh . . . and I, so little of you.”
They are one and all fine people, so I remind myself, but I’m afraid that what they might have heard may be short some facts on me in the character assessment arena.

Once, long ago, this area was entirely an other-worldly panorama of worthless rubble, peopled by macabre, starving people stumbling atop the jagged precipice of a war-torn Cro-Magnon era. One hundred and fifty-eight years after the Sherman walk through, their descendants have regained their former passion about elegance — personal, clan and regional. What goes on amongst us who live here and between us and those who don’t is based on a kind of quietly enraged foundation that can only be transcended through clashes-by-night drinking. It’s one of the things that makes me laugh so much, sorta like youthful love of innocent lust. They We are fascinated death-defiers, mostly out of sheer childlike amazement. Some of the native born, I think, practice raising their eyebrows ever so slightly in elegant curiosity with a stillness and attitude of delight for just these introductory moments. We all deserve some wariness as we spend the waning years that we are gifted with discovering the mysteries of each other’s imperfections, triumphs, failures, and silliness. It’s not so much feeling like we need to be laughing exactly, what rises up most times in us at these moments is calming glee.

All is forgiven and wariness factors drop to zero, when personal truths finally are shared like old brandy — brought out late at night among close friends. No more innocent-child deceptiveness. No more Not Quite Right folly of luxuries.

Secrets, we had, but they get fewer and fewer at this stage. Before they were the lies that we told to our friends. Now we tell each other the real nitty gritty.

How wonderful we these crazy times are with their e-dragnets picking up every living laugh within our vicinity and shining a light on it, intensifying it, pitching it higher as if to dare us not to laugh with at them. Daring us to despair . . . that there is no dawn, that all there is is darkness, that there is no silver lining, that our hearts don’t grow fonder by absence; daring each other to believe we are going to loive forever when we at that moment know, just know, that somehow, we are immortal, like up high among the gods.
Thanks, Ebenezer, for the revelation.

Meanwhile, back in the big city, we went out for a sliders, fries, and Coke lunch date when our earth stood still.

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