The above photo is of a mill in West Virginia; the one I'm speaking of is quite similar in appearance.

Over toward Highway 72, in the northern part of Monroe County, there's a mill dam and grist mill that are maintained as a sort of living history museum. The area in which it stands has had a reputation for being haunted for well over a century. One of the stories involves a Cherokee woman who threw herself off a nearby cliff into the creek that was dammed up to run the grist mill; it's said that at certain times of the year, she can still be seen standing at the top of the cliff, staring down into the waters that took her life.

Others have told tales of seeing Cherokee warriors in the mists of early morning along the creek.

One story about the area was reinforced in the last twenty years by a sighting of a lost little girl.

One night in the early fall, a couple or three young men were on their way home when, in the area of the grist mill, a girl who looked no more than five or six years old ran across the road in front of the car. The driver slammed on the brakes, afraid he would hit her; when the car stopped they sat looking around, and spotted her again. This second time she looked in their direction, and they noticed that, around her eyes, her skin glowed a soft blue.

And she was gone.

When they could move again, they drove to the nearest house, and asked the man who answered their frantic knocking if the strange little girl they had just seen was his, and why she was out at this time of night.

The man told them that they were not the first to see this little girl. Her story was a terribly sad one. Many years before, a little girl in the community had vanished without a trace. She had been gone for some time before the first reported sighting of her. Everyone who saw her mentioned the odd blue light around her eyes. After several people had seen her--always at night, always crossing the road--someone followed her into a nearby patch of woods. She vanished at the foot of a tree. It's said that the man who followed her returned the next day with friends and a shovel, and they dug down and found what remained of a little girl. She had apparently died by some sort of violence.

No one knows to this day the little girl's name, the circumstances of her death, or the name of her killer. She was given a Christian burial in an unmarked grave in a nearby cemetery. In spite of the kindness of the strangers who found her, she does not rest in peace.

The man said that it was considered bad luck in the community to see her. Nothing happened to the three young men who spotted her on that chilly autumn night, other than having the fear of the Lord put into them--but they heard a couple of weeks later that the man who told them her story, at the house where they stopped, lost a family member within days of the sighting.



And on that disquieting note, fair thee well.

The first color to return to my beloved knobs in winter is yellow: first crocuses, then jonquils, daffodils, and now this: forsythia, also called golden shower by us hillbillies.

The yellows always remind me of this poem from Robert Frost (1874-1963):

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower.
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Titled "Nothing Gold Can Stay", the poem was written in 1923, and, in spite of its brevity, is regarded as one of his best.

Before long the yellows of early spring will give way to flowering trees, none of them yellow: redbuds, dogwoods, peaches, cherries, apples. For this little time, though, all is the color of sunshine and warmth. We still have cold spells coming--especially dogwood winter--but the yellow, like the scritchy love songs of the peepers, are a promise winter's all but gone.



And on that sweet note (sickeningly sweet?) fair thee well.

This morning we have our first significant snow of the season. Late, late--not totally a surprise, though; the blizzard of 1993 hit us on March 12, dumping two feet on us, and the second deepest in my lifetime, in the late 1980s, was fourteen inches on the third of April. Last night, as the snow front coming from Nashville ran headlong into our warmer air, we had a thunderstorm.

I wake early this AM (8:15, early for me). The ground being as warm as it has been the past few days (only three days ago temps at seventy degrees) I would have thought the ground was too warm for snow to lay, but it is. The crepe myrtle outside my bedroom window had begun to bud out; this morning the buds look like unripe berries kissed with snow. The car is covered; the cat comes in with snow melting on his fur, merely from standing on the porch. The snow is continuous, sometimes in great fluffy goosedown flakes, mostly in small fluttery ones dancing on a slow wind. Once in a while a blob falls off the roof with a thump; I'm sitting near a window, and jump and chuckle at the noise. The light coming in is dull, the world is gray and white, the only color being an occasional car or truck driving by on the wet ribbon of road.

I got to looking for paintings of snow and come up on this one by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):



And this one, by the American Andrew Wyeth (b. 19l7):



Back here in real life, it's wonderful to sit by the gas heater, Mom asleep in her recliner, the cat curled in a ball against her leg, TV a drone in the background, and look out at the snow. For this day, it's a welcome retreat.

And on that wintry note, fair thee well.

I love prehistoric art. The above painting is a copy of the original from the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux, in France's Dordogne Valley. The originals--discovered by four teenage boys (probably playing hooky from school) on September 12, 1940, during the German occupation of France in WWII--are off limits; the cave complex was closed to public view in 1963, as carbon dioxide breathed out by visitors was visibly damaging the paintings. The paintings were painstakingly recreated in Lascaux II, a nearby visitors' center.

The paintings at Lascaux are at least sixteen thousand years old, but sites have been found that date back at least twice that.

The "bulls" of Lascaux and other sites are in fact aurochs, the extinct ancestor of modern domestic oxen. The last living wild aurochs died in the forests of Poland around the year 1627, but the species had been domesticated long before the time of Christ.



The debate goes on about whether cave art is religious, hunting magic, or merely decorative. As for me, I'm always reminded, looking at cave art, of the words Pablo Picasso spoke when he came back out into the light after visiting Lascaux: "We have invented nothing."

He was right: the cave artists made use of perspective in ways that were not rediscovered by Western art until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century A.D.

Looking at their artwork, I cannot think of the people who painted them as primitive. This level of sophistication is anything but characteristic of a "primitive" society. We give ourselves airs about our high level of sophistication, but if you stop and think about it, that's mostly thanks to our gadgets.



And on that superficially profound note, fair thee well.

Okay, we're all grownups here: let's explore the legend of Lady Godiva, the Saxon woman who, in order to persuade her husband to lift punitive taxes, rode naked, with nothing save her knee-length hair for cover, through the streets of eleventh century Coventry, England. To preserve her modesty, she asked all the people of the town, as it was then, to remain indoors and close all their doors and cover their windows, and since they held their lady in high esteem, they did so, all save for a nosey (and possibly sex-starved) tailor named Thomas, who looked out his window and for his trouble was immediately struck blind. He has gone down in history as the infamous Peeping Tom.



This painting of Lady Godiva was done circa 1898 by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Collier.

Cute story, huh? Don't we all, ladies, occasionally have fantasies that the sight of us, clad in nothing except a curtain of hair, struck a man stone-blind? Hasn't it formed the basis of many a man's fantasy, the plot of many a movie (the most recent I know of being CALENDAR GIRLS, with Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, 2003)?

Not so fast.

I got the real scoop from a book. And Lady Godiva wasn't the pinup of the Middle Ages.

In his GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY: THE TRUTH ABOUT KING ARTHUR, LADY GODIVA, RICHARD THE LIONHEART, AND MORE (2003), Robert Lacey gives us the real lowdown on Lady Godiva.

To begin with, she was a kind and pious lady. In Saxon, her name was Godgifu--literally God-given. She was a landowner in her own right, with huge estates in the Saxon areas of eleventh century England. And she was married to a real winner named Leofric, who in 1042 helped put England's only royal saint, King Edward the Confessor, on the throne. She and her husband endowed the first church structure that stood on the site of what is now Coventry Cathedral.

The tale of Lady Godiva was first told around A.D. 1220 by a chronicler called Roger of Wendover. He does not mention anything of her being "naked" except "her fair legs."

Lacey speculates that Roger of Wendover copied his account from a Latin manuscript that once existed at Coventry, and that the account of "nakedness" may turn on a Latin verb: denudata, which literally means stripped--not necessarily of all clothing, but of all ADORNMENT-- that Lady Godiva, the gentle, pious and beloved, rode without the jewelry and fancy hairpins and sumptuous clothes she would have worn as befitting a major landowner and member of the Saxon nobility. In short, she rode out wearing, most likely, a modest undergarment, similar to a full length petticoat--and her hair fell around her because she did not pin it up with her jeweled pins.

The lady herself, who inherited her husband's estates upon his death in 1057, is last mentioned in history in the Domesday Book of 1087, those two giant volumes that take a complete inventory for William the Conqueror of all that his English subjects owned at the time of the Norman Conquest. That she is celebrated today as an audacious naked beauty would no doubt pain her.

That's not the worst of Lacey's explication, though: remember Peeping Tom, struck blind when he looked with lustful and curious eyes on the glorious Godiva? Roger of Wendover, the closest thing we have to an original source for the lady's act of kindness, doesn't mention him at all. Peeping Tom first enters history in about the year 1678--around the same time as an account of a rowdy Godiva procession through Coventry that attracted tens of thousands of visitors to that little Midlands market town. And we all know, tens of thousands of visitors means lots of money into the town coffers--

And on that exploitative note, fair thee well.