BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… DARK TOWN SNOW. The painting hangs in the gallery, testament to a thousand small towns, a thousand Americas across the winter, a thousand winter nights. The weathered, lonely red bricks of an easily overlooked downtown, the black of the sky, white snow piled on old wooden steps. Unseen street lamp illuminates the…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… A GREEN CHRISTMAS. “A green Christmas makes a full graveyard,” goes the old mountain saying. It is an old Appalachian omen, dating back likely to old Britain. But Vance Randolph recorded the saying in the Ozarks too and the words have echoed in my mind the past several days. Days in which…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… MOUNTAIN MAGIC. I clench the Arkansas diamond in my small palm, imagining in my five-year-old mind that the clear quartz crystal is a real diamond and, more than that, that the cheap quartz has real magic. I had picked the crystal out of a rock box in a dimly lit mom-and-pop curio…