I love old maps, don’t you? Can you see Elgin up there near the top?
The other day I drove in my burgundy Ford F-150 pickup truck to downtown Bastrop. I love driving the truck down the country roads of Bastrop County: they are wide and open and go past field after field after field. I see cows and trucks and tractors, enormous circular bales of hay, old cars and trucks, houses, trailers and water towers. I have always valued driving time as thinking time; the only time this is not true for me is when I am stuck in terrible traffic and then I just feel frustrated and defeated! But country driving always gives me a sense of clarity, distance, perspective and tends to be a generative process in the ideas department.
Bastrop County Courthouse in 1930
The Bastrop County Courthouse (and Jail it turns out) is a beautiful, old building in the center of town. There were lots of people standing around the entrance, waiting for their docket times I suppose. I walked up the center sidewalk and noticed that a petrified tree stands to the right, sparkling in the sunlight. I asked a man where the County Clerk’s office was, and he pointed me to a small, carved pine door that looked more like a cuckoo-clock facade than an office entrance, but enter I did and found myself in room after room of age-old filing cabinets, lining the walls. The ladies sitting at desks were very kind, and I had my businesses (the farm and the jewelry studio) filed in no time, stamped, and, I suppose, entered into one of those large files along the walls.
The wind had been blowing as I got back into the truck, and I always take the spirit of the wind as a woman communicating something each time she blows and whistles about. Most of the time, I take her message to be one of, “get used to change” or, when she is especially vociferous, “a change is a-comin’!”. I try to look up and breathe in the wind, as if I will glean something else from the scent, or temperature, or force of it.
As I have gotten older, I am committed to understanding that the only constant in this life is change, and that we can fight it, or not. I choose not, and for this I can be considered flighty. My mother calls me a willo’-the-wisp, and I don’t think that either categorization is quite right. Do I follow the river of my life, ever-attempting to stay in the boat? Yes. Do I run from idea to idea? No. Perhaps I used to, but doesn’t everyone, in one way or another, do that in their days of youthful indiscretions and blindness? I would say so, even to people who think that they had it all figured out in their twenties and did things “the right way”. Those folks make me laugh a bit.
The herb farm has begun, I think that is what the wind was telling me, and upon its wings I will be carried forward. It is amazing to be able to dream an idea into reality. I am very lucky to be in my boat on this great river, and I hope I am able to continue my journey for years to come. Today is a short musing on transitions and transformations: I am also lucky to have the grounding force of a little brick house in Elgin and a very sweet man to have dinner with in the evenings. It helps this Goldberry take stock of the beauty of the day, and the understanding that tomorrow may be very different. The clarity of the present is, perhaps, all we really have.
Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth 1947
