For several years I have heard, and used, the quotation, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” For the longest time I thought William Faulkner said it. He said something else about the past. The past is never dead . It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence. And to prove we can easily get quotations and their attributions wrong, I thought that was “In the South, the past is not even past.” No, he wasn’t talking about the South then. He does have a great quote about Mississippi. To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi . That is so true about fiction writing (and other matters), I want to stop there for a minute. It applies to just about anywhere you could write about—Dalton, GA or Southwestern Virginia, Maryland suburbs of D.C. or Los Angeles, CA. But I think Faulkner is getting at the need to see a place different from th...
t is late July in Northwestern Georgia. The forecast today is for a high of 94 degrees. I have walked my dog already by 9:15, so that he and I can avoid the panting and the perspiration that yesterday sucked us dry of energy. I sit inside with two fans and some indirect air conditioning on me, with no plans to go outside for more than a couple of minutes today. Tomorrow should be better. August is always a little better with the heat here, with shorter days of sunlight and leaves starting to say, "It's enough, we will give up our lives." Yesterday I pulled up my beans. They have yielded, but I did a poor job of creating a frame for them to expand. I may plant another two rows, and plan for a better skeleton of sticks. The okra lives, and the peppers, but tomatoes languished this year and zucchini and cucumbers seemed prefer May and June. Rain would be welcomed. But I remember that it falls on the just and unjust, and that rain does not make the choice of who it falls on ...