Day Trip: Green Acres Farm

“Crows are family.” This wasn’t precisely the first utterance from Denton Parkins, but it was certainly the most arresting. He’d already gone through a list of remedies for crows and mice, his major competitors in the pumpkin and strawberry market. Crows, it seems, are wily creatures and sociable; he proposes to me that, “the crows scope us out.” I sense that he and the crows, from long dwelling together, have become familiar with one another’s faces.

The River

One of the most perplexing and discouraging realities the modern world confronts us with is a disconnection from our past and the past in general. We are separated from the first European settlers of West Tennessee by just less than 200 years, but we have less in common with those ancestors than they themselves would have had with the Ancient Greeks or Romans. Time is a relative construction in this sense, just like it is in physics.

Ancient Trails

When the white-tailed deer show up in my backyard, it’s like witnessing a direct link to an age almost forgotten. I freeze in my tracks, and I can’t help but think about their unbroken chain of ancestors going back into the ancient past. These animals were here long before any settlers arrived from Europe. They were the hunted long before rifles replaced bows and arrows. They knew these lands when the waters were still clean and the air was still fresh. They knew these lands when there were no cars and no railroads.

To Preserve & Promote Beauty

When I first moved to Jackson, my only regret in my college choice was (what seemed to me) the lack of natural beauty in the university’s town. As a Middle Tennessee native and an East Tennessee enthusiast, I grew up enthralled by the beauty of Tennessee’s landscape: the rolling hills, slow-moving rivers, and Blue Ridge Mountains in the east. Hence, my relocation to West Tennessee was, quite literally, flattening.

On: Westwood Gardens

The events, places, people, and things that we remember in our lives can be extremely non-discriminant. In a singular moment, I sometimes think that whatever I’m doing or whoever I’m talking to in that moment is so important or emotional that it will be burned into my mind forever, only to realize a few weeks later that I can’t even remember the moment. I simply remember thinking that I would remember the moment.