Hannah Lee Jones
Washington
September- October 2016
Into Autumn at Rensing: Abundance
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| The pasture at sunset |
Always in life there
are places you visit and remember with fondness – but also there are those places
you visit that become part of you, such that you: a) put down stakes and opt never
to leave, or b) bury a hunk of your indebted heart in the ground as collateral
to ensure that at some point you make it back. The latter is already very much the case
with my two-month stay as a resident here at The Rensing Center, the former a
yearning strong enough to warrant a fair amount of no-jokes reflection (following a trip this
morning to the Greenville Farmers Market with Rensing neighbor Ron Few, I texted
my aero-engineer husband in Seattle asking, where was Boeing’s South Carolina
plant again?)
Here in Pickens, SC,
the soil is deep red (iron oxide-rich as in western Kenya, another country I love), and the air hot and muggy (in the 90s today, in
what I’m told is one of the very last warm days we’ll be having before the state’s
weather decides it’s actually autumn), the katydids are humming, and the
sun is setting over a land that enjoys the warmth of the subtropics almost
year-round. But for the skies' distinctive “pink of the evening” serving as my reminder that the candle is quickly burning on my time here, I'd ease into the dream state of a child who was going to live inside
of summer forever.
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| Bell jar, mason jar, and cuttings in the library |
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| Driveway/path to the Pottery from the Guest House |
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| Jon Fritz |
At the halfway mark
of my residency the memories are carouseling into a bit of a blur, but the
important things are easy enough to report. New billy goats arrived in the upper
pasture on my first day here (see Rensing’s wonderful Facebook page). Weekly dinners
at director Ellen Kochansky’s place have kept residents social and connected to the place and to
each other, and for me they've been greatly needed respite from the frequently head-bonking
work of writing new poems and stories. Jon Fritz, a local landscape designer/farmer
and past Rensing Borseda resident, has been a supportive and generous presence
to me and the other residents, giving us tours of the farms along Six Mile Road. Aijung Kim, a poet and visual artist who left us this week to return home to Richmond, Virginia, gave me my first lesson in how to sew together a chapbook, and inspired me during our walks together to see our surrounding nature with new eyes. To wake mornings in the Guest House to the calls
of birds I don’t recognize, to walk in woods and
not know the names of most of the trees –
these have all been invitations for opening and wonder, along with guided trips to the Pickens flea market and to historic Hagood Mill, or to the monthly fish
fry at Soapstone Baptist Church where we visited the community’s Liberia cemetery of freed slaves.
And that's not even to mention the over-the-top kindness and chivalry/gentility of some of the good southern
men I’ve met during my time here (the husband at home has been supportive); this Pacific
Northwest gardener’s joy at finding eggplants
thriving in the garden (plus peppers? God exists); the spontaneous gifts of bananas and oranges from Evelyn Kochansky (96 years old and the place’s incredible muse and founding
spirit)
– but when you’re a young poet cranking
on new drafts with a 70% failure rate and have shelves of Eliot, Stevens, Camus, Rimbaud, and Kafka staring you down and daring you to see if you can top that, you’re going to take all the support you can get. And I am grateful to the Rensing Board and
to poet GC Waldrep for opening the door to my stay here throughout this season.
I’ll post more in a
couple weeks with further reports on my excursions in writing, and in Pickens,
and further abroad, out of this eco-haven and liberal-progressive bastion in the center of Trump territory (photos forthcoming of the Texas
Longhorn cattle who are our neighbors – if I can manage some snaps of the reclusive beasts
when they’re not hiding from me).
With warmest greetings until next,
- Hannah Lee Jones
Resident, Poetry/Fiction September - October 2016  |
| Friendly goats |
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| Aijung Kim, showing me how to sew together a chapbook |
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| Reading at the kitchen table in the Guest House on a cooler day |
