A Woozy Dispatch from Summer Covid

I’ve gone from sleeping nearly all hours, because sleep was the only cure for the knife in my skull headache, to sleeping odd hours. I woke up this morning around 4 a.m. and decided to look outside, feeling sudden gratitude for the land we are on, that I have the ability to gaze at it, that it has supported us literally and figuratively.

In the early days of the 2020 lockdown, when some of us still thought we were just having a mandatory 2 week vacation, my husband began digging beds for the wildflower garden we had often envisioned but never made real. As he turned over patches of grass, we discovered artifacts in the soil: torn plastic bags, bits of Styrofoam, remnants of trash we guessed had washed down from neighbors at higher elevations. Then as he dug deeper, sections of pvc pipe connecting nothing to nothing, pieces of hardware, tools, loose screws, chunks of concrete, a rusty iron bar with a corkscrew end, no longer attaching anything to the ground - all of it floating nearly motionless in the thick red clay under our yard. By nearly stepping in it, we found a large grown-over hole we’d never noticed.

We knew our Craftsman had been been moved at some point from housing cotton mill workers to its current location and now wondered what else had been destroyed or removed to make space for the plot we live on.

Covid buddy/editor

My neighbor is a 70-something retired schoolteacher who seems alternately leery of the world and delighted by life. There is a dancing bears sticker in the rear side window of her Subaru and she once surprised us by sharing that she wanted to go see Dead and Company in Raleigh but didn’t want to have to drive drunk. She will occasionally hike up our gravel driveway yelling “Jessica!” loud enough that we can hear her inside the house, which always gives me the impression I’ve done something wrong. (The only people who ever called me by my full name were my mom and my grandma, usually when I’d done something wrong).

Last winter, sitting on our porch, our neighbor pronounced, “This piece of land has a bad history” - a ghost-story like intro. We were rapt with attention, which she seemed pleased by - an impish smile danced in her eyes - but the details that followed seemed minor and bureaucratic - a few feet ceded this way then that, disputes over where the water and electrical lines should be dug. I have no doubt this land truly has a bad history since it was stolen from the Lumbee, Cheraw, Catawba, Saponi, Occaneechi, Eno and Shakori people and surrounded by plantations worked by enslaved people. That’s an unimaginable depth of loss, bloodshed and violence absorbed into the soil.

Last weekend my sister in law and nephew visited from New Jersey. We took them to our town’s Riverwalk, 3 miles of wooded trails along the Eno River between Occaneechi Mountain and the Occaneechi Speedway Trail (one of the first NASCAR tracks, now an interesting running trail meets outdoor museum with rusted out cars and bits of the original stands). About halfway through the Riverwalk, The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation have constructed a model of an original village along the Great Trading Path as it would have looked a few hundred years ago.

Lately I have been really trying to take everything in - the beautiful, the brutal. I feel turned off by unconscious consumption - a privileged thing to say, as I already have plenty of “things” that make my life convenient.

How much has changed, how violently, how quickly on this piece of land. How the building of a nation-state seems to be intrinsically violent because nothing was undiscovered - there were people there before. I wonder if we can get to something like the highest vision of America when for so long we’ve ignored so much of the reality of how we got here. When you dig in and keep digging, the only thing that remains true is, given the chance, nature, the land will renew itself, grow something new, adapt. I hope that’s true for us.

I abhor having to cancel shows, but need to finish recovering from COVID. I have tested negative but feel like a truck ran over me and need to honor that. Roanoke friends, we are looking to reschedule this show and I will keep you posted on a new date!

Shows starting next week are still moving ahead.

Friends,

There will be no Sunday Salon in August because I have been working on a very exciting new project behind the scenes which I will share with y’all soon! Planning to restart our Sunday Salons September 22!

8/8 Gas Hill Drinking Room, Winston-Salem, NC - w/special guest Grant Peoples

8/16-8/18 Philadelphia Folk Festival, Old Pool Farm, Upper Salford Township, PA

9/5-9/8 Antlers & Acorns Songwriters Festival, Boone, NC

9/14 Paxtuxent House Concert Series, Gaithersburg, MD

9/18 NC Songwriters Round, The Blue Note, Durham, NC - w/Jonathan Byrd & Kirk Ridge

9/21 Lucky Penny House Concert, Washington, DC

10/13 White Horse Black Mountain, Dark City Songwriter Round, Black Mountain, NC

11/9 Stone Soup Coffeehouse, Providence, RI

11/10 Newton House Concert, Newton, MA