with tomorrow marking our second shoot for Friendship Union Community Theater, we're all lining up ducks in the proverbial row to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.  the probability is that we won't post a blog tomorrow (though updates from set may be coming in other forms...), so i thought i'd post this one a bit later in the day today to keep you occupied this day and the morrow.  and please, send us good energy for tomorrow!

this is a passage from an entry in one of my favorite publications, Oxford American.  i've been a few issues delayed in my reading of late, and this comes from two issues back, the best of the south issue, #65.  i have to admit, i somewhat guiltily skimmed this issue with the design to get through it, and get to the current one. guilt, shame.  but i certainly stopped dead on this entry.  i'd like lincoln booth to read it, too.

ode to coming home / by daisy dodge

Because it will love you.  Because it will love you back.  Because it will love you back home.  Even abandoned and forsaken and forsworn, it will love you.  It will love you back whole.  It will fill you.  It will welcome you with sweet tea, sweet corn, smoked meats, okra, cracklins, collard greens, fatback, buttered biscuits, butter beans, buttered everything.  It will welcome you back with heat.  It will welcome you back with Yes Sir, with reckon and pardon and How do you please?  It will welcome you back with memory.  It will welcome you back with thick cigar breath.  It will be so very happy to see you, son.  It will Look how much you've grown.  It will Look how far you've come.  It will still, always, eternally love you.  It will love you in gardens.  It will love you in steel.  It will love you in shipyards and factories.  It will love you in cotton and cypress knees.  It will love you in spaceships and oil.  It will love you in salt; it will love you in soul.  It will love you in ghosts and vitriol.  It will love you in gravestones, in marble-etched names of your ancestry.  It will love you in stories - many stories.  It will let you love you one more time.  It will make sure you've eaten.  It will make sure you've slept.  It will make sure you've passed a good time.  It will not let you go. It will not let you back out into the cold.  It will welcome you back with football.  It will welcome you back with song.  It will sing of your journeys; be glad they are done.  It will welcome you with Jesus.  It will welcome you with guilt and prayer and holy water.  It will welcome you with history.  It will welcome you back with its sad history of humans owning humans; it will welcome you back with its history of humans who stood and fought for the rights of humans and won.  It will welcome you back, still standing.  It will welcome you back with cicadas' skreee.  It will remind you.  It will bind you and keep you.  It will dance you and sing you, pray you and dream you.  It will design you.  It will build you.  It will make you in clay.  It will purchase you.  It will release you.  It will set you free.

**

i find myself so affected by this.  it's the best thing i've read in at least three or four months.  i am humbled.

love the south with us/n.gray