Georgia air

The afternoon was growing old under the weight of Georgia atmosphere and the monotony of incessant mating calls of countless cicadas. From the porch where he sat, he could see the air out across a hundred acres of pasture to the catfish pond at the bottom of the gentle rise where the house stood. Humidity and grass pollen and dust from a truck that had run up the red dirt road a few minutes past hung full in the air. It was still as stone except for the minions of bugs that swirled and darted and hopped and clicked and buzzed everywhere across the fields and around the pond. A big snapping turtle released a pocket of air trapped in the mud at the bottom of the pond as she rooted around for her dinner. The bubbles boiled up startling a big lazy dragonfly into action from his perch on a reed only inches away.

He was visiting relatives, and had little to do other than socialize and read and sit in the presence of this place whose spirit was so different from that of his California scrub oak hills. It was a welcome break from his routine. He knew all the people on this trip well, but had never spent time meeting the place itself until this afternoon on the porch.

South of the catfish pond and west of the house was a stand of pine and mixed hardwood forest that ran an untold distance off across the countryside. He had been told that the forest was less than a hundred years old, and had grown up on land that had all been in cotton during and after the Civil War. But as he sat, he sensed that the spirit of this place hid in those woods—that it welcomed the trees back to heal the land from the trauma of cotton.

For a few moments that late afternoon, it revealed itself to him at the edge of the woods. It was an ancient spirit. Far older than the plantations; weary of the incessant onslaught of progress, but always resilient to absorb its blows and regroup. It was steeped in communion with the Indians long before the whites had brought their fiddles and ploughs and wagons and slaves. And those whites had brought their own influence to the spirit of the land, as had their African slaves. It was a wild spirit, murky and dark and heavy with humidity and blended with the toil and long striving of its inhabitants; with memories of joy and laughter, of brutality and outrage, peace, prosperity and poverty, sorrow, tranquility, crisis, and immeasurable depth. It carried secrets of untold history, some of which he dared not even to imagine. And it informed the consciousness of the locals at a deep level most would never articulate and of which many would never be aware.