So I had this notion a month or so back that my experience as teacher, speaker, field trip leader and engaged citizen would mesh nicely before small groups of folks who come to Floyd County lacking any depth to our natural or human communities here. Well, you know about plans. Mr Murphy is always ready to give us a ground in The Way Things Are. If you plan something so well that nothing can go wrong, something will. Before you can do what it …
If you’re a Fragments Regular (???) you will have seen somewhat fewer images of the mill dam on Goose Creek than you have seen of our barn. My guess is that, if you are a photog of any length of days, you have your own worn favorites–vistas, buildings, places, details from your life–that recur over and over in your image archives. Such places that ground us in place, such special features in our local lives are iconic. They ground us and help tell us …
I can’t remember the trail that led me to it, but browsing across it brought back a number of pleasant memories from 2004. The piece I happened upon in the Blue Ridge Country Magazine online was about the Mabry’s who operated the mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Meadows of Dan Virginia, the couple after which the most visited attraction along the four hundred miles of Parkway was named. I contributed a sidebar to this piece, including the color images and some text …
A stroll in the December archives finds this image [click to enlarge] from early December, 2007. I had been manning a book table at the Chateau Morrisette Winery Wine Club members banquet (what a nice invitation, I met lots of nice folks and sold 50+ books). Somebody asked if I’d seen the mill pond covered with ice. Soon as I left (in my fancy clothes) I headed a few miles west on the Parkway and came home with the shot you see above–one of …