All in the meantime

The day after that last post, "today I truly came home" (I remember that day), I took off on backroads to make it up to Nashville. I had friends to see up there and wanted to get footage of the city to complement the wealth of countryside I was collecting. It was the big excursion of the initial period, where I tuned back into the openness of rolling hills and fields and the envelopes of rich forest.

I went through Tracy City to talk with an old-family democrat who told me all about the local elections that had just taken place, his notions of why the South has turned so Republican and what the outlook is of those who've stayed in the little town and who all have left since the building trades fell with the housing crash. That used to be a rich coal community too.

I went up the Beersheba and then Sparta Highway to have lunch with a Christian actor and comedian, and talking to him and his housemate for an hour afterward I came to appreciate what I have to learn in order to make good on building trust on all sides. They gave me books on improv comedy and I hope I'll make it back to visit again soon.

I went straight on to Nashville so I wouldn't miss dinner, at the eastside home of an old friend through high school and college who knows me. And spent the night on Broadway and out among the multi-storied honky-tonks and trailer-house dives where beer's only served out of bottles. Nashville is a wild big old town. In the unhappy overcast I still got the shots I wanted to include.

And I came back straight to Mother's Day, with everything to be grateful for.

All the footage I got along the way, and before, didn't stand on it's own though, at first. I started to worry about where I was with my project. It had been five weeks (now six) since I left New York and I was not ready with the reporting, the trailers, the recorded interviews that are the content I have in mind, and what I had saved to come back and start on was wearing thin. I needed to have already done so much more, I thought. I needed to have already produced, because in fundraising again I had nothing to show for it, or so I thought. I felt the fear of having been all wrong.

Then I looked back at what I'd written in the first place, the plans I'd made after my first try at fundraising, and found it pointed right to where I was. By Memorial Day I'd be ready, I'd said: well Memorial Day was yesterday and I am ready. I've met such amazing people and started to work, shooting some video every day and refining my system for managing it all. Churning out content is not unreasonable. And the conversations I'm having are leading to more. The plans I'm making now are open-ended, full of detail to fill in with broad strokes, and so exciting.

So I get ready to fundraise. Indiegogo this time, not Kickstarter, since all I need now after a hard drive are gas money and incidentals. I'll get through another month and have more to show. I just have to keep working. Keep working like this. Stay tuned.

This is happening.

Today I truly came home.

Tomorrow it will have been a month since I left New York City. Back around the end of summer last year, when I first made the decision to leave, I started to fantasize about coming back South. It had been more than five years since I left, where even my visits and time back home from college or holidays were all temporary--time measured against how far removed I felt.

In the last few weeks before I came back for real it occurred to me that I had forgotten how beautiful it is here. It shocked me to the core when night fell along my long train ride from New York to Birmingham and I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had been in natural darkness. It strained my eyes to take in the full green of trees and fields when I woke up in Georgia after the long winter of 2014 and the concrete many-colors of the city. Those I hadn't anticipated. But I knew well in advance how unprepared I was for what I'd missed, when just the nature of Central Park or the wooded surrounding country became relief.

And since I came home I've been wide eyed rediscovering the beauty of this Southern country. My part of it: the Tennessee Valley and Walden's Ridge, Cumberland Plateau and Highland Rim, falling off into the Nashville Dome. Today my dad surprised me driving off into it, out through fallow fields, soon to be canola or corn (they hope for another bumper crop year), deep yellow with mustard grass with spots of grazing cattle and all manner of homes, farm buildings in all conditions, standing pregnant with people's living. Out into the slopes wooded and cleared into grazing fields leading down to transparent creek beds, labyrinthine, the road losing its lines, narrowing, leading. Luckily my camera was in the car, but there are things you have to see with your eyes.

Between Coffee and Moore Counties a woman stopped to talk to me while I was photographing downed trees from last week's storms that brought twisters. She told me one had jumped over her house, and in the middle of her field her daughter found a photo of a woman and child opening Christmas presents. She said her family in Fayetteville had been fine, said all of Lincoln County had got it bad.

I had never been to Lynchburg, where the town square is the indelible kitsch rounding a painted colonial courthouse, half storefronts in the theme of Jack Daniels whose warehouses gleam angular out of the hillsides, and a third restaurants. Of the remainder I talked to the 94 year old Jim Fuqua of the antique store in the name of his late wife. He pleased to tell us all about his careers and his son's careers, his travels and privileges and his wife's living memory, sobering more than aggrieved at the state of affairs in Washington, and with words of support for my project.

Dad and I came home straight through Tullahoma, in time to put chicken quarters on the grill and sit with my Godfather on the porch through sunset.

I'll never forget now the beauty here. I'm home. Now it's time.