The Painter & The Fish, a poem, by Raymond Carver

All day he’d been working like a locomotive, I mean he was painting, the brush strokes coming like clockwork. Then he called home. And that was that. That was all she wrote. He shook like a leaf. He started smoking again. He lay down and got back up. Who could sleep if your woman sneered and said time was running out? He drove into town. But he didn’t go drinking. No, he went walking. He walked past a mill called “the mill.” Smell of fresh cut lumber, lights everywhere, men driving jitneys and forklifts, driving themselves. Lumber piled to the top of the warehouse, the whine and the groan of machinery. Easy enough to recollect, he thought. He went on, rain falling now, a soft rain that wants to do its level best not to interfere with anything and in return asks only that it not be forgotten. The painter turned up his collar and said to himself he wouldn’t forget. He came to a lighted building where, inside a room, men played cards at a big table. A man wearing a cap stood at the window and looked out through the rain as he smoked a pipe. That was an image he didn’t want to forget either, but then with his next thought he shrugged. What was the point? He walked on until he reached the jetty with its rotten pilings. Rain fell harder now. It hissed as it struck the water. Lightning came and went. Lightning broke across the sky like memory, like revelation. Just when he was at the point of despair, a fish came up out of the dark water under the jetty and then fell back and then rose again in a flash to stand on its tail and shake itself! The painter could hardly credit his eyes, or his ears! He did just had a sign-– faith didn’t enter into it. The painter’s mouth flew open. By the time he reached home he quit smoking and vowed never to talk on the telephone again. He put on his smock and picked up his brush. He was ready to begin again, but he didn’t know if one canvas could hold it all. Never mind. He’d carry it over onto another canvas if he had to. It was all or nothing. Lightning, water, fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery, the human heart, that old port. Even the woman’s lips against the receiver, even that. The curl of her lip.

copyright Charlotte Hutson Wrenn 2012

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What is Art? Everything.

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Posted in Arts & Culture, beauty, creativity, music, photography, Poetry, spirituality, women, Writing

Loving the Children

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Posted in Arts & Culture, Ukraine

May the Blessings Find you.

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Posted in art, Arts & Culture, music, Poetry, spirituality, Writing

Two Blue Houses, a painting

May your path be joyous on this Thanksgiving 2021.

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Posted in art, Arts & Culture

Edisto Island’s Hutchinson House

Such a joy to see today the preservation of one of the earliest African-American owned tracts of land near Point of Pines. Thank you to the Edisto Open Land Trust for making this happen. Open to the public! Makes my heart happy.

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Posted in Arts & Culture, Gullah, history, South Carolina History

The Presbyterian Church on Edisto Island

“Edisto Island is God’s country.” – Jack McCray, author of Charleston Jazz One is struck by the many churches lining the two lane road onto Edisto …

The Presbyterian Church on Edisto Island
Posted in Arts & Culture

Row, Fishermen, Row.

https://youtu.be/PDr0-Gv9jZc

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Posted in Arts & Culture, Gullah, history, music, sustainable living

Charleston’s Place in the History of Memorial Day

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Posted in Arts & Culture, history

Edisto’s Slave Cabin Story @ The Smithsonian

https://play.prx.org/e?uf=http:%2F%2Ffeeds.si.edu%2FSmithsonianSidedoor&ge=prx_69_b1121ac4-40df-40ac-a2bc-395655fb6daa

Posted in Arts & Culture

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What’s this?

Welcome to my blog about the Lowcountry of South Carolina, a place proud with beauty, history and art. Sometimes we feel a call, to be, to go, to do. I was called to be an artist, and as an old midwife from Alabama said, “If the good Lord wants you to do something, you won’t have no good luck until you do it.”

So here I am writing about what I know, about the 'under glimmer' as the poet Basho, says, the way I have learned to see, to notice. I am inspired by, and talking about the history and art and culture of this place that has called me to herself. By the ancestors.

My background includes a degree in fine arts from a small private college in Florida, and before that, four years of all girls' boarding school in Asheville. I worked as a professional photographer, helped my children grow up, and now and I love seasoned things, good food, better conversation, beauty, my beloved and beautiful Italian Greyhound, Beau. Moved by the sacred places and stories of this beautiful historic land called the Lowcountry, I am here in spirit and I hope to infect you with my love of this place.

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