This is the very first love song I ever wrote in my life. I wrote it for my dawg…and that’s the truth“.
—PattiGriffith
I love that line from the video of Patti Griffith singing one of my favorite songs written by her. I fnished all these danged leaves by hitting “Replay” over and over again….there are certain pictures for which I have to do this in order to complete the enterprisingly tedious aspects (drawing 1,0000 leaves, for instance?) of the picture.
This is a painting of the enormous pecan that gew in my Durham garden…..a 1900 house which, before I moved in, had been (for forty years) a rental-house, gravel-packed parking lot filled with tire-ruts,broken coke bottles, rusted fencing, and stashes of used condoms from sometime during the Nixon adminstration (I’ve really never investigated how long these things last, but I remain amazed at how long the dang things obviously DO last. I dug up and threw away a LOT of them during my first two years there).
After eight years?….the house and garden were lovely….but getting the place to that point took eight good years, help from a lot of friends and family, a lot of sweat, and rather a lot of money (these things don’t happen for free).
In any case, I loved that old pecan tree, which stood just outside the kitchen window.
Perhaps it’s plain weird or stupidly-sentimental or morbid of me, but one of the things that strikes as being very sad about leaving the Durham house is that so many of my dear,longtime friends will never be able to come to Hillsborough. During the time I lived at 2507 W. Knox in Durham, practically everyone I’d ever cared for/loved stayed there for a good visit. That will never happen in Hillsborough.,
Oh, well…welcome to middle-age, I suppose.
The pecans are always the last to lose their leaves in the Fall, and the first to grow them again in the Spring (I keep a close watch on such cycles; working at home attunes you to them…particularly if you don’t watch/own a television set). I love that fact about pecan trees.