 | Solitary Eye One blue eye peeks out from underneath a carpet of forest clover and beneath the blue leaves of mustard greens. A thistle jostles next to a Dollar weed and a tiny fern to create a background for the one small blue unblinking eye – an ornamental toadstool. Like the Turkish “evil eye” it watches the forest a channel to the Divine taking in all the blessings and dispelling all the chaos. |
I fell in love with the Piney Woods in a very roundabout way. I grew up in Houston (and I love Houston -- more about Houston later). I spent my later childhood years in what was then a suburb of Houston. It was considered far, far out on the very edges of the city. This is not true now, of course, as H-Town has moved miles beyond where I grew up. The point is that I grew up in a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood where there were houses exactly like ours down the street. Still love that old two-story house, though, built around 1965. My parents bought a house in a small town on a lake north of Houston. I would go there and I would enjoy the lake an the woods, but I was not enchanted with it at the time. Then, for reasons of his own, my dad decided to buy a little farm house with 6 acres and Piney Woods and decided it would be a legacy for my husband and me. That's when I truly fell in love with the Piney Woods. The Piney Woods take up about 1/3 of Texas and some parts of Louisiana and Arkansas. They include The Big Thicket which is a world famous ecological system. The Piney Woods are magic. I have spent the last 4 years taking pictures and writing poems about both the woods and the small town located close to our place. I see it with my poet's eye and I try to capture what I see.
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