Introducing Joan Durant- One of the Founders of the Cafe Rienzi - on YouTube: Interview With a Poet

In my previous posts about the Cafe Rienzi, I have introduced my Aunt Joan and Uncle Tom Durant - a couple of the Rienzi's original founders. Laura Collins has done a breathtaking feature on my Aunt Joan Durant on YouTube which I am thrilled to present to you here:

YouTube - Interview With a Poet

And speaking of Painters and Poets - Archie Foxworthy

I have posted frequently on this blog about my great-aunt Firma Duchene Philips, a well-known scenery painter and one of the charter members of the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. I'd now like to introduce some other memorable folks from my youth - namely Archie and Mary Foxworthy. I spent my teenage years with my grandparents Claude and Helen Alward in Fountain County just outside the town of Wallace, Indiana. Every fall my grandparents would help Archie and Mary ready the produce and products they had raised on their Parke County farm to sell at the Rockville Covered Bridge Festival. My grandparents would tie bunches of bittersweet and help bundle other local fruit and flora such as persimmons and sassafras roots as well as various jams and jellies, I suppose. For many years Archie and Mary ran a produce stand on the corner of highway 234 and US 41, across from a little store called Jipville, where they sold the fruits and vegetables they had raised throughout the growing season. I got to know them there, and at Wolf Creek Community Church, and through Lodge and Eastern Star activities in Wallace. Also Archie had a sugar camp for as long as I can remember - and I have an oil painting of it painted by my Aunt Firma Phillips. The painting has also been around for as long as I can remember. When Parke County started the Maple Syrup Festival which runs from the last weekend of February through the first weekend of March, Archie and Mary became very involved in this event. In fact I'm looking forward to attending this coming weekend and buying some of Foxworthy Farms maple syrup. Now 93 years old, Archie is a musician, a poet, a humorist, and a philosopher. Duane Busick, an Indiana journalist, has produced a wonderful three-part series of videos about Archie entitled "Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure" which can now be viewed on YouTube - and the links follow below. I hope you enjoy meeting Archie and his family as much as I have enjoyed knowing them throughout my life.


Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part One - opens with spectacular scenes of Parke County Covered Bridges as Archie picks his banjo with a hickory nut and sings in the background ...





Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part Two



Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part Three



And here's my Aunt Firma's painting of Archie's Maple Syrup Camp.

JuneBug

Summer Lights

This picture is as close as I've been able to come to the memories of my childhood when the lightening bugs were out in July.

I'm still learning to take decent pictures of lightening bugs. It's hard. =:O

I took this picture on a very slow setting, the camera propped on the arm of a bench to steady it, no flash,and with the multiple spot meter setting. (Hence the streaks) I then "developed" and enhanced it in Photoshop with the curve, saturation, and artistic tools, to make the little guys show up like they normally would to the naked eye. :)

There just don't seem to be as many lightening bugs in recent years as I recall in my mind's eye ...




Click on the image to see it at higher resolution

Fire FliesCome ride with me 'neath fading skies,

past floating fields of fire flies

Like champagne bubbles, they burst and rise,

and steal the star light from the skies.

Now here, now gone, the summer flies,

and fades to autumn before our eyes

So come ride with me in the pale moonrise,

past floating fields of fire fliesJeanne Winstead Copyright 2001 more of JuneBug's poetry


Happy ShutterBugging!

JuneBug