Turpentine And Maple Syrup

This business of giving the appearance of holding tight with certain ideas and then abandoning them stretches out after first glance to be ostensibly confusing. Why? So I could use the term "ostensibly". Reading articles online can be a joyous thing to do since I'm overtly curious about what words mean. The Dictionary feature that comes with the Mac OS pisses me off infrequently. I got no excuse not to look up a word I don't sufficiently understand.

All I have to do is point the cursor at the word and right click on it, and the dictionary feature pops up with a definition that usually satisfies my curiosity. This usually allows me to move forward with less doubt about carrying out my intentions. Doubt is the devil. We're intimate acquaintances, but I don't think I would claim that we're good friends.

I spend a lot of time posturing. At first blush I became aware of it by maintaining a hatha yoga practice for a number of years, and finally connecting the idea of asanas (postures) with posturing. In this sense we all posture and pose before each other. Mostly, I think, to get our own way with the significant others we surround ourselves with. Some people call this web of lies non-verbal communication. In hypnosis school it was called non-verbal hypnosis.

The appearance of things
caught drifting in matter
then bespoken with a scheme of design
is less barter than it oughta
when it's out with some mother's daughter
then tarred and feathered
with raw turpentine.

There is an old boat landing in the south part of the county called Clear Run. It's on the Black River, which flows into the Cape Fear River, and from there into the port city of Wilmington. One of the chief products sent down to Wilmington from Clear Run was naval stores. Namely, southern yellow pine resin called turpentine. Fiddlers call it rosin. It's the same thing.

People gather at the old landing warehouse at Clear Run to play acoustic music on maybe the forth Saturday of each month. I've been there to hear the music a couple of times. It's okay, but old time music is not my cup of tea.

What fascinated me about going there was that there still a few blocks of turpentine resin there in the old building. Big blocks of it as big as a foot square and a yard tall. It looks just like the amber that ancient bugs are found in. It's the same material.

It's the same stuff that comes out of conifer trees when their bark is torn open. The people here in the coastal plains used to cut the bark of the longleaf pines to get the sap out of them in the same way the people in Vermont collected the sap from the sugar maples. They both cook the sap to move to the final product. Conifer tree sap melts together and then solidifies as it cools inside prescribed containers.

When I was a boy there was a roadside park where one of the largest colonial turpentine refineries was located. There was an artesian well there where spring water come up out of the ground through an open pipe. It was a popular spot for people going to the beach from up around the capital to stop. Local church groups used to have picnics there just about every Sunday.

The road was moved when the state went to improve it. A new bridge was built in a better crossing spot and they moved the road to accommodate the location of the new bridge. The new road was a lot wider with wide shoulders and had been engineered with the latest road-building techniques. Nobody went out of their way to stop at the old rest stop. It got to be a hangout for trouble makers, too many people got hurt there, and finally the state just fenced it off.

Nobody does that anymore. Most of the longleaf pines are gone. Cut and sold for lumber. These days hybrid pines that grow faster are planted and harvested by huge forestry product companies who clean cut hundreds of acres at a time for pulpwood to make paper products. After they harvest every twenty years or so, they replant the cut over land with seedlings, and the band plays on.