In the arms of nature and history

Mai tais are out. Gin and tonics are in.

Lanais are out. The screened porch is in. Aah.

The timeless rustic luxury of the screened porch. Rocking chair. Verdant vista. Humming birds.

Now on Sautee Farm in the Nacoochee valley in the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, we sink into the pastoral life.

It is lush and lovely country. The great, softly forested mountains range out in all directions, turning blue in the distance.

Rivers like the Chattahoochee rush and

swirl over wide, rocky beds. Gurgling creeks meander through the densely wooded landscape, home to snapping turtles and trout.

I have been coming here with Bruce since 1996. “Most beautiful country on earth,” he sighs lovingly and often.

His generic American accent swings into a Southern lilt when he comes back.

Here, the people add a syllable to most every word with their musical Southern accents. Some of the gap-toothed mountain folk have accents so thick that, even after so many visits, I still cannot fathom what they are saying.

While America’s religiosity is on a statistical decline, up here they’re God-fearing, church-going Protestant folks and pretty, white-steepled churches sit proudly on hillsides and in valleys. Massive revivalist box buildings house the holy rollers and born-agains. Gun shops are never far away. Nor are bail bondsmen.

Predominantly, they are Trump people.

This also famously is Cherokee

country, their sad and cruel “Trail of Tears” history commemorated with a small pavilion on an ancient burial mound in the middle of a large pasture where black and white cows now graze in obvious contentment.

Sautee Farm is part of the history. Bruce’s maternal ancestors were among the founding white folk. Farmers and preachers.

Family histories are taken very

seriously and the locals keep careful track of who is blood to whom. Thus are we surrounded by a world of cousinry. Family stories are told over and over again at the dinner table. I can almost see the little provision stand that great grandma “Mamma” Janie Lumsden Williams had at the bottom of the farm drive. People would ring the bell and she would trot down and sell vegetables and preserves. She was a legendary cook, they say. Great uncle Bee

was killed by a bull. Grandfather Roy Etheridge, farmer and Methodist preacher, broke his leg escaping from a bull. Not the same bull. Grandmother “Miss Bobbie” loved to make butter but never quite got all the milk out. Bruce’s grandfather was such a prolific gardener that he delivered veggies to half the population of the valley.

They were and are waste-not, want-not people. Aunt Libby grows vegetables a

nd shares them out. We eat fresh tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, capsicum, and okra.

She has so much basil that we make batch after batch of gorgeous walnut/basil pesto.

She also has a patch of zinnias in the rabbit-proof vegetable enclosure. You never saw such zinnias. With the rain and sun and humidity, they have grown

as tall as I am. Their colours are ravishing and much appreciated by butterflies and bees and even hummingbirds. Libby shares her zinnia crop with the Presbyterian church across the pasture, with the Arts Centre across the road and with whoever comes to visit. We have a glory of zinnias in every room, even the bathroom.

It is late summer. Hot. The air is thick and steamy. One moves slowly.

Storms come and go.

The screened porch is the place to watch them. Dark clouds. Whooshes of wind through the trees. Cascading intensity of rain. Blinding wet white out. Then the calm of rebirth. Fingers of steam whisping

up Lynch mountain...

And there are the humming birds back chattering at the feeder. Exquisite, colourful little skinks have popped back onto the porch. Red cardinals are singing. Crows cawing to each other. The garden beds are once again alive with giant butterflies, huge bumblebees overloaded with pollen bending over the flowers with their weight, vivid little hover flies, honey bees, wasps…

Timeless fecundity.