I grew up in the Brushy Mountains of western North Carolina. My
father loved to grow things. My mother loved flowers. He would bring
her wonderful presents from the woods--bouquets of tiny blossoms,
a story of a colony of leeches that swayed upward to meet his hand
held over a creek and then contracted when he moved it away in a
rhythmic dance of blood lust. My parents passed their love for the
earth on to my brother, sister and me. Some of my earliest memories
are of long Sunday afternoon family walks beside a river near our
home. We children filled our own and then our parents' pockets with
sticks, feathers, moss, stones--anything we found interesting. Later
we spent endless summer hours playing in the creeks and "hollers"
and woods--wading in water, swinging on grapevines, exploring mysterious
places like the Devil's Smokehouse Rocks where there was a cave
that sheltered men like my great-grandfather who hid there to avoid
conscription by the Home Guard during the Civil War.
By necessity we had an intimate relationship with our physical environment--we
grew and preserved most of our food, sawed and split firewood for
warmth, carried water from a spring for our daily needs. We learned
to be closely attuned to our physical world and minute changes in
it--the beauty of a hillside of apple trees in full bloom under
a full moon, the pungent odor of smoky honeycomb cut from its wooden
frame, the sound of a single oak leaf falling from a tree on a sunny
autumn afternoon.
Having my hands in dirt is necessary to me--it heals my grief, re-creates
my joy, keeps me connected to my family and myself. I believe that
the earth and sky and their health are fundamental to the survival
of human beings. This web site is dedicated to my parents, Frail
and Blanche Joines, who loved me abundantly and taught me the importance
of respecting other people and the wonder and beauty of growing
things.
Joyce
Joines Newman, MFA, May 2004
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