Idle Minutes

Without providing details, I’ve been ill. I’m gradually feeling better and I’m going to get rolling on sketching again. Sorry for the two month downtime. Sometimes things don’t go as we want.

Callaway Gardens in South Georgia, is an unusual place. It’s an outdoor place. In Spring, it’s ablaze with azaleas practically everywhere, hundreds of acres of them. They have a very nice horticultural center, and a butterfly center, which is an entire building dedicated to housing and raising live butterflies…thousands of them.

They have miles of bicycle trails too and walking trails through the gardens and woods. And three golf courses, a tennis center, a large swimming lake and beach, a circus in the summer, a gigantic vegetable garden, fishing boat rentals, bike rentals, fly-fishing store, a couple of restaurants, a wonderful summer program for kids, a lodge and conference center, cabin rentals…it’s a resort I suppose…a family oriented resort.

I know of nothing like Callaway Gardens. It’s not a typical resort. It’s quieter and isolated in an unusually out of the way place. It’s in nowhere land really. A little town in South Georgia, called Pine Mountain. It would be safe to say there is nothing in South Georgia except a bunch of little bucolic towns, the pastoral scenes between them, and the hard to imagine ways of life lived in each little house, trailer, shack, or rare “big house” one passes on the two-lane highways. Other than that, there are a half dozen small sized cities, a few low-key tourist attractions, and Callaway Gardens.

I’ve been there a lot since I was a kid. Off the beaten path, there is this dock with a shake shingled roof, which I think used to be a boat house. It sits lonely below the overlook pavillion in the very shallow end of a small lake. It’s abandoned as far as purpose. Dirt Daubers and turtles have moved in and call it and the shallow waters beneath it home.

The turtles await food from people like me who come to visit. I had none so they just poked their heads out of the water and stared at me with forlorn eyes. The Dirt Daubers…well…they just stay in their little clay homes and buzzzzzzz apparently. There were more Dirt Dauber nests than I recall seeing in one place, twenty maybe. But only a couple of them flew about me for a moment to check me out. Other than that, they all just buzzzzzzed in their nests.

This being the first attempt at sketching in two months, it was a “therapy” sketch more than anything. So, not much in the way of humor or meaning here. The timber bracket bracing up the roof is what caught my attention because I’d not ever seen brackets designed the way these were. So be it…that’s all there is behind this sketch.

I’ll see if I can’t do better as I try to get rolling here again.

Thanks to all my readers for sticking by. You are all much appreciated!