A SITE TO BEHOLD

Thanksgiving has ended for another year and I have some of Aunt Glenn’s cranberry relish left over. It’s in two small containers hidden in the refrigerator.  Aunt Glenn’s cranberry relish marks the beginning of the Holiday Season in our household and when it’s gone, I miss her all over again. Isn’t that odd? For all the years that we exchanged Christmas gifts, all the times we met half way for picnics, the truck loads of ham sandwiches shared on week end afternoons (and the Manhattans served - “two cherries please” ), it’s the cranberry relish that brings her back to me full-blown and re-opens the wound left when she died. 

I’ve shared the cranberry relish recipe with any number of people and I make sure it’s always titled “Aunt Glenn’s Cranberry Relish.” Is this “ever lasting life?” Maybe. I can’t think of anything much better.

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Dedication of “A Site To Behold,” the twig sculpture built in Hillsborough, North Carolina by artist Patrick Doughtery with help from volunteers (including Chip and me!) was November 21.  I did not attend but enjoy watching the video of same title (go to youtube to view).

The question I get asked about the project:  how did I happen to know about it and become an afternoon volunteer?  Simple…the power of the internet.

We planned a trip to Beaufort, SOUTH Carolina, to tour Auldbrass, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed estate and so I cruised around web sites looking for “other events of interest” during the week or so we planned to be down south.  Up popped the project listed on the Hillsborough Arts Council web site with a call for donations and volunteers. I sent in a small check and showed up with Chip, clippers and garden gloves for a half day’s work mid-way into the two week construction.

By the time we arrived, mountains of limbs and cut saplings were piled around a clearing in the wooded park just off a public boardwalk. The day before, using augers, 2 ft. deep holes were dug as “footers” for bundles of larger structural uprights and kept erect by tamping gravel around the bases of each 20 ft. tall bundle.

As Chip and I stripped leaves off more limbs, Doughtery and others were putting in place five platforms held up by scaffolding. These were strategically placed to give him and other “weavers” access to the structure.

Doughtery works constantly himself and directs construction in a soft southern voice. He’s a tall, white haired man who looks mostly like an outdoors’ builder.  He brought to this project one salaried assistant, a woman probably in her late-20s. All other workers - about fifteen the day we worked - were volunteers. The sculpture is in a very public spot; the park is smack in the middle of small Hillsborough and foot traffic is constant on the meandering boardwalk that passes not 20 feet from the base of the twig building. 

It’s easy to write about this art work, it’s poetry and relevance to the world in which we live. It’s appeal bridges the youngest explorers running through and around the giant “birds’ nests” to the more intellectual who see the work as commentary on the transitory nature of the environment. Some of us find ourselves more philosophical these days and rejoice in human collaboration with nature. Count me among them....all!