A Smattering of Disdain 2/7/2021

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

If you read my last blog you know it was a somewhat gushing affectionate tribute to a writer, or probably more accurately an individual that I love most everything about.  For some reason today I am traveling a very different, I suppose you could call it downright opposite path. Oddly enough the topic came to me lying in bed after a road trip that allowed me to see a few things that apparently put ideas in my head.  Today, if you’re taking the time to see what random thoughts are spewing from the storage bins of my mind then you’ll find several very specific things of which I am very much not a fan.  These are things that some people may very much enjoy so I hope my explanation of my arbitrary distastes are at least minimally entertaining despite their haphazard presentation.

If you’ve read most of my entries, you know that nature is without a doubt probably my most readily available and possibly most influential source of inspiration for my writing. I am pretty certain I blathered on about just my favorite season alone over the course of far too many posts and that was a single season! I probably shouldn’t have gone that overboard but as you are privy to, when I’m passionate about something I talk about it. Often.  It’s better if you know now so you can just go ahead and be prepared for subject matter to reappear. So, what I am telling you is that what I am writing about today is, yes, nature. But today won’t be just a rambling chunk of prose about how much I love all the beautiful things and how inspiring they are. No, today will be a different kind of passion. I am wondering as I type why I feel like anyone would want to hear about what natural occurrences that I don’t particularly like, but why would anyone want to hear what I do like for that matter so, I make a wager and write on.

My first bit of displeasure may be out of the ordinary for a southerner. I know of others just like myself, well at least one, that shares my sentiment, so I don’t think it is totally unheard of for me to feel this way. I shall simply be outright and admit it. I very strongly dislike pine trees. I know. I’m sorry if you love them but I have yet to find much of anything good about them except perhaps their usefulness in the creation of lumber and paper, both highly valuable commodities.  Even the fact that they stay green year-round isn’t enough to merit any creative benefit for me.  Give me a forest of hardwoods and I could overflow with musings.  However, put me in a pine grove and I have nothing. They are rife with affronts to any attempt at a pleasant forest experience; needles that are prickly upon the tree and dangerously slick for walking beneath them, treacherously sticky sap and the pollen, oh heavens to Betsy the ungodly pollen.  I wish I liked them. I really do. Considering I live where they are ridiculously prolific, me enjoying a good pine might be one less thorn in my side but no. Even when it comes to needing native evergreen décor for holiday reasons, no, I will lean to cedar every time.  While I bemoan the stark grey winter landscape, I still cannot bring myself to appreciate the green the pine lends. They don’t dapple sunlight like a poplar leaf. They don’t become ablaze in autumn like a maple.  I would take a sweetgum with its contemptable prickly balls before a pine. I’m sorry if there is a pine lover reading this because I don’t want to upset you but clearly, you’re a questionable soul anyway so if I have please don’t do me harm.

This next element of disagreeableness that came to mind even comes with its own moniker that I have given it.  I like to call it, or them, “grey areas”.  This can be easily summed up as environments where it is not easily discernable (or very black and white per se) as to what is land and what is water.  This includes anything that one would call a swamp or a marsh. Yes, I know that the marshlands off the coasts of the Carolinas are all the rage as a lovely area to vacation and such but, no. I am sure they are full of biodiversity and are just an overflowing ecosystem and whatnot but the very thought of a large grassy expanse in front of me which may be a grassy field, a body of water with deceptive vegetation or some treacherous and soggy mixture of the two causes me to shudder in the most horrified way.  I’ll never forget my experience one time at an old shut down dairy farm.  I was looking at what I thought were lovely lush green meadows and then, as a stiff breeze blew, I noticed to my abject revulsion that the surface of those lovely meadows was moving. They were in fact the old lagoons of the farm overgrown with some disconcertingly green vegetation. All I could think about was what if I had meandered over to those lovely “meadows”?!?!? One wrong step and I would have silently vanished into shadowy depths of black water, cattle dung and very likely sea monsters of some mutant proportion. No, I cannot stomach grey areas. I don’t care what type of lovely bird it may house, or what pivotal plant it may grow. They are nothing more than traps to swallow me up. I can’t feel differently. No coastal marsh vacation homes for me.

I could continue my rant about many other little things. I could tell of how I dislike red mud. My husband referenced it as “red gumbo mud” and I found it highly appropriate. It is just so…much. I understand mud is a natural occurrence. There are even types that serve as a highly effective beauty treatment. But the difference in that mud and the red gumbo kind is that it knows its role. Red mud stains. It is dirt and you are supposed to be able to wash it out. It isn’t wine or blood. It has no business leaving stains. That is just being excessively taxing for no reason. And it stains all it is around so whenever it appears in the landscape everything is aglow in a dirty orange wash.  Orange red is not a flattering enough shade to just throw about all will-nilly!  I suppose it is one of the few cases of nature being more colorful that is about as unattractive as possible.

Overall, I am not sure why I felt like giving you a rant today.  Perhaps you even agree with me on some of the things about which I described my disdain. You could possibly also disagree with me vehemently and I suppose that is ok as well. Like I said, if nothing else it was mildly, she said hopefully, diverting?  I don’t suppose with all that is going on the world today that there is anything wrong with a little light-hearted banter perhaps.  Maybe, just maybe, now that I have thrown out there my negativity toward a few of these things I will try harder to find their bright spots that I tend to like to write so much about it. Hm. I just realized that this diatribe may very well be to teach me a lesson. Well, that was a certainly unexpected development!  I guess I need to see the positive in the pines, and maybe make a pot out of red mud.  I think it should hold gumbo.