Mansion And Perennial Gardens at Cheekwood

I spent two hours of this foggy morning at the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Here are some photos of the mansion and the perennial borders.

Fall Scenes along the Little Harpeth River

See the remnants of the broken bridge in the second photo. There used to be a gate on this side of the river. There was an old farm on the other side. And I remember a day in the 80s when I walked up to this gate with my dogs and saw an electricity cut-off notice pinned to the gate. As Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote- "In this Great Republic of ours, someone is always at the drowning point". And that was the end of the farm. And then came the McMansions.

Devon Farm and Its Stone Walls

Antebellum Tennessee was Plantation country. Slave country. Its planters were wealthy, but their crops were hard to get to market. The wide Cumberland was of no use to men who needed to get their crops to New Orleans and its shipping, for the Cumberland flows north, seeking the Ohio River. The planters sent their wagons south, up over the Tennessee Valley Divide and down the Natchez Trace , aiming for the Father of Waters and the port of Natchez, Mississippi.


This is Devon Farm. When I came to Nashville in 1981 it was a stables. Horses grazed in the fields where the Little Harpeth meets the big Harpeth River. It was down on its luck, and eventually The Ensworth School rose in the fields. The old brick house is still there. So is the cemetery and a log cabin. And the stone walls as well. Built by slaves, flat rock upon flat rock, then angled like dominoes on top.

There are other slave-built stone walls in Nashville. There was a distinguished one that ran along Harding Road through Belle Meade. But it was damaged in Our Great Flood a year and a half ago and what replaced it was a reproduction.

7 Spice Chicken with Garlic and Grapes

I bought 7 Spice Powder in the Middle Eastern section at K and S Market. It contains Allspice, Black Pepper, Cloves, Cardamom, Cinnamon,Fennel, and Ginger. I thought it might work well with chicken drumsticks, and my hunch was good. I braised the drumsticks in chicken broth flavored with the spices, grapes , and peeled garlic cloves. I paired it with couscous. It is a very savory dish. And need I remind you that drumsticks are cheap.


This will serve two-


4-6 chicken drumsticks

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of 7 spice powder or more to taste. Be careful not to add too much or it will be too peppery.

3 cups of chicken broth


Sea salt- to sprinkle on chicken before browning

Olive oil for browning

6-8 peeled garlic cloves

2 cups of mixed green and red grapes




Dry the drumsticks, sprinkle with a little salt and brown lightly in a skillet with a few tablespoons of olive oil. Pour the broth into an ovenproof casserole, and mix in the spice powder. Add more to taste if you like. Then place the drumsticks, garlic, and grapes in the broth. Braise uncovered at 325 degrees for an hour. Then remove the chicken, garlic, and grapes and place on a serving plate.

If you wish to serve this with couscous, follow package directions to cook the couscous, and use the left over braising liquid as part of the liquid you add to the couscous. 1 cup of braising broth added to one cup of couscous will give you two cups of cooked couscous. If you do not have enough broth left, add water to make a cup.

The Annals of Nursing- The End of Junior Year- Psychiatric Nursing

I have been charmed by the ABC program "Pan Am", about young stewardesses in the Sixties who crave adventure and new possibilities rather than marriage. Though my classmates and I were not as svelte and elegant and chic as these young women (they were glamour girls and we were workhorses), we shared their excitement at what was awaiting us after graduation. The nursing magazines had pages of ads trying to lure us to California and Hawaii. Join the Air Force! Work only 2 hours from the beach and 4 hours from the mountains. Be a Lennox Hill nurse in exciting New York! And each day we saw our senior class geeting closer to the end and to the nervousness of taking their state boards.

I was awed by the seniors. Probably I was idealizing them. But they seemed so confident. So poised. A fair number were going to stay at Hitchcock, which sought a ready made workforce . The hospital paid tuition for anyone willing to stay for two years. But other girls had their eye on the Peace Corp and the hospitals in the sunny states far from New Hampshire. This is what we had in common with the stewardesses of Pan Am. Excitement about the years ahead. So many choices to make.

If memory serves, my Psych rotation was my last semester as a Junior. And I thought Psych might be my forte. The Mental Health Center was all bricks and modern glass and nuthatches out in the pines that surrounded it. We were supposed to interview our patients and write up our "Therapeutic Conversations" with them. Back then if one was mentally ill, it was considered your mother's fault. She twisted you. Now we believe it is seratonin's fault, and that you need drugs and not psychotherapy.

There was one notorious inmate at the center. She was not visiting. She was living there.Her husband was a surgeon, and he had installed his insane wife in Hanover after she did hard time at McLean. There were rumors she tried to kill one of her doctors there. She was tall, and blank, and so slow and hesitant in her movements that she was zombie-like. We were afraid of her, though I think all the life had leached out of her from years of evil drugs such as Thorazine and Stelazine. No student took her as their patient.

And after a few weeks, unsupervised by an instructor I cannot even remember, we began to huddle together in the sitting rooms, and our conversations with our patients, submitted to our teacher were pure fiction that we enjoyed making up. By this time I knew psych was not for me . I decided this after sitting in a big conference room with the shrinks and nurses while the patients paraded in to be questioned for a few minutes. A working class bottle blonde in old jeans and a yellow sweatshirt came in. She was uneducated and tongue tied -and almost toothless. What was the shrink asking her? She did not know. As she left the room and the door had yet to close ,people started to snicker. I know she heard it, but because she was not Hanover she was contemptible. This was ugly. I will always remember it. And I knew Mental Health was not for me.

And then it was over. I stayed in town and I worked as a nursing tech. And I worked as a ward clerk at the Dartmouth Infirmary. I worked all summer, and in September I became a senior.

Thus ends the annals of my junior year.

A 110 Year Old Book- "Fowls of the Air" by William Long

I have owned this book since I was eight years old. And I have carried it with me from place to place for over 50 years. It is not unspoiled, for I colored some of the pictures. But it brings back the days of my childhood. I grew up a free child, free to wander the woods and swamps. To watch birds, and catch polliwogs. My mother did not fear for me even after I wandered away at the age of three, and the police found me at a house up the street. People worried about nuclear war back then. They did not see child molesters behind every bush. And parents found books such as William Long's "Fowls of the Air" in old book stores and gave them to their children so the children could learn bird lore and the old Indian names. Ch'geegee-lokh-sis was the chickadee. Hukweem, the Night Voice, was the Common Loon. And the book is full of beautiful black and white illustrations. A lone man in a canoe on a misty northern lake startles the loon. A Snowy Owl on an icy salt creek. Do children read books like this anymore? Or is their idea of the natural world the place they see in a Disney animation? How sad for us. How sad for them.

A Squirrel's Paradise

Nuts beyond number fall each autumn in Middle Tennessee. This photo is of the acorn of the Burr Oak, which lives here along the Harpeth River in the bottom lands. But we also have walnuts, pig nut hickories and mockernuts. When the bird songs grow distant and plaintive in October, acorns land among the fallen, dry leaves with a new sound of the season. And the squirrels pursue them, and the woods crackle and rustle with the sound of industry. By spring the hulls of the mockernut will litter the park foot trails. These nuts feed turkeys and deer and blue jays as well as the squirrels.

Sadly, the one nut tree that would have me out foraging ,does not grow this far east in Tennessee. I have seen the pecan tree in the woods around Reelfoot Lake, but never here. Why not? That is a mystery, along with the absence of the bald cypress, which graces low places along the Tennessee River- not that far to the west of Nashville. Oh, the vagaries of Nature-