Cedar Grove

We are shambling through the promised land.

One week is shorter than all the rest in the year, and its fleetingness makes it all the sweeter. The week I’m referencing doesn’t contain enough days to savor what it offers, and what it offers is the Atamasco lily.

Like so many wild things in our machine-ravaged, torn-apart world, the lily once was everywhere. Angus Gholson, great Florida botanist who I was lucky enough to call a friend, told me that when he was a boy growing up in Chattahoochee, Florida, these lilies were everywhere.

The word “disappeared” was often on the lips of the old greats, when I was out in nature with them.

The Cemetery

In the years my dad was ill with Alzheimer’s, on Sunday afternoons I would drive him and my mom around the countryside, looking at cemeteries. One day near English Eddy, Georgia we came upon a small family cemetery beside the highway. I stopped, because it was full of lilies.

I mean this to be a joyful post, but I have begun to weep as I write. We have lost so much. Look at those petals in the close-up of the flower, how they’re turning to crepe, starting to look bedraggled, and don’t we all feel like that sometimes? Angus is gone. So many of the great naturalists are gone. So much of the nature itself that they studied—on their knees—is gone.

And the photo below tears at my heart.

It says “Infant daughter of W.E. and E.E. Ansell.” The child lived exactly a month, a month in which she apparently was not given a name. She was a fleeting moment of beauty. Her parents said of her: “Twas but a flower too good for earth, Transplanted into heaven,” and they asked for a drooping lily to be carved into the little headstone. But the thing that leaves me gasping is the choir of glorious Atamascoes crowded up next to the little grave, leaning in.

The Lily

It’s Zephyranthes atamasco. I didn’t know until this morning but there are two other similar lilies endemic to the southeastern U.S., Z. simpsonii and Z. candida. They’re in the amaryllis family, which I also didn’t know. Leaves and bulbs are poisonous, and Wilbur and Marion Duncan in Wildflowers of the Eastern U.S. say that “consumption of less than 1% of animals’ body weight is fatal.” The blossoms change from pure white to pink as they age. Bruce Sorrie’s Field Guide to the Wildflowers of the Sandhills Region says that the word “atamasco” is a Native American word meaning “west” or “westerly,” and that it refers “to the spring blooming period when westerly winds predominate.”

The Church

About seven years ago I decided to restore an old church in my neighborhood. After we moved to this farm where I live, I would pass a worn-out but beautiful chapel on Cedar Haw Road. One day I stopped to look at it. Its doors and windows were gone. Inside, a sad piano lay on its back and four hand-made pews were overturned. The structure was sound and featured some nice architectural flourishes—a very high ceiling and a sweep of windows behind the pulpit. (The mystical photo above was taken by The Barn Hunter. You can see his photographs here.)

The chapel’s future was clear—it was going to fall into the ground, into the huge silence that constitutes much of our history.

When I was a child, I was beset by strange notions. One of them was that I wanted to live in a church, in the same way that a girl in a Walker Percy novel lived in a greenhouse. I knew even then that old churches moved me; in them I was flooded with peace and joy.

Plus my father had taught me to save things. He was always ready to save a broken-down car or a tree or a hurt animal, even something as insignificant as a toad. He was especially eager to save souls. My father saw beauty and value all around. To everybody else, he looked like a junkman, but to me he worked miracles.

In the 21^st century we pride ourselves on technological advancements. Even with all our technologies—computerized lifts, diamond blades, metal trusses—we build structures that are uglier and cheaper than ever. Banks fund new structures, even one as uncomely as a trailer home, yet refuse to fund old structures built using the luster of ornate marble, heart-pine, and stained glass. This morning I woke up thinking of ancient and sacred sites that the U.S. destroyed when we invaded Iraq in 2003, and how a cultural heritage can be the soul of a people. It’s a crying shame, all the history and architecture that we keep destroying.

Standing in Cedar Grove Church that first time, I knew it needed to be restored as a sanctuary for people to enjoy, as a landmark in a rapidly changing world, and as a memorial to the hard-working people of the Wiregrass Region.

The easiest thing to do was walk away. But good and worthwhile things are possible with effort, with determination, with labor, with money. If I didn’t try to save it, who would?

That was 2016. Now the church has a new roof, new hand-built window and handmade doors, new repairs to the floors and walls, new steps back and front. My hope is that Cedar Grove can be used as a gathering-place and that it will stand for another century plus as a shining example of beautiful and important things worth saving.

The Lily Again

Imagine my surprise recently when, on the shortest week of the year, I happened by Cedar Grove Church and saw white flowers blooming in the churchyard. Atamasco lilies, too, are restored.

The Money

I’ve raised money for Cedar Grove lots of ways—Indiegogo, a Micah Boney concert, letter-writing campaigns. Last fall a paddle with Wesley Hendley of Millpond Kayak raised $2,000. A lot of angels have emerged. In fact, I have a master list of donors with over 200 names on it. A few people, who will remain unnamed, have donated $1,000 or more. (Thank you.) One donor sends $500 checks once or twice a year, unprompted. These folks are the heroes in this story, because they go on faith that something can be done, because they believe in the power of redemption, and because they take a chance. They trust me with their hard-earned money.

Sonny Seals and George Hart, who wrote Historic Rural Churches of Georgia and produced the television series The Steeple, which features Cedar Grove in this episode, have been huge fans from the start.

The pandemic slowed me down, and during those years I couldn’t find a carpenter anyway. Almost $3,000 was sitting in the bank, waiting on somebody, and finally I found Mr. Javier Ramos. A couple of months ago we got moving again. Now Mr. Ramos has completely finished all the holes in the walls and floor, replacing rotten wood with reclaimed heart-pine we purchased from Thompson Lumber in Ailey, Georgia.

We’re getting very close to being done. The next step is repairing the siding, replacing rotten cypress. We’ll need to do some painting. We need a railing for the front steps, and we’ll need a blacksmith for that.

I am not going to ask you for money. You support me so much already, in so many many ways, and for that I am deeply grateful.

However, if you have more coin than you can possibly use in a good lifetime, if you are looking for heartwarming projects to support, if you need donations to claim on your taxes, if you want to help keep a church on its feet for another 100 years, then I invite you to be part of this vision, which is to return a little heart-pine heirloom in a faraway, out-of-the-way, depauperate place to a functional structure, built on solid ground, saved from certain doom.

I am not going to create any kind of official fundraising site. But I would gladly and lovingly accept your donation and put it to very good use. Checks should be made out to Cedar Grove Church, and they can be mailed to me at Janisse Ray, 895 Catherine T. Sanders Road, Reidsville, GA 30453.

Last week this small group from Moultrie, Georgia did a quick walkabout of the church. They were on a self-directed tour of historic rural churches in Georgia. That was part of George and Sonny’s dream, to have historic tourism help save the structures.

The Atamascoes were blooming.

Praying for Cabbage

I want to leave you with a couple more images. This is what the cabbage harvest looks like in southern Georgia. Sometimes I get to pick one up off the shoulder of the road.

The Fishing Pond

Here’s Cedar Haw Road at sunset, on the way through the 10,000 acres of prison farm between my farm and the church.

Thank you, wild blessings on you, and may your spring be full of beautiful surprises.