Cabin Beside Ancient Oak Tree

This was the farm home David Lipscomb built for himself and his wife Margaret, before he built Avalon. The log cabin was moved from its original site to the place that it now occupies near an ancient oak tree beside Avalon, on the acreage which became the campus of Lipscomb University.

Movies and Poetry

This morning, because the house was so cold when I got up, I set the thermostat higher, to 75 degrees, got back in bed, and watched what was currently running on the Turner Classic Movies channel: "Abe Lincoln in Illinois." As I watched the film, I began reflecting on the current decade as compared to the 1850s. And this made me remember a poem that I wrote in 1997, after I had read copies of a series of letters written by my Texas ancestors during those trying times. Here it is:

JUXTAPOSITIONS

Rebecca, contemporary of Mozart,
Mary, of Keats and of Schubert,
Lizzie, of Whitman:
They sent family letters across a wilderness.
Lizzie was endlessly carding and spinning and weaving,
And writing to Brother George about it,
Who camped in sight of Galveston
And the Union blockade.
She sent him accounts of corn crop failures
And of army deserters possibly hanged or shot in the thicket;
Sent him handmade socks,
Sent him word-tableaus of Lizzie picking dewberries,
Under a north wind, near the Texas prairie’s blue sky.

By Mary Eunice Roberts Bull
April 13, 1997