In search of red dirt…

I’ve come to find the red dirt. The red dirt of Emmylou Harris’ Alabama, my grandmother’s childhood journal, and the characters in my manuscript. This beast of a manuscript I’ve begun to think of as my Opus.

I started Duet for Three Hands several years ago, after inspiration from letters and short stories written by my great-grandmother when she lived in Alabama in 1934. And in all that time I’ve wanted to visit the real places of her letters and my subsequent imagination. Today I set out on just such an adventure with not much more than my computer, a camera, and a few ghosts. I begin in Atlanta, then head up to northern Georgia and then down to Alabama, searching for details of place and inspiration of the divine sort, found in unexpected moments.

I’m an Oregon girl. I could describe every detail of the mountains and woods of southern Oregon, of every wildflower picked and lizard chased. I could tell you the difference in temperature of the river in June and the river in August. But this land I do not know. I know only what is in my blood, my DNA, and what has been passed down to me in story.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll find. All I know is that sometimes we have to do something out of pure instinct. And everything, for months, has pointed here, to this trip, now – the last missing link to my Opus.