Off Again...Through the Windshield

My main kiln is definitely sick. We are taking it to Westpoint to the kiln hospital today. Then back to Starkville for a couple of meetings and then back home to catch up on some porcelain.

The folks in Brusly, Louisiana, may come tar and feather me very soon if I cannot finish their big order of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church ornaments. I don't blame them for being frustrated. I'm beyond frustrated with the production complications we have encountered of late.

We'll fire up Big Bertha today with the ornaments that we have been trying to fire for more than a week in the three malfunctioning kilns. I wonder if a big clap of lightning might have come in on the line during those storms earlier this month to cause this multiple-kiln damage.

Big Bertha takes a day to warm up, a day to fire and a day to cool down.  A bunch of little ornaments will be a very light load for her, but we HAVE no other choice at the moment.

I truly do enjoy making this ornament.  It is the most intricate and most detailed sculpture of a historic building I have made to date. The church is beautiful in real life, and the people there have been very gracious to us.

In this instant, mass production world, folks are not accustomed to the vagaries of handmade porcelain. All we can do in cases like this is "Work the Problem", keep working, keep pushing, work harder until the problems are solved.

I need to make a sign, "Work the Problem", to hang in the studio. That is one of our oft-repeated motivational mantras.

So, with Kiln Calamities hanging over our head yesterday as we traveled the two hours to and two hours from Rolling Fork, there was no time to slow down for pictures in a picturesque Mississippi Delta. 

I tried to capture some of the more interesting sights, presented here in another collection of Through The Windshield shots!

Photo 2: AME Church near Anguilla

Photo 3: Yazoo City showing the steep rise of the earth as one exits the Delta. The Mississippi River once cut through this part of the Delta, cutting deep into the soil. The River has moved over the millennia, leaving a deep deposit of silt that created the rich Delta farmland.

Photo 4: One of the modern machines that tills the soil or plants the seed or sprays the crop with protection.  I grew up on a working farm, and even I am not sure what this particular piece of equipment does.

Farm machinery changes design rapidly as crop production needs are met with complicated equipment.

This would probably be a Ferrari in price...which helps explain the high cost of production for farmers trying to work more efficiently as human labor becomes more difficult to hire and manage.

I never get impatient when driving behind a slow-moving piece of farm equipment. I know first hand how expensive it is to run, own and insure that equipment. The equipment has to come first before many of the expenses the rest of us would consider life's necessities. Farmers don't take their precious equipment out on the highway unless it is absolutely necessary.

Photo 5: An abandoned cotton gin in Anguilla (pronounced Angwilla).

I love old cotton gins.  I can remember going with my uncle to take the cotton to the gin and watching that giant equipment seemingly chew it up and spit out fluffy white clouds devoid of seed or plant material. It was magical to see.

Gordon can't understand why I want to photograph every abandoned cotton gin we see in any state. It is part of my disappearing South... the disappearing world of my childhood growing up on a real working farm.  Even a snatch-and-grab photo shot through a windshield of our van racing back to home and work is my effort to capture a moment in time to savor many years from now... like the abandoned farm buildings in...

Photo 6; Gone are the small farms of yesteryear. Without a reliable pool of labor from which to hire, small family farms have been forced to yield or submit to the large corporate farms that can afford to keep up with the fast-paced changes in agriculture. I try to capture in photograph as many of these abandoned farm buildings as possible. They are rare now, and they will soon be gone forever.