We make adjustments to our thoughts and lives without conscious oversight to the process. Here in the southern mountains there is an elastic quality to time, that seems to stretch more readily into the past and gives the feeling of life passing like a warm summer day if forced towards the future. It can contain the children in Winslow Homer's "Crack the Whip" and Eric Clapton playing "Crossroads" easily at once. The building in this painting stands near the railroad tracks and in grime, with the soot of over a century. On the town's side it displays an old "Bull Durham" roll your own tobacco advertisement fading into the brick work like a dying veteran's youthful war tattoo. Its bricks were made here from native clay dug only 300 yards away and fired on that site, On the railroad side it advertises "Coke Cola everywhere 5 cents" and "Glike's Sporting Goods" neither of which are true or relevant anymore and are like the promises of politicians in this age that it has been drug into. In truth, the ground floor stores stock for a nearby carpet company behind blackened windows. On the upper floors pigeons softly coo amid the sound of dripping water and a fetid poultry smell abounds. The stair case is now a risky journey to nothing of consequence; a coy promotion without pay off. Yet we remain heirs to what we were left at horrible cost; and our thoughts are unbidden, like the weather. Let us be good stewards and honest. "Suicide is not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valor to condemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live...." Sir Thomas Browne mixed water-media on paper