Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane

Arts & Photography

synopsis

Synopsis

We are the makers of subcultures. Of all our communities, where are we the happiest? As an award-winning Southern journalist, Dianne Poston Owens has learned a thing or two about people and community – that people want to know their lives matter, their pets won’t rat them out, and that they are not alone. An observer and recorder of people, places and things, she understands that every day is a new day, and each day is played out in tandem and in gathering. Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane is a collection of short essays intended to be read for inspiration and encouragement. Owens poses questions and offers photographs that allow readers the opportunity to reflect and pause before forging ahead. Written with charming wit, Southern twang and a deepness that is drawn out by nature, Owens explores what we see, say, and choose, and how we connect to the people we interact with in the “communities” in which we gather.

bio

Author Biography

Dianne Poston Owens is a former newspaper reporter, columnist and editor, serving rural communities in South Carolina for more than 30 years. Though she wandered from her roots, she now lives in the same neck of the woods that her family has lived and died on for more than 250 years ... Along with two goats, at least four chickens, two cats and whatever else lives in the woods!

website

Author Insight

Be selective

We can fill up our lives, and holidays, with events, people and things that are not necessary and really won't matter to our futures. Being selective, some say living with purpose, helps us weed out the unnecessary. I'm convinced if we sift away something of import, it will come back to us. Life is like that. We quibble too long and too much over the unnecessary. When you're making memories, and syrup, or cookies this holiday season, whatever your traditions, make them with joy, pride and the understanding that being selective is necessary. Be kind, though ... being selective is not permission to be mean, in any way, shape or form. It is, however, permission to make a better "syrup." Like this week's excerpt from my essay "Making Syrup" in "Gathering, Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane," says, some things ought not to go into the syrup.

Book Excerpt

Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane

I once met this guy who felt it was important to keep doing what he had seen his wife’s grandparents do, make syrup from cane. Sugarcane, grown on his property and on others, was loaded by hand onto a wooden wagon and pulled by a nearly modern tractor to the mill house.

The cane was placed into one end of a hand-cranked mill, and squeezed until the juice flowed out into a fifty-gallon barrel. There is a ten-gallon to one-gallon ration of cane juice to syrup, the farmer said. The juice is processed, through boiling and cooking, and reduced to its essence.

The essence of the cane grown in the field is syrup. From a solid to a liquid.

While the cane is cooking, it is skimmed. “There’s a lot of skimming,” he said. Some things ought not to go into the syrup.

Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane

Buy

	Amazon
	Barnes&Noble
	GooglePlay
	Apple Books
	IndieBound
	Kobo

Share
Follow Unfollow
Comment
x
Comment on this Bubble

Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.

Dianne Poston Owens

Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane

Synopsis

Author Biography

Author Insight

Be selective

Book Excerpt

Gathering: Homespun Essays from Beech Tree Lane

Comment on this Bubble