Atlanta is HOT. Like a rotisserie. Hitting the century mark and even with the AC running full time, the house was still close to 80 degrees when I got home - now the AC *may* need a Freon boost and I'm working on that, but upstairs you could just feel the heat pressing down from the ceiling and the roof above it, so I think it's just a case of more heat than the AC can reasonably handle. It's occurred to me - on evenings when a dusk rain shower has cooled the house dramatically in minutes - that if I ever built a house, I might have some sort of sprinkler arrangement on the roof allowing me to imitate a shower and cool the roof down on a hot night with no rain in sight. Either that or live in a house where I could hose down the roof!
My final Fripp pictures are cool and green. Almost every time I leave Beaufort, unless the weather is unspeakable, I stop at the Old Sheldon Church between Gardens Corners and Yemassee. It's on a little shortcut between the two hamlets and a much prettier drive than the 4 lane alternative and Ms. Packratty would much rather drive a little slower on a 2-lane road that is canopied with live oaks than a 4-lane with billboards.
Like the Chapel of Ease on St. Helena, the Old Sheldon Church is a burned out shell, however the Old Sheldon Church is still an active church. One service (Episcopalian, of course), is held there a year and numerous weddings. T
he church was first built in 1745, burned by the British during the American Revolution and rebuilt in the early 19th century, only to be burned again during the Civil War. The second structure represented the first temple-form neoclassical structure in America, and began the Greek Revival style in the South. I find it a place of unearthly peace and beauty. The grounds are kept mowed and there is a well with hand a pump which used to water horses and now washes the hands of tourists. Fortunately it has suffered little from the sort of yahoo who must leave his spoor everywhere, although there are numerous places where creatures of this sort have carved their initials into the soft brick. Not a recent phenomenon at all, though - one such graffito is dated 1840 or 1849 ... A personal aside - the name Sheldon Church comes from the English family seat of the Bull family of the parish, of which my old friend Jennie Clarkson Olbrych is a descendant - and she herself was the first woman ordained to the priesthood in that same diocese. She is now vicar of St. James Santee (another pre-Revolutionary church) in McClellanville and the mother of 5 children. http://www.stjamesec.org/
he church was first built in 1745, burned by the British during the American Revolution and rebuilt in the early 19th century, only to be burned again during the Civil War. The second structure represented the first temple-form neoclassical structure in America, and began the Greek Revival style in the South. I find it a place of unearthly peace and beauty. The grounds are kept mowed and there is a well with hand a pump which used to water horses and now washes the hands of tourists. Fortunately it has suffered little from the sort of yahoo who must leave his spoor everywhere, although there are numerous places where creatures of this sort have carved their initials into the soft brick. Not a recent phenomenon at all, though - one such graffito is dated 1840 or 1849 ... A personal aside - the name Sheldon Church comes from the English family seat of the Bull family of the parish, of which my old friend Jennie Clarkson Olbrych is a descendant - and she herself was the first woman ordained to the priesthood in that same diocese. She is now vicar of St. James Santee (another pre-Revolutionary church) in McClellanville and the mother of 5 children. http://www.stjamesec.org/Between the climate and the lack of huge amounts of traffic, some of the flora is astonishing. Live oak trees have branches dripping to the ground and one such branch is supporting a colony of fungi, Spanish moss and ferns in an epiphytic explosion.
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