After designing so many websites in the past few years it was starting to seem rather constricted here on WP.com.  So I’ve decided to move on to the land of self hosted options. You can find me at raywoodruffmusic.com. This site will stay up as an ever more out of date archive.  

It’s a dangerous blooming – early and sprightly, over excited by the warming of February.  An invitation to a cull of those most rambunctious and least hardy by a cruel, late frost. Just like last year. But it can’t be changed. Be it natural or man made – an unusual, large scale warming trend or … Continue reading Blooming

It is over ninety degrees outside, the sun blazing with a relentless burn heavy on the fruit bushes and quickly reddening the people who dare to brave it. It seems a strange time to be thinking about a freeze. But I am. Over the past 8 years here at The Croft I have photographed and … Continue reading Undercurrents of the Freeze

So in a town that eats and breathes history, historic preservation is always going to be a very heated topic.  It probably seems odd to other towns, but it’s true.  What is, and what is not, worthy or preservation will be talked about here more than in a good many places in this world.  It … Continue reading The Drive (thru) to Preservation

So, I suppose we are at about a foot of snow now.  Drifting higher and lower, little hills, little waves, solid but never stagnant in the wind.  Not as bad as it could be, not as twisted and blown.  We are on the lee of the hill, remarkably protected from the gusts I just felt on my … Continue reading Cut Off

For years I’ve noticed a pattern in where and how I find inspiration. I write from memory. I have to leave a place to really begin to write about it. I would make a terrible or, at least, remarkably obsolete journalist. I might pull little bits from the present here and there – heavy rains … Continue reading The Place of Memory

Well, there is still some time yet, I suppose. Summer hasn’t gone completely. Not entirely. It still lingers in the heat and heavy air of mid-day. But, out at night hunting comet remnants as they leave their lair just behind our large, old and currently exfoliating crepe myrtle to trace their light trails across the … Continue reading Crouching Under Summer

For about ten years now I have had a love/hate relationship with the acoustic guitar. I love the immediacy, the uninhibited physical response to making sound with it. It’s a big, wood box with strings attached to it and, every time it becomes more than that, every time it creates music, it vibrates – it … Continue reading The Tools and the Job

We have been cleaning. Spring is here, though she came late this year. The grass flowers are up and the land is starting to turn a rich green, if a green speckled by thousands of white and purple flowers. We have spent the past few weeks gleefully documenting each new bud burst photographically on Urban … Continue reading Cleaning

The Bard. Singer of heroes. A collector of culture. Teller of tales. The oral reciter of lives and history. I don’t much care for the word, myself. Bard is a little too rarefied, a little to bathed in mist and twilight. It is a word drowned in its own myth. So storyteller, then. For the … Continue reading The Bard of the Burg