When Sarah Moore Chyrchel was growing up, Frog Bayou was her favorite place, and John Rule was her favorite person.
Rule and his wife, Margaret, chose the remote piece of land south of Winslow as a home base in 1963, when both of them were graduate studentsin the English department at the University of Arkansas.
Over the ensuing years, they traveled and taught, settling permanently at the place they called Frog Bayou in 1976. Sarah, their granddaughter, was born in 1974, so summers spent with the Rules are among her earliest memories.
Documenting the place and the people was also her earliest ambition as a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker.
“I knew from the beginning this was the story I wanted to tell,” Chyrchel says.
Her grandfather was game, but “he thought this was going to be more my story,” she says.
“He was going along for the ride, kind of humoring me. But I never planned to put myself into the film at all. I really wanted to tell their love story and John’s story now that he’s living there alone.”
The resulting documentary, “Witch Hazel Advent,” will be shown Saturday at Ozark Folkways in Winslow. Because witch hazel blooms in the coldest weather, the film’s title comes from one of Rule’s poems about “life in the dead of winter and the possibility of renewal,” Chyrchel says.
Rule was always a poet, but itwas his wife’s Alzheimer’s that led to his “creative coming out,” according to his granddaughter.
“When Grandmother hadto be moved into Fayetteville to a nursing home, he was in town so much more, caregiving, that he started to get involved with local writers’ groups,” she explains. “He claims he doesn’t like to socialize, but he really does need that interaction. It was an important impetus for him, and he has really been working on his writing full time since then.”
In his poetry and in the film, Rule speaks of his love for his wife, even though their romance wasn’t atraditional one.
The couple met when Rule returned to the University of Arkansas after service in the Korean War.
“He was in an English class with my grandmother,” Chyrchel relates. “He talks about her being the brightest mind in the department - everyone was impressed by her.
She had raised four children in southern Arkansas and then decided to get her education, so it was after the age of 40 that she got her undergraduate degree, then her master’s, then a Ph.D. in comparative literature.”
As Chyrchel tells the story, the two became friends, “but the age difference was so great they never considered romance.” Rule became part of the family, having meals with Margaret and her children, a friendship that lasted four or five years.
“The way he describes it, they took a walk one moonlit night, and everything changed,” his granddaughter says. “They fell head over heels in love witheach other.”
Chyrchel says she “didn’t mean for this to be a love story,” but her grandparents’ relationship became “one of the prominent themes in the film.”
“You can tell how much he adored her,” she says.
Their desire to spend their time together led them to Frog Bayou, Rule’s “first real home,” his granddaughter says, “and the one stable place in my life, too, for a long time.”
That hasn’t changed, but Chyrchel’s life has. She married, had a baby and finished her master’s degree. With this film completed - and its success at the Offshoot Film Festival, where it won best documentary and audience choice - “I don’t feel as much pressure” to decide what’s next, she says.
But she does hope “Witch Hazel Advent” will bring one more change to her grandfather’s life. She’d like to see his poetry published professionally.
“We’ve had some bites,” she says. “I’m hopeful.”
Whats Up, Pages 11 on 02/15/2013