Family, Politics

The 13th Amendment

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70  bar steady 29.87 0mph SW dew-point 53  Summer, night and warm

                     Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Grocery shopping this afternoon.  There is nothing as grounding for me as grocery shopping.  It’s something I’ve done since college and I continue to enjoy it.  A domestic task.

Pulled the tulip’s dead leaves and stalks out this afternoon, too.  Some annual can go in their place now that the bulbs have stored energy for next year’s growth.

Watched a movie, Human Trafficking, with Donald Sutherland and Mia Sorvino.  The last scene grabbed me because Mia’s character gives a speech at the very end referencing the 13th amendment which outlaws slavery or involuntary servitude.  After 48 lectures on the Civil War that particular amendment stands out with neon lights. 

Kate had a late night at the office and I’m up later than I want to be, so I’m off to bed.  Taking the red car into Carlson’s in the morning for a head gasket and having the heads ground.  Pricy.  But important.

Garden, Weather +Climate

USAF Officers Attacked!

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81  bar falls 29.99 0mph S dew-point 59  Summer, sunny and hot

Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Each year in late June a convergence of heat, humidity, sun intensity and the growth of weeds combine to make gardening an early morning task for me.  The toddler trees, planted last year, had a considerable collection of weeds around them.  They had to go.

The machete makes short work of the nettles, the most troublesome of the weeds.  They grow tall and block the sun.  They grow from rhizomatous roots, so they send up new plants when the old ones are cut down.  Their main defense, formic acid, makes humans want to stay away from them, hence, the nettlesome person.

Virginia creeper and grapevines also sap a lot of food from the growing area of these young trees and must be pulled up like a zipper, taking out the length of the vine as well as its immediate spot of rooting.  Then there are the other weeds, names unknown to me, that gather in numbers.  Up they come by the handfull.

Last and hardest to remove are the tall grasses, the exact thing desired in the large open area, a sort of meadow, but harmful to the new trees.  Once they’ve become establish the trees will outcompete everything in their area, but these guys haven’t reached that growth stage.

One anecdote I loved from the Maxwell AFB experience involves nature’s own air force.  A single person walking along the east side of the cafeteria building often receives pecks and a dive bomber approach from a towhee who lives on the roof.  The idea of a bird attacking USAF officers is ironic.

General

Leaves Me In a Small Percentage Spot

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 These are excerpts from a Washington Post article on the PEW survey of religious beliefs.  The title is a link to the full article.

 More Than 90 Percent of Americans Believe in God, Study Finds

More than 90 percent of Americans — including one in five people who say they are atheists — believe in God or a universal power, and more than half pray at least once a day, according to results of a poll released today that takes an in-depth look at Americans’ religious beliefs.

The poll, by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, also found that nearly three-fourths of Americans believe in heaven as a place where people who have led good lives will be eternally rewarded. And almost 60 percent believe in hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without repenting are eternally punished, the poll found.

Majorities also believe that angels and demons are at work in the world and that miracles occur today as they did in ancient times.

Two-thirds of Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 22 percent of Mormons. Also, 77 percent of historically black churches are Democrats or lean Democratic, while only one-third of evangelical churches are Democrats or lean Democratic.

But most Americans — even many of the most religiously conservative — have a non-exclusive attitude toward other faiths. Seventy percent of those affiliated with a religion believe that many religions, not just their own, can lead to eternal salvation. Just about one-quarter believe there is only one true way to interpret their own religion’s teachings.

“Even though Americans tend to take religion quite seriously and are a highly religious people, there is a certain degree of openness and a lack dogmatism in their approach to faith and the teachings of their faith,” said Smith.

Family, Travel

Home

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63  bar rises 29.95  0mph NNE  dew-point 54  Summer, night and cool

                           Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Back home.  The corn is past knee high; the garlic has finished its growth; the tomato plants that began from heritage seeds have fruit; the beans have begun to bush out and the onions have sky rocketed.  A wonderful pastel copper/brown bearded iris has bloomed and the Siberian iris have thrown up dark blue flags all over the garden.  There is, of course, the occasional weed, but that’s Monday’s task.  Perhaps Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, too.

Driving as I did, a bit over 3,000 miles, movement dominates.  Even in Montgomery I drove to Maxwell four times, an equal number of times out for meals.  In the car.  Out of the car.  Stop for gas.  Now the movement slows down.  A walk in the garden.  Up and down stairs.  To the refrigerator. 

Here Kate welcomes me.  At the various motels slightly aware receptionists said how can i help you.  Here I get a hug, a meal, a smile.  An “I missed you.”  “Me, too.”  The dogs jump up and down, lean against my leg.  This is a place I know and where I am known.     

General
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There is a Summer Solstice posting now in the Great Wheel.

Leaving Texarkana this morning for the Ozarks, then Kanasas City or so.   See you in a few hours with trip news.

General, Travel

The Journey Flows North

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88 bar falls 4mph NNE  dew-point 75 (!)   Summer Solstice

                        Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

                            Texarkana, Arkansas

Ate lunch today in Monroe, Louisiana at the Piccadilly Cafeteria.  This is the cafeteria you may remember from earlier times.  It has a sturdy 3-part metal rail and about 50 feet of food set out in neat little rows.  The watermelon and the cucumber salad I retrieved first could have come from anywhere, but the shrimp etouffee?  Pure Louisiana.  Cornbread and greens filled out my tray (Formica with little flecks).  This cost $11.84.  Pay at the register on the way out.

Dana brought me some hot sauce and a second large glass of water.  The atmosphere managed to be both down-home and quietly elegant.  I ate until I should have stopped, then went right on past that point.  Mmmm.  Good.

Earlier a Park Ranger at the Vicksburg Military Park got me to participate in a mock firing of a confederate cannon.  I was the gunner.  The whole business is a dance that a good crew could repeat three times in a minute.  First, a long pole with a cotton damper is thrust into the cannon to put out sparks from the last firing that might prematurely set off the charge.  A second person pushes a charge into the cannon.  The first person tamps the charge home with a wooden tamper on the other end of the swab. 

A third person stabs the charge with a sharp metal rod, opening the powder.  Then, the gunner steps up (this is me) and sights along a bronze rule.  When satisfied with the placement, the gunner throws up his hands.  This signals the person with the metal rod to step up and place a leather covered thumb over the striking hole to create a vacuum.  Yet another person puts a firing pin in the next hole.  Filled with chemicals, it lights when he yanks a six foot long lanyard.  Boom.

On a drive through the park on the tour route I thought about why we commemorate these events.  Battles.  Clashes of men and arms.  There are many monuments.  They honor states, divisions, armies, batteries, generals, colonels, the fallen and the wounded.  They are made of marble, bronze, and other stones, some small, while others, like the Illinois and Wisconsin state monuments, are huge.  This is sacred architecture called into service when some path changing event occurs in the sweep of human history. 

It does its job.  The whole drive feels solemn, reverent.  Somewhere, back behind the trees, the dead still swab the cannons and lift their muskets. 

Stopped in Texarkana for the night.  I plan to make at least Kansas City by tomorrow night, then on home.  After the Vicksburg visit, my inner compass turned toward home.  Now, headed north,the journey flows toward my pole star.

Great Wheel, Travel

The Summer Solstice

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76  bar rising 30.00   6mph SSE  dew-point 66   Summer

                            Jacksonville, Mississippi

                                 Full Flower Moon

Beltane 2008 has passed into history.  Look under the Great Wheel tab this afternoon or evening for a Summer Solstice posting.

The plan today is to head west.   A bit of time at Vicksburg Battle Field (civil war), then on into Louisiana.  I’m thinking I’ll end up somewhere around Shrevesport, but we’ll see.

Now.  Breakfast at the Waffle House.

Travel, Weather +Climate

Swollen Muddy And Fast

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90  Sunny, hazy   Airquality alert in Nashville.  Suggested:  Limit trips.

The deep south is close.  Tennessee was one of the upper slave holding states at the beginning of the civil war and did not secede with the lower south states of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and tomorrow’s destination, Alabama.  

Murfeesboro, Tennessee has the Stones River Civil War Battlefield. 

Today’s journey was and is hot.  As the road pushed further into southern Illinois, there were signs for college majors in coal mining.  Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois University was in the vicinity.  These are also unglaciated limestone hills sitting atop layers of plant life from the Carboniferous, now black and concentrated into veins of coal.  Heat and coal and the underground, the cthonic realms go together.

The Ohio river, the mighty Ohio, flexed its muscles today, swollen muddy and fast.  It was over its banks and looked like it would get higher.  This is a big river and where it feeds into the Mississippi multiplies the river we call the Father of Waters. 

Kentucky, which never seceded and therefore allowed Union access to the south side of the Ohio, continues, in the main, the rolling limestone hills in southern Illinois.  

Paducah, home of the National Quilter’s Museum and the only place in the US creating nuclear fuel for electricity generation from out of date Russian weapons (literally swords into plowshare), is not far from the bridge over the Ohio.

At Russert’s, a woman named Keeum (Kim) took mah ordah.  Cahtfeesh.  She was real nice.  She gave me a to go order of iced tea.  Good food.  Boy, the folks must like it down here, it’s roly polyville.

Nashville had a freeway down, but there was a quick way around the bottle neck and I found it.  Cities do not draw me in as they once did.  I find myself more interested in the quiet, secluded setting and Murfeesboro, though a city, does not intrude too much out here near the Stones River Battlefield.  I’ll go there in the morning, then scoot on down to Prattville and the Plantation Bed and Breakfast.

I finished a 24 lecture course on the American Revolution in the 11 plus hours I drove yesterday.  A nice setup for the 48 lecture course I began today on the Civil War.  Fits right in with the trip.

Travel

Gravemarkers Under Water

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 Wrote a long post, but lost it in a connection snafu. 

Here’s the gist.  Highway closed at the Dells.  Tornados and high water.  Got off and drove south on blue highways through the unglaciated hils of southern wisconsin.

In Spring Green I saw a submerged cemetery, the gravemarkers only partially visible in some two feet of flood water.

Finally found Interstate 39 and headed south in Illinois.  Sun a blood orange as a it sank under a dark thundercloud.  It’s path below the horizon enflamed the sky.  It looked like a prairie fire in the rear view mirror.

Stopped in little Le Roy, Illinois and found this connection this AM.  Wrote post, hit publish and it went away into the cyber ether, never to return.  Oh, well.

Until tonight, I’m on the road.