Another American Adventure: this is how I'm starting to feel about this blog ...

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

this is how I'm starting to feel about this blog ...

2 comments:

AJuly 19, 2010 at 10:42 PM
Hey there Beth. I've spent some time and gotten caught up on your PA adventures. :) This blog is definitely better than pointless incessant barking (the cartoon made me smile), but I think I may understand what you mean....
Peace
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beth cioffolettiJuly 21, 2010 at 11:14 AM
Feel free to steal it, A, and use as your own. I stole it from Marc ...
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.