Another American Adventure: 4th of July 2012

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

4th of July 2012

Didn't do too much today but mingle with the neighbors at the pool, have a hot dog for lunch (really an Italian sausage, but hot-dog-style), and walk Jube at the park. Maybe one of these days we'll have a proper 4th of July cookout with family and friends, fireworks and the like.

This is the pool this morning, all cleaned up and ready for the crowd ...

Me and Jube at the Knob Hill park ...

And a thistle in the early morning light ...

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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.