Another American Adventure: September 2012

Monday, September 3, 2012

birthday blues

Another birthday ...

Lots of love all around. John sent fruit flowers ...

Sandy brought over free trade flowers ...

Friends stopped by, Eric and Dawn came to visit, and John flew home for the weekend ...

Partied with Frank's famous hamburgers ...

... an exciting game of corn hole (the old guys won) ...

... and finished it off with Sandy's gluten free chocolate cake!

This blog would be remiss if I didn't at least mention Hurricane Isaac. It was not a big deal for me - no flooding or trees down - but 3 solid days of bands of wind and rain that swirled out from the center of the storm.

In some strange way, I enjoyed it, like I do most all "bad" weather. Jane came over for part of it and we sat it out. Some communities just west of here had major flooding, and all the property damage that brings with it.

"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.