tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16371242121603730712024-03-12T20:44:33.058-04:00Breaking Up With New YorkSaying Good-bye to the Biggest, Baddest City in the WorldDorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-35311105678718248022020-05-10T21:40:00.006-04:002020-05-10T21:42:43.052-04:00Appendix 2: Apocalypse Diner<div>
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No one has ever Yelped about this place and it is almost invisible on the web. Indeed, if it weren't for a few inspection violations (none too serious-looking), I would think we had dreamed the whole thing: a little greek diner with psychological problems and decent food in Virginia Beach.</div>
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It was May 21, 2011, according to some the day the Rapture was to happen. We were wandering around Atlantic Avenue looking for some humble fare. My husband and I are not attracted by the usual touristy all-you-can-eat joints and somehow we stumbled into this tiny Greek diner with decor circa 1962 located off a parking lot pertaining to a 1 star motel on Atlantic Avenue. What possessed us?</div>
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We were seated by an anxious, eager to please waitress who seemed as self-conscious as we were that there was no one else there. Sometimes a kind of tractor beam keeps you in a place that you would otherwise just walk right out of, like empty restaurants and poorly-attended plays. Maybe we stayed out of pity. Or maybe we stayed because it was 5:30 and, according to the news and the signs on Rapture vans out on the avenue, we were scheduled for the end of the world at 6:00.</div>
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We asked for sweet tea and the waitress said they had none. And then almost as quickly she got a determined look on her face and said, "No, I'll FIND you some! Yes, I will!" We were afraid for her, running around town looking for sweet tea this close to the Rapture. But she said she'd get some. Somewhere. She promised.</div>
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I ordered a greek vegetable salad, no lettuce, no green peppers, and some tzatziki, The tzatziki was creamy and good, and it came with some lovely hot flatbreads like little fried pancakes. When I finished the bread, another plate was quickly brought without me having to ask. The salad was fantastic, featuring a lot of cubes of the most delicious tomato I have eaten since childhood and some really tasty feta cheese.</div>
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My husband received three, thin-cut pork chops, a piping hot side of french fries, and a pile of salad as fresh as mine.</div>
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The place was an amazing people-watching experience, kind of like being in the Diner at the End of the Universe. The decor was unconsciously retro. Various local characters starting walking in and out like actors in a play: a skinny man sang a verse of a song I didn't recognize, laughed at himself, and left. An older woman customer sat sipping a mixed drink at the counter, and when another customer wandered in looking lost, she got up and seated him and gave him a menu because our waitress (the only waitress) happened to be busy. Perhaps she was still hunting around for some other hard-to-find beverages.</div>
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We ordered the pie.<br />
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I figured this was a place local weirdos went to hide from the tourists. I was sure it would disappear the second we walked out of it. I think we were overcharged. But at 28 bucks for two we couldn't complain. After all, 6 o'clock passed and we were still alive.<br />
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-30611077478868682332020-05-10T21:08:00.002-04:002020-05-10T21:43:36.465-04:00 Appendix 1: I Pledge Allegiance to the Power of Story (God Save America) <h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
<i>I wrote this post on January 20, 2017, the day Donald. J. Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. </i></h3>
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I dread high noon today when the president-elect will be sworn in. I do not pledge allegiance to this flag waved by the cackling clowns of hate,
and bought by the corporate, global monopoly. It is not the flag I took it to be. The Pledge of Allegiance is a rite forced on schoolchildren by fanatics in the 1950s, anyway. This is not one nation, nor do I
believe in God. We are, it seems, not only divisible, but also divided,
and now I see we always have been.<br />
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There has never been liberty or justice for all.<br />
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Instead, I pledge allegiance to the fresh, brine air off the Neuse River here at The Lighthouse in Milestone, NC. I pledge allegiance to my dogs because they pledge allegiance to me. I pledge allegiance to my husband, to my sister, to my mother, and to all those who are or might become, my friends. I pledge allegiance also to the oppressed, to the
poor, to the tortured, and to the unjustly jailed. I pledge allegiance to the third of an acre that a lawyer said I own, and to the little,
old, hand-built house that sits upon it. I pledge allegiance to the spirits of the now dead, black men and women who built my house, who lived, laughed, cried, endured, and died in it. I pledge allegiance to their descendants. To my neighbors. To my town. I pledge allegiance to this beautiful earth, and all its passengers: vegetable, mineral,
insect, and animal. <br />
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If I am to pledge allegiance to anything abstract, it will be to love,
compassion, and respect, not to the nationalism of a military-industrial
complex that sucks its dark power from misogyny, racism, and the
exploitation of the vulnerable, the immigrant, the groaning Earth, the
corporate slave, the indebted, and the educationally-impoverished.<br />
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Further, I pledge allegiance to the resistance: I will resist against
any person, idea, government, or act that is born out of greed, hate,
deception, and the raw desire for economic and political power. Upon
this inauguration day, I declare that "resist" is the first word I will
say when I awake, and it is the last word I will say when I go to sleep
at night.<br />
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Why have we Americans failed to learn the lessons of every childhood
fairytale? With all the heroes and heroines displayed to us as examples,
in story, why did we choose as president a Goofus and not a Gallant?
Why Lex Luther, and not Superman? Haven't legends, movies, comic books,
fairy tales, King Arthur, and the Bible given us enough of an education about what the Bad Guy looks like for us to make a wiser choice?<br />
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The corporate electronic propaganda pulse, flying directly out of the omnipresent and omniscient screen they've trained us to transport everywhere with us in your pockets, has inundated our minds with the gross commercial messages that we take to be our own thoughts. We feel lost without the screen, don't we? It flashes into our eyes and works to undo the legacy of human truths that we received from thousands of years of story. For us, the cyclops, not Odysseus. For us Voldemort,
not Harry Potter. Not Red Riding Hood, but for us, the wolf this time.<br />
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As a reader, as a writer, as a scholar, and as a literary translator, I
call upon the power of story to remind my nation of what is good, what is brave, and what it is that makes a real hero. We need heroes now. May
America soon remember to tell itself good, true stories, and may we remember that the hero's journey is a perilous one, fraught with danger,
obstacles, and despair. But along the way, if we look, there will be
helpers. We must look for them. <br />
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May my fellow Americans, especially those who are committed to resist, dedicate themselves to use the power of words only for good. And may we
all find our way back home.
Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-36821410116688097162017-01-02T16:13:00.002-05:002017-01-02T17:24:59.778-05:00A walk ends, a journey begins.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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By now, Dog and I know most of the forest paths around here. Early Saturday morning, we decided to walk the distance down the hill, past the old mill, under the train trestle, and down to where the river cuts a gash through the forest, and a friendly path wends its way across wooden bridges and all the way to downtown to where the farmers' market is on weekends.<br />
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On our way, we found a fairy castle. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stick work by <a href="http://www.hillsboroughartscouncil.org/about-patrick-dougherty">Patrick Dougherty</a></td></tr>
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We strolled in through the front door, and entered another dimension. I felt as if the outside world were melting away, and the air itself growing denser and syrupy, the way it used to in dreams when I discovered I had a talent for flying. I checked myself for anxiety, but couldn't detect any. I only felt very curious. What would happen next? There was a slight humming in my ears. Dog was curious, too, and noted to me that lots of birds were nesting in the sticks. In fact, there were thousands of them within the walls of the castle, all chattering to each other, excitedly doing their bird business. Their combined voices sounded like a symphonic orchestra tuning up.</div>
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Dog and I looked out of each and every window, including the oculus, the one pointing towards the sky. We were peering hard as if expecting something to turn up: a giant, a troll, a unicorn, Don Quixote. Maybe God? But there was only a pleasant, happy, all-aloneness everywhere.</div>
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Suddenly, the birds went quiet, and there was a tap, tap, tap, like a conductor's baton on a podium. Then, we felt a rushing, pelvis-down-through-your-feet sensation, like when an elevator goes up too quickly. Dog stood bold and four-square, his ears going back against his head, while I wobbled slightly on my own two, thin pegs. The soft, leaf-strewn floor seemed to remain immobile beneath our feet, but we saw that the tops of the trees were passing slowly by the windows, and dropping away from view. The wind was whistling through the tiny cracks in the walls, and we heard the dry, bony racket of thousands of tiny wings flapping for all they were worth.</div>
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Soon, there was nothing but sky. The fairy castle was floating now, and the birds had gone back to their previous conversations. When you're actually inside the sky, it doesn't look blue at all, you know: it just looks as clear and fresh as cold glass of water.</div>
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Dog and I no longer need to go to market. We have a new direction. The walk we were on is over. A new journey has begun.</div>
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<br />Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-39545364750323412362015-12-20T19:53:00.002-05:002016-01-28T13:47:57.854-05:00Smoothing white paint on the uneven baseboards<span aria-live="polite" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; outline: none; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; width: auto; word-spacing: 0px;" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></span></span>
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Smoothing white paint on the uneven baseboards of the silent old house this afternoon, I crouch low to the freshly-installed floor, knees aching with this work, and I can smell the fragrance of the fresh cuts in the wood planks we've just installed. Ninety-two years this mill worker's cottage has been here, sheltering the same family generation after generation and witnessing their births, death<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">s, Christmases, lovemakings, sorrows, comings, goings. Now we are here, strangers to its walls. We want to be friends. This renovation is mostly preservation, a healing of some wounds, and we run our hands over all its home-made surfaces, marveling at the house's refusal to achieve a real right angle anywhere. Ancestors not mine observe me. I beg their pardon when I have to remove a handmade cupboard to get the 'fridge in, I apologize under my breath as I carefully store the pieces of it in the shed. Painted wood, sage green. There are three chimneys in the house's thousand square feet, one now entombed in the center of the house, one waiting to become part of a kitchen exhaust system, and one big old stone hearth still wondering if we are going to unstop its mouth or not. When we made space for the washer dryer in a closet, a letter and a photograph fluttered from the ceiling where they had lain quietly for sixty-two years. The walls are ready to tell story.</span></div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-49876634883562640202015-05-02T11:09:00.001-04:002015-05-02T22:10:25.470-04:00Adapt or Die<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">The garden is a
savage place. Here in the Piedmont it's spring. But such a strange
spring it is that even in mid-April we were running outside at dusk, arms laden with any sheets not covering mattresses to shield the tender plants against
the freeze. In times of global warming, my daily battle in the garden is how I, middle-aged now, face my fear of the future.</span></span></div>
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<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XZKrwa-ecV8/VUTpMGFkyPI/AAAAAAAACq4/WflMQsZPhIs/s1600/IMG_20150226_091424.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XZKrwa-ecV8/VUTpMGFkyPI/AAAAAAAACq4/WflMQsZPhIs/s320/IMG_20150226_091424.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The morning
is bright but cold. As I pull the soaked and dirty sheets off the vegetable garden,
I see that all the tender sprouts have survived. Indeed, the crisp
but moist air seems to have given an added brilliance to the green
buds, the just-opened azalea blossoms, and the fleshy white flowers
of the dogwood. The tomato seedlings appear to have doubled in size.
But with radical global temperature and weather shifts, the battle
for survival and species perpetuation becomes more pitched, more
ferocious. Who knows if we'll be so lucky next April? </span></span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Now in
mid-life, I don't want to be a fatalist. I want to have hope, to
believe. Investing in my garden is my most material expression of
hope. But, as my horticultural zone continues a slow creep into the lower and
colder numbers, I find that I am battening down the hatches, thinking
about retraction into a tinier home, a smaller garden. As I watch the
tremulous job market totter and the tech and real estate bubbles
inflate, I look for signs and wonders in May hail.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: medium;">What will live
will live, I say to myself. What will die will die. That goes for
everything and everyone, trees and people alike. This is the way of
nature, says my husband. Let it be. But human beings have so significantly altered the way of
nature that these bromides are of little comfort to me. These
transitional times seem to signal a scarcer and less comfortable
future for all of us, and they call for practical decision-making. I
try to not let my mind wander in circular hypotheticals like, "What
if the plants cannot adapt to the reality of global warming fast
enough?" Or, "What if the bees die off and pollination
doesn't happen this year?" Or, "What if my husband dies all
of a sudden, like the people in that German plane?" What if?
What would I do? What would happen? </span></span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Should continue
to support the unsupportable with bedsheets?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-size: medium;">Disaster
thinking comes naturally to me. As the gifted younger child of a brilliant but moody mother, I developed a razor-sharp radar system to protect me
against the dramatic emotional ground shifts in my household. I
developed an uncanny sensitivity to the needs of others and learned
to be like bamboo, bending in the wind. Know what the big animal
needs you to say and do and comply in order to avoid pain. Survival in the plant kingdom or animal kingdom comes
down to the same commandment: adapt or die. </span></span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Will the skills
I learned as a child help or hinder me to adapt to global economic
and ecological change? Will my garden adapt with me?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Adaptation causes
its own problems. The self-obliterating empathy I developed in order
to survive my childhood developed into a disconnect between me and my
real feelings that endured well into adulthood. It took working with
a therapist for six years to untangle that mess. The good doctor and
I penetrated the emotional labyrinth in which little
me became lost so many years ago, and together we dragged that little
girl out into the light of the present day, scarred but
functioning. The process was like carefully
unravelling a lovely sweater and then trying to knit it back together again with the same wool: evidence of the destruction remains and the sweater never looks like
new again –- but you can wear it. Innocence is not recoverable, and
you have to be content with that damaged but serviceable sweater that
is your actual life. Everyone does it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My garden needs
a therapist, too, and I have tried my best to fulfill that role.
Beset by an increasingly dense human population here in the Piedmont, the introduction of invasive plant species, and rapid weather and
temperature shifts, my garden was in a bad state when we bought this
gracious home on its acre of abused soil. The first
two years were mostly occupied with killing invaders and making dirt. </span></span>
</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The first day I
went out to survey my domain after we bought this house, the trees seemed to call
to me weakly for help. So I began by ripping english ivy off the bark of a single loblolly pine with my fingernails. “Get help,” my husband said weeks
later as he surveyed the bruises, scratches, mosquito bites and
the third onset of poison ivy rash that covered half my body. I hired
help. And with the might and persistence of six people, including a
remarkable man with a machete named Carlos who was later deported
back to Mexico for his own inability to adapt to the ways of American
women and police, we reclaimed our patch of forest. </span></span>
</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">We massacred
wisteria, bamboo, English ivy and other invasive species that had colonized
the woods with their stoloniferous highways, strangled
trees and bushes, and had created habitat for voracious rats, voles,
snakes and mosquitos. We kept most of our land's organic waste,
churning it up into mulch instead of putting it out on the corner to
be carted away by the city. The piles of leaves and sticks weren't
pretty, but then therapy rarely is. A couple of winters and a lawn
mower ground the waste down in fine mulch which I deposited into the
stripes of clay and sand as I planted native bushes and flowers,
cooking up a topsoil that could support life again. Tree bark is scarred, a
holly tree trunk still seems to have scoliosis, and a 100-year-old
pine was too far gone to save and had to be cut down. But we've
basically restored our little bit of Piedmont woodland. I want it to
survive after me. But will it?</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Human beings do speedy damage to the land that takes years of labor and treasure to
fix. Humans brought non-native invasive plants and put them into this
garden. Humans seek to frack the gas out of the very ground under our
feet without putting anything good back. Humans fight light surface
transit in favor of the almighty automobile. And as I continue to
spray vinegar and salt on the wilting survivors of the wisteria colony,
I am sometimes chased indoors by the percussive onslaught of damaging hail
and Biblical-level flash floods. In light of the bigger picture, my forest
restoration project is like bailing the Titanic with a tea spoon.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">But I still do it. Often working silently and alone outside, I get into my "zone" and experience the meditative feeling that gardening is for me. I generate with my hard, dirty labor the
quiet prayer of hope that my garden is. Someday,
someone else will live in this gracious house and, I hope, will care
as much for this tiny patch of forest and garden as I do now. Leaving
the land in good health is my love letter to unknown people living in
an unknown and unknowable future. Working the land, I battle my anxiety about
what may come, and leave my mark. Service to the soil is how I repent for the sins of my species, and help the garden adapt to conditions that are both unjust and unnatural. It is how I have hope.</span></span></div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-6505526383192917352015-04-08T12:09:00.000-04:002015-04-08T12:09:59.559-04:00Ordinary Miracles<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9IzaMSyGPQc/VSVSBD5JKpI/AAAAAAAACl4/HQlJbA5o4NE/s1600/IMG_20150407_153448.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9IzaMSyGPQc/VSVSBD5JKpI/AAAAAAAACl4/HQlJbA5o4NE/s1600/IMG_20150407_153448.jpg" height="312" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hemerocallis (Day Lily) root</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">In the Fall, I dug them all out to make room for the herbaceous peonies: nearly 200 hemerocallis. It was a weekend's work to unearth them, split them, knock off the dirt, dry them and pack them in brown paper. I hid them as best I could in my garden shed from the gnawing mice, hoping they wouldn't freeze out there in winter, hoping they wouldn't rot. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">On Saturday I spent the afternoon digging a new bed</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">, peeling back sod and weeds to expose sandy soil that needed mulch and manure to make it just okay. Then I held my breath and dared to look in the shed. They emerged from the brown paper wrinkled as mummies having consumed their tuberous roots as sustenance these many months. And a miracle: a ghostly sprout is there. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Plants don't bother with hope or fear. They just do, surviving until there's nothing left to live on. Now tucked safely in my newly dug bed, they will fatten on water and manure. They'll go on as if nothing had happened, ordinary miracles.</span>Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-21279715005825731912015-02-18T09:49:00.000-05:002015-02-18T12:08:49.236-05:00Her Old Pots and Pans<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wNy9v6rvPpM/VOSlRKEdwEI/AAAAAAAACb8/pSYORF_ahHI/s1600/IMG_20150218_091349.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wNy9v6rvPpM/VOSlRKEdwEI/AAAAAAAACb8/pSYORF_ahHI/s1600/IMG_20150218_091349.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">We had only come for the headboards, two depression-era wooden slabs, simply-made and painted butter-yellow with real <i>linkia</i> starfish glued to the corners. Advertised for $70, when we got to Fishes and Loaves thrift store in Beaufort, NC by a miracle they were now $50. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">Then I saw a box of 6 vintage Revere Ware pots and pans, all lids present and accounted for, jumbled into a worn cardboard box. The black marker letters read "$35. Firm." </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">"Okay," I said, "I'll take them. But I don't want </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">the Farber Ware pot. I'll pay the same."</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">"You don't want the BIG pot?" said the fisher-wife turned thrift store keeper, her rugged, salt-creased Down East face showing concern. "Then it's $20." We paid $30. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><br /></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">When I got them home, I started polishing and cleaning, massaging the copper bottoms with liquid metal cleaner. The small pots were dirtier, harder used. By the time the women are old, they are cooking for one and they only use the smallest pots. I thought about the owner of these pots and pans, now mine for a song because their owner is gone. I thought of my own mother and her own prized Revere Ware.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><br /></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;">I scrubbed hard to make the copper and steel shine like new.<span id="goog_697490614"></span><span id="goog_697490615"></span></span>Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-86354222495966139712014-08-22T22:44:00.000-04:002014-08-22T23:40:59.666-04:00Dispatch: Down-east farm stand stand-offThe fat man's afraid someone's taking his food away, and it might be me.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
It's a hot August Friday afternoon in down-east North Carolina farm country. The fat man and I arrive at the farm stand at the exact same moment. We are the only customers. He's 400 pounds if he's an ounce. His tender white skin has been sunburned, and there's neat lines where white skin leaves off and skin the color of a country ham begins. A huge red T-shirt tightly encases his massive torso.<br />
<br />
The fat man wants tomatoes. He moves directly to the heirlooms, corralling the dun-colored granny who runs the farm stand.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m7-FQo1e0AI/U_gM72hqLzI/AAAAAAAACCM/JWi05QpR0fU/s1600/IMG_20140822_164746.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m7-FQo1e0AI/U_gM72hqLzI/AAAAAAAACCM/JWi05QpR0fU/s1600/IMG_20140822_164746.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farm stand tomatoes, Pamlico County, NC (Photo: DPS)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"I <span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="9ae95839-ff81-4c15-a32c-15719525e428" id="a399d6c1-7b15-49cf-8423-2e73c6bd4254"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="73452324-c24f-4a1f-a1c0-064eb8ba82b1" id="24d218da-cd07-4a23-b92a-3a25da393771">wanna</span></span> box of these," he says, pointing.<br />
<br />
"Ah'm sorry, we don't sell '<span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="2185d39a-47cd-4209-938f-5462d474989a" id="8f7c9637-e3de-419b-84a6-fc333261318f"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="9134f849-e4c5-47cc-ae0c-a4150f3e9307" id="1b7cf7d0-46eb-416a-a994-2c054431526b">em</span></span> by the box," she says with a heavy aw-shucks down-east accent, bobbing her head apologetically.<br />
<br />
I approach. The fat man places his body directly between me and the box of tomatoes. He opens a white plastic shopping bag and starts placing the magnificent, <span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="d6df9787-92c3-4eec-b7ea-f4395bd70320" id="5de97765-c3d9-47e0-8171-1be7cf4afa1f"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="77aa751b-66ce-42eb-a756-eb3d68879af3" id="8564af99-5d9b-4a7a-86cf-a2939af6f3ee">baroquely</span></span>-shaped fruit in the bottom of the bag with loving gentleness. The granny helps him.<br />
<br />
"Git '<span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="a04525dd-4628-4de8-91bd-c8e7331fe4f9" id="da62c7a7-6abc-4cb8-b5b1-852660f11e63"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="455151a6-80c2-4b68-88bc-3956a3a63148" id="1f316fea-e623-4eea-b525-2a8436a7ecf7">em</span></span> in the bag quick 'fore <span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="a04525dd-4628-4de8-91bd-c8e7331fe4f9" id="c888c1e9-cd07-4d8c-8e75-b5cab1fa9059"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="455151a6-80c2-4b68-88bc-3956a3a63148" id="fd3e5469-49a0-487c-a69a-9692038131d2">anybod</span></span>' else git '<span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="a04525dd-4628-4de8-91bd-c8e7331fe4f9" id="87d1c65c-bfef-4376-b883-99e938089d1e"><span class="GINGER_SOFTWARE_mark" ginger_software_uiphraseguid="455151a6-80c2-4b68-88bc-3956a3a63148" id="a3ce89c4-7bc4-4665-b0c6-83056c2820da">em</span></span>," he mumbles, his back to me. I am amused. I want to tease.<br />
<br />
"Ooh, what kind are these?" I ask the granny, pointing to another box of large, deep red tomatoes with skin striped a dark olive green and still warm from the sun. The fat man hadn't seen that box.<br />
<br />
"That's a kind of German Johnson," says granny. Nearly obliterated by his bulk, she has to crane her skinny neck around the fat man to speak to me. The fat man whirls around and sees the other box. There's a look of panic on his face. The intruder might get some tomatoes after all!<br />
<br />
The fat man reaches across my body to the box of German Johnsons. He spreads his huge hands over the fruit like a priest blessing the heads of children. He wiggles his swollen fingers and strokes the smooth, ripe tomato skin.<br />
<br />
"Ah," he sighs. "More."Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-14748197474264453512014-07-05T12:35:00.001-04:002014-07-05T18:53:28.223-04:00Independence Day: Sewanee, Tennessee<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<div class="p1">
“Ashes, ashes, we all get burned!” sings a little blonde boy, hopping up and down with excitement. He and his family walk towards the parade route on University Avenue in Sewanee, Tennessee. It’s July 4th, Year of Our Lord 2014, and the tiny town (population: 2,311) is jammed with people, both from here and from all the smaller, surrounding towns. They’ve come to see the Sewanee Independence Day parade, an annual attraction in Franklin County and beyond. There are people everywhere, lining the parade route, talking, walking, laughing, eating kettle corn, browsing the crafts fair. This has the feeling of something carefully preserved, a vintage piece of Americana, a <i>tableau vivant</i> from the 1950’s.</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3z4bb5XrVBk/U7gh-kU_SZI/AAAAAAAAB1c/Ni6aLSiFvGk/s1600/IMG_20140704_144422.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3z4bb5XrVBk/U7gh-kU_SZI/AAAAAAAAB1c/Ni6aLSiFvGk/s1600/IMG_20140704_144422.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sewanee, Tennessee paraders (Photo: DPSnyder)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="p1">
The firetrucks, police and EMTs lead the parade route. People wave frenetically from atop the bright red trucks, lobbing handfuls of hard candy at kids. The emergency vehicle lights flash blue and red, the horns and sirens wail playfully. “SEE yuh!” screams the little boy to his parents. He runs after the firetrucks, free as air. They let him.</div>
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<div class="p1">
The carillon at All Saints Cathedral plays God Bless America. The notes tinkle down on the crowd like fairy dust. Families sit on handmade quilts that are pinned to the green lawns of the University of the South with tiny American flags. Women, babies and toddlers wear red, white and blue-themed outfits. A thin black girl, maybe 8-years-old, with tiny Old Glories stuck in her tight braids, swings shiny plastic Mardi Gras jewelry like an exotic dancer, moving her limbs in a complicated, improvised dance to music that only she can hear. Friends greet friends, point camera phones, laugh. The town is packed.</div>
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<div class="p1">
Now the floats come down the Avenue. Leading them are the two Grand Marshalls, looking self-conscious in their black, convertible Camaro. Themed vehicles, trailers and marchers roll slowly behind them: Panther Pride; John Deere; Sewanee Tiger Sharks; a red, white and blue calliope on a big old trailer. Little boys devilishly laugh and caper, bombing parade watchers with thick streams of water from orange and green plastic cannons. It’s hot, and no one minds. Tiny little girls in silver leotards tumble down the Avenue, sometimes becoming dizzy and planting on the cement. The Veterans of Foreign Wars pass in a rusty, butter-yellow El Torino, its motor turning over with the deep roar of a muscle car. “<u>Please</u> Vote for Helen Stapleton, County Commissioner” implores a banner. A trailer full of muddy off-road vehicles proclaims, “This is how we roll!" It flies four, big Confederate flags. </div>
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How do they roll, I wonder? </div>
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A mile and a half away, at Jackson Myers Airfield, the crowd is sparser, quieter, more intense. We scan the sky, waiting for the tiny plane to appear. We hear it before we see it. The announcer narrates the “trick flying show” through a megaphone. Her tone of voice is broadly humorous to offset the real danger of what’s going on above our heads. “The old saying is, ‘never fly with a pilot who calls himself Ace.’ (beat) But that’s his name, folks!” The crowd laughs on cue. “Ace is gonna show you a hammerhead now, followed by a four point roll.” The plane ascends straight up, then tips and descends straight down as if it were about to crash. But no! Ace steadies the small plane out and then rolls, holding each point for a few seconds, like a military jet. One. Two. Three. Four points. Applause. The spectators <i>ooh</i> and <i>ah</i> as Ace completes the “reverse cube and figure 8”, some more rolls, some spins. The sky is perfectly clear. Just a few stratus clouds like fine white hair blowing in the blue sky. Ace completes a “snap and roll”, another loop, and then a series of fast rolls as a final flourish. “Give him a hand, folks!” cries the announcer. Dry applause rises, then scatters in the breeze.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A few hours later, it’s my turn. I’ve bought a ride to heaven in a little Cessna 172. I’m declaring my independence of the Earth today, at least for a short while. The pilot, Sam (not “Ace”), asks me if I’ve ever been in a small plane before. I say yes. But it’s been a long time.</div>
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I hoist myself up to the Cessna’s cab by placing a foot on the landing gear struts, and once inside, I strap on the shoulder harness. It's just an ordinary car safety belt. The interior cab on this prop plane is smaller than my Kia Rio, and is also made mostly of plastic and rubber. Sam hops in on the other side, and we adjust our beige bucket seats forward. I have a steering wheel in front of me, too, and I quickly glance over the fairly simple array of black plastic gauges and knobs. He turns the key, and the propeller coughs to a start, spinning fast. I can feel the cross-currents. Sam tells me the wind never stops blowing up on this plateau. It buffets the plane from the side as we start to move.</div>
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Now we’re ready to take flight. We roll down the short runway, picking up speed fast. I know that this is the kind of tiny plane that occasionally rams into a mountainside, a skyscraper, or just senselessly plummets to earth. But in deciding to leave the earth today in a vehicle this small, I declare that I want to <i>feel</i> alive a lot more than I want to stay alive. The little plane noses up. We are airborne.</div>
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From a thousand feet up, the dark-green, tree-blanketed Cumberland plateau and the University campus look like neat, scale models. We fly due southwest, into the late afternoon sun. The propeller spins smooth and loud, constant and reassuring. After a few minutes, the plateau shears off sharply below us and we see the neat grid of fields and farms. I see the angry cut of a limestone quarry, the forking of platinum rivers. I am delighted like a child to be free of earth and all its encumbrances. With our big headphones and microphones on, Sam and I can communicate with each other above the din of the propeller, and I become aware that I keep saying how great this is, how amazingly great. This is so great, I say. And it is. There’s nobody and nothing up here, just me and a competent pilot. My mind is clear. The simplicity and beauty of it fills me with joy. </div>
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When Sam turns the little Cessna back northeast toward the airfield, I feel a pang of regret that I have to return to earth. Better to stay up here, I think. Above the crowds. Simple. Lighter than air.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mCVCQ2YTt68/U7giUXoSerI/AAAAAAAAB1g/5nmHMF0uatY/s1600/up+high.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mCVCQ2YTt68/U7giUXoSerI/AAAAAAAAB1g/5nmHMF0uatY/s1600/up+high.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">High above the Cumberland Plateau (Photo: DPSnyder)</td></tr>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-73290918116073241672014-06-29T11:21:00.000-04:002014-06-29T14:27:44.025-04:00Dispatch: Fields of Stone<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rkGeBNlOhj0/U7AtHakUxKI/AAAAAAAAB0A/dQlTUuAWV1g/s1600/IMG_20140628_171601.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rkGeBNlOhj0/U7AtHakUxKI/AAAAAAAAB0A/dQlTUuAWV1g/s1600/IMG_20140628_171601.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bond Angel, the old cemetery, Sewanee, TN<br />
(photo: D.P. Snyder)</td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">June 27, 2014, Sewanee, TN</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- “The fortified ego is the cause of immense suffering.” This thought is tickling my brain when I catch sight of the perpetually half-open, black iron gate of the old cemetery. There are no fortifications here. The walls of the cemetery are low, lichen-covered and tumble-down, as if the stones had arrived there by accident. The open gate is a sign. Come on in, it says.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The people that lie beneath my feet suffer no more. Their egos were removed at the moment of death, or so they say. The colors in this graveyard are all gray, no matter what color they are.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The central path is gravel overgrown by grass and weeds. I walk down it, and am drawn to a tall, stone angel. It stands nine feet high, and its stone wings form a symmetrical arc over its head. Its stone feathers are uniform and stiff as the scales of a fish. My gaze travels from the androgynous face to the lichen-coated toes. Below them is a name: Bond, my mother’s maiden name. I raise my gaze to the angel’s face just as a beam of white light illuminates it, forming a halo around the head that is impossibly bright given the heavy cover of hemlock branches. The edges of the angel’s wings glow, ultraviolet. I raise my phone and snap a picture.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wait. There is no clap of thunder. No one speaks. Within a minute more or less, the intense light recedes. Then it’s just me, alone again, staring at stones.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is my condition: a wanderer, walking through fields of stone, believing in miracles.</span></div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-54686712363008137832014-06-28T14:45:00.000-04:002014-06-29T14:04:58.684-04:00Dispatches from Sewanee<h2 style="text-align: left;">
</h2>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;">
Here at the School of Letters at Sewanee, I have the good fortune to be in <a href="http://neilshea.net/">Neil Shea</a>'s creative non-fiction writing workshop. One of the exercises we do for this class is a daily writing called a Dispatch. In Dispatches, we experiment on the page every day in short form, setting down our experiences as they happen. I will share some of my Dispatches here.</h4>
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June 26, 2014, Sewanee, TN -- “Oh-oh! The smell’s gettin’ into my <i>eye-yuhs</i>,” the tiny girl in the yellow and pink flowered smock yells happily, extending the word "eyes" into two syllables. She holds her tiny white fingers over her face, and peeks. She’s just calling attention to herself. It’s not her birthday party, and she’s too little to light rockets and roman candles. But she dances on the periphery of the action, flirting with danger, while the boys yell and shout urgent directions to each other. “Run!” “Get back!” “Don’t touch it!” </div>
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The man and woman oversee the action, but not too closely. They’re the ones who brought the Jr. Pyro Backpack from Black Cat, the largest fireworks supplier in the South. The birthday girl, twelve years old today, watches the action carefully, but stays apart. She stands close to the woman, twirling a glossy, brown sausage curl around her finger, observing with interest. </div>
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The oldest boy is thin, tall and in charge of the serious rockets. His face is tanned and angular, his hair many shades of natural blonde. He does the lighting the way the man showed him to. He crouches over a rocket on the sidewalk. His faded red t-shirt drapes perilously close to the fuse while he snaps the Bic lighter, once, twice, three times. He lights it and leaps backwards gracefully and dramatically. The rocket shoots into the sky, sputtering blue fire. This boy’s starting to show himself as a teenager. He’s learning how to be the popular boy. He’ll set off many more mortars and rockets in high school and college. He’ll get into trouble a few times, too, and maybe he'll burn something down. Girls will fall for him like dominoes. </div>
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The tiniest boys have snappers, poppers, and sparklers. They dance like happy demons in the road, dashing the poppers to the cement with a pop-pop-pop. The little children laugh and swoop like swallows, playing with danger, and their laughter rises and falls with the cicadas’ song into the damp, primeval Tennessee night. </div>
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The grown-ups stand back, smile and remember.</div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-90624117397152843792014-04-19T22:13:00.001-04:002014-04-20T09:40:59.989-04:00An Easter Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5an1u19DrOE/U1MrWNsG1UI/AAAAAAAABrU/7B0j97MBiy8/s1600/back+mouth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5an1u19DrOE/U1MrWNsG1UI/AAAAAAAABrU/7B0j97MBiy8/s1600/back+mouth.jpg" /></a></div>
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In the beginning, he knew the darkness. It was a darkness so complete that breath was impossible. He could not hear his own breath. He could not feel his own breath. Neither did he know if his eyes were open or closed.<br />
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He could not tell how long he lay in this state. It might have been seconds. It might have been centuries. The darkness pressed around him, at once infinite and claustrophobic, a vast emptiness, a humid black fabric that seemed to wrap him from head to toe, leaving no space between him and itself. It was complete.<br />
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After passing some time in this way, he became aware of a prickling that reminded him that he had form. This was not welcome to him. It was as if hundreds, then thousands of tiny electric explosions were detonating at random distances from where he felt himself to be. Attentive, he observed them. He had not yet connected them with himself. He only knew that they were there, and that he was there, too. It was a start.<br />
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He settled back into himself. It was utter silence, a perfect circle. Comforting. But then the prickling came again, distracting him, and without willing himself to do it, he began to assemble a pattern in the small explosions. He began to perceive them in the perfect darkness, though not seeing them at all, as if they were random events, rod-shaped and impending, emerging from nothingness and multiplying, evidence of a volcanic event, bearing down upon him and shattering the otherwise perfect darkness.<br />
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He resisted.<br />
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From somewhere, he mustered will. He brought immense will to bear on the rods of light, commanding them to retreat. For the darkness was simple, and the scattered sensations, formless but present, brought something to his chest that felt like panic. He did not wish to be among them. He did not wish to fall again.<br />
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Again and again, he focused his will on the scattered explosions that prickled him all over, for he was beginning to grasp that they were happening inside of him as well as outside of him. And though he commanded them to subside over and over again, first one rod of light would appear in the vastness of the darkness, and then another, glowing and menacing. And he knew, feeling the impending dread of it, that no matter how many times he drove it back, another rod of light would soon be born of the darkness. First one, then another, and then countless more, in an infinite and unstoppable crescendo, as if a terrible and complex architecture were being raised above him, whose only purpose was to crash down and obliterate him.<br />
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He fought it back again, and he longed for the simplicity of the darkness. He was tired.<br />
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At last he knew he was beaten. He knew that this could not go on, and that he would have to let the relentless light take him. He determined to surrender. So the next time a rod of golden light appeared in the perfect infinity of the blackness like an undeniable command, he spoke and said, "So be it". And he waited to fall.<br />
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The light overwhelmed him. He let it.<br />
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And he felt in that moment a painful tugging and an unbearable velocity, as if he were free-falling through all of space without limit, but also leaving a small part of himself far, far behind in the dark and silent place where he had been resting. It was this loss, the loss of that infinitely small part of himself, that made him remember who he was.<br />
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He cried out.<br />
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And the great rock rolled slowly from the mouth of the cave.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo: Back Mouth Cave, © Sam West</span></div>
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<br />Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-30275996732110764902014-02-22T23:33:00.000-05:002014-02-23T19:56:56.188-05:00Wreck and Salvage"Good afternoon, young lady," calls Captain Roy from his perch on the wood deck of the big barn at Pickers near Milestone as I make my way through a field of rusted hulks. I am almost 54 and still look pretty good, but I wonder where the tipping point is when "young lady" stops being a flirt and starts being patronizing, ironic.<br />
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Captain Roy is neither patronizing nor ironic. His left leg is in a white plaster cast, and purplish toes with sharp, long yellowed nails are sticking out the end of the gleaming white exoskeleton that's holding his leg together; the skin above and below the cast looks angry, wasted. I ask him how he broke his leg, and he doesn't say, just says, "They almost cut it off last year." Beat. "Hi, I'm Captain Roy. I'm a tugboat captain." And he extends his hand in greeting.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cpoPgzIh6-g/UwlmRAImU7I/AAAAAAAABdY/C2zmXIRH9Yg/s1600/IMG_20140222_151149.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cpoPgzIh6-g/UwlmRAImU7I/AAAAAAAABdY/C2zmXIRH9Yg/s1600/IMG_20140222_151149.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">He is a tugboat captain. (D.P. Snyder)</td></tr>
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"There was this little thing called Hurricane Irene", he says with a getting-underway tone of voice, like an old train gathering steam. "Took out the first floor of our house, took out my trucks, too," he says, gesturing vaguely across the huge field of rusting equipment at two large, white panel trucks sunk deep in the muddy stubble about 75 yards away. "Had to take out the motors."<br />
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Captain Roy tells me that his wife Angie runs the place, but he's watching it for her today. "She's young, like you two", he remarks as my husband walks up behind me. Captain Roy is not young and this business of the leg has made him aware that he is, in fact, old. It's three years since he messed up the leg, since an accident the details of which he does not reveal, but which must have happened right before Irene. There's a big, beautiful old Harley Davidson motorcycle parked inside the barn; its black metal skin and Cyclops eye are gleaming from inside in the half-light.<br />
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"After the accident, the hospital cost 50 thousand," he says, and they wanted to cut off the leg to here," he says, marking the spot with a swift cutting gesture on the shin where a whirring saw would have severed bone from bone. But the surgery, the prosthesis and the rehab would have cost a million dollars, so he found "these two doctors at Duke", and they put his leg back together for him. "I still work the tug boat," he tells me. "Can't afford to stop working, so I just stump around on this," he says giving the plaster cast a playful whack.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XJqnbwTCKj8/UwlvNatmKoI/AAAAAAAABdo/VeDzJwUCnUY/s1600/IMG_20140222_144738.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XJqnbwTCKj8/UwlvNatmKoI/AAAAAAAABdo/VeDzJwUCnUY/s1600/IMG_20140222_144738.jpg" height="240" title="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">American Pie (D.P. Snyder)</td></tr>
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From where Captain Roy sits on the raised platform in front of the old barn, he can see pretty deep inside where mysterious, frayed, and rusted objects are stacked in a thick but orderly succession, like with like. He can see out, too, across the vast stubble field where rusted stoves, grills, tractors, tools, sailboats, and even a lime green Gatorade go-cart sit in quiet meditation under the fragile, white February sun. "Tug boat got beat up pretty bad, too," he says. "She was out there in the water when Irene came." And then he goes quiet.<br />
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Irene. Did a lot damage down-east, a <i>lot </i>of damage. Homes gone, boats gone, lives gone. Lives just broken badly, too, and then left to rust. "Damn shame a man has to end his life with nothing," says Captain Roy. "Damn shame." I want to ask him what he thinks of universal healthcare, but I don't.<br />
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In a bin full of pocket knives, I find a vintage one made in Pakistan in the 50's. The bolster is green and long, curved just right to fit in the palm of my hand or slide slick as a salamander into the pocket of my jeans. It's got two blades, one long and sharp, and the other one serrated like a saw with a bottle opener on the end. Handing him a ten, I tell Captain Roy it was in the $5 bin. "Shouldn't have been", he says, "that's a vintage knife," and he hands me my change. There's no way to hand him back the $5 without insulting him, so I buy a weird little green plastic rake with an aluminum handle instead; I'll use it to rake the dunes on our strip of beach.<br />
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Amid the broken machines and objects of a happier time, Captain Roy sits in his old wood chair wearing a camouflage cap that shows he's a Veteran. The bill of his cap casts a sharp shadow across his face so that the only features you see are the white Papa Hemingway beard and his wire frame glasses floating in the penumbral space between beard and hat, seeing everything, reflecting the pale, late winter sky.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VDqK2CnJ2ew/Uwlv--7146I/AAAAAAAABdw/Nw82DI3yYfA/s1600/IMG_20140222_150805.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VDqK2CnJ2ew/Uwlv--7146I/AAAAAAAABdw/Nw82DI3yYfA/s1600/IMG_20140222_150805.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shovels, Pamlico County, NC (D.P. Snyder)</td></tr>
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<br />Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-125031718026283882014-02-16T12:31:00.000-05:002014-03-26T11:21:39.312-04:00February, Piedmont Garden<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ct_UkrX47bM/UwDzk1MkVcI/AAAAAAAABYQ/ZFeiyZ26yeU/s1600/IMG_9870.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ct_UkrX47bM/UwDzk1MkVcI/AAAAAAAABYQ/ZFeiyZ26yeU/s320/IMG_9870.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dry Pods (R. Taylor Monk)</td></tr>
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The Sun has come out in Piedmont at last, just enough to melt last week's thick cover of snow and ice into patches, carving an atlas of irregular, dun-colored continents into the ground of our yard. Beneath the melt, the dominant color is brown, and the shrubbery shows crisp patches of destroyed foliage and broken branches, visible damage from a hard freeze of unaccustomed duration.<br />
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In our big kitchen window there's a sprig of kitchen rosemary that I rooted unintentionally in a glass of water; now I'm helping it take its first tentative steps toward independence in a pot of moist loam, dug from under last year's leaf pile. I am distrustful of the thin white water roots because so many times they've proved too feeble to handle the richness of real earth. Rooted cuttings placed too soon or too late in soil will crisp and die, so you must feel out that precise moment when the young plant is still excited enough to develop a real root system, and not made so lazy by water's lack of resistance that its thin, white roots will despair and rot when buried in real ground. I recognize that this "feeling" of mine is not scientific, and occasionally I look up such matters online in an effort to discipline my gardening efforts; then I promptly forget what I've read. I simply feel out the moment, and I try to love my garden to life.<br />
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Also in our kitchen is a rosebush that Dog and I found on a walk the other day, just before the big storm, a beautifully bowl-shaped knockout rose that some fool had jerked out of the ground, shearing off most of its roots in the process. I am speechless in the face of the violence that humans do to living things. But a single root still trailed from the thick stalk, and so I brought it home, sinking it in a pot of loose earth and pruning its live wood hard, amputating half of the bush in an effort to help it understand that all of its energy must now go toward making roots. I keep it good and wet in a plastic lined cardboard box full of earth, and I move it around the kitchen every day to expose it to every possible minute of the feeble February sunlight. Perhaps the rose will find the courage to put forward another vein-like root. And then another.<br />
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Whether the rosemary makes it or not, whether the rose makes it or not, will it be destiny? Or will it be because of me?<br />
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I am not above thinking that I am an instrument, a small but stubbornly hopeful scrap of a larger logic or spirit. I don't give that thing a name, I just feel it numinous around me and hope that human failures like ego and pride are far beneath it, whatever it is. I have not been given the gift of belief in dime-store gods. But I do feel the force of will behind the movements of the earth and in the sighing of the wind. I feel, and I obey.<br />
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It's the nature of conscious beings, and I include Dog in this, to be at their most desperate when they feel themselves utterly alone, solely responsible for the outcome of their lives and the lives of those they love. Dog looks to me to make things happen; my husband and I look to each other as well for comfort and protection; and neighbors are charmed when a word or gesture indicates that the reassuring tendrils of love extend, if only slightly, from your house to theirs via a card, a lunch invitation, or a wave hello. But as those tendrils become hyper-extended and aim at a wider circle of influence, it is common for the love inspiration to become something more like a desire for power, something like control, something harder and less connected to the true source. We begin to wish that we could erect fences around all those whom we love to prevent the necessary chaos of life from hurting them. We begin to want to dominate.<br />
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I love the fragile young rosemary. I love the abandoned rose. I love the azalea I planted last year whose crown has taken on a stricken look from frost burns. I love the tiny "remaindered" fig tree that I bought for one dollar at the end of last season and sunk casually into the dark earth at the edge of the forest where it has been since preyed upon by ravenous deer. I love the old bent beech tree that arcs toward the afternoon light like a dancer; and I feel an abiding sisterhood with the little native holly that my husband rescued from a ravenous wisteria vine, not unlike the way he rescued me six years ago. The abundance and health that the holly now enjoys extends itself to the bees who will drink its nectar, and to the robins who will nest this spring in its strong, homely branches. We are all of us charged with spreading our good fortune to others.<br />
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I'll admit it: I am afraid to go out to the field, to the forest, to my trampled beds to see what damage winter has done to my garden. I am terrified that I may discover that the hosta, spider lilies and rust-colored ferns that I sunk into the forest floor in autumn will be found rotten and lifeless. Will all my efforts to cultivate this small Eden have come to naught? Am I fully responsible for what happens on this piece of earth, or is it destiny?<br />
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Spring is not without its terrors. But the sun is shining, albeit thinly, and I hear birds singing. So I'll screw up my courage, pull on my rubber boots and canvas gloves, and I'll head out to the garden today with my bypass pruner jammed into the pocket of my old jeans. I'll start cautiously by gathering fallen branches, and then perhaps I'll touch some of those crisp leaves and twigs, turning them over in my fingers and inspecting them for signs of life. And if by chance I do discover some green shoot emerging, responding to the gentle tickling of this thin February sun, I'll pause for a moment and look. And what I feel will be love.Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-28565058352860511722014-02-12T14:32:00.001-05:002014-02-12T16:37:02.428-05:00The Earth Trembles in Milestone.<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Only in Pamlico County can there be a blizzard and an earthquake just hours apart," submitted B. to R., who proceeded to forward the message to me here in Piedmont. On Monday, February 10 at 8:11 p.m. there was an earthquake measuring 2.5 on the Richter Scale with its epicenter at the mouth of Goose Creek near Goose Creek Island, North Carolina (which, incidentally, is the birthplace of Miss C., our beloved neighbor and the wife of R.) "</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Big boom like thunder," writes B., "in the Commonwealth of Milestone, four miles south of downtown Bethany Crossing." What's more, by 9 this a.m., </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">snow had fully covered the ground, which is a rare enough event in Downeast North Carolina to be remarked upon. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, the snow is falling here in Piedmont too, thick and wet, and shows no sign of letting up.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UyO7Jg_eDFU/UvvKub-QIBI/AAAAAAAABX0/p7cxy6FBBv8/s1600/IMG_9782.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UyO7Jg_eDFU/UvvKub-QIBI/AAAAAAAABX0/p7cxy6FBBv8/s1600/IMG_9782.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Channel Marker (The Big River at Milestone. Photo:. R. Snyder)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">These are times of signs and omens.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I've posted before in this space about the end of the world (see <a href="http://goo.gl/Deo6nh">here</a>, and <a href="http://goo.gl/eUg3cu">here</a>), and I've always done so tongue firmly placed in cheek. But now it's February when one's thoughts turn to the color gray, the fact of death, and the seeming pointlessness of it all, and I would have to say that if the tectonic plate supporting Milestone is doing a mambo, the end of times may be closer than I had originally thought. Tongue firmly removed from cheek.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nor was it good news a few days ago when R. shot us a series of evening emails from Milestone to us here in Piedmont to report a suspicious and grim situation unfolding across the street. The first message announced the advent of a old, beat-up ambulance to the Milestone front door of our elderly neighbor J.; the next one reported the arrival of police who drew on their rubber gloves in a disconcertingly unhurried way. And the final report declared the exit of a body -- fully draped -- from J's domicile. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's the thing: I already knew something was going to happen, because I had seen it clear as day in his eyes two weeks before. It was a night just past full moon when my husband and I found him sitting alone in his car with the motor off, right there in the parking lot with the windshield angled so that he had a clear view out over the broad, black, moonlit waters of the Big River. No radio, no light, no company, no nothing. And as he wearily lowered the car window to greet me that night, offering a barely audible "hey", I saw eternity right there reflected in his smudged bifocals. The message pinged my brain pan clear as digital, "This man is dying."</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That night, my husband</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and I walked </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in silence </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">up the three flights of wooden stairs to the Lighthouse. We were both thinking the same thing, and as soon as we closed the front door behind us, we spoke almost simultaneously: "I'm worried about him." We agreed he seemed depressed, and we couldn't figure out why he was still in Milestone, since he had told us he was going to leave for the northeast a week ago. We agreed between us to keep an eye on him. And the next day when we saw him, he remarked that he felt exhausted. "Left my heart medicine in the car last night," he sighed, sitting there on the front steps as if he had gotten stuck there going either up or down. "Getting old is the worst," he added, "It's. Just. The. Worst." My husband agreed, playfully moaning about his tennis elbow and creaky knees. "You? You have no idea," chuckled J. bitterly, "You have no idea. Not yet, you don't."</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Two weeks later we returned from Piedmont to find J.'s car still there, parked almost diagonally between two parking spaces. Suspicions aroused, we knocked on his door, because by now his departure was seriously overdue, and when there was no answer, my husband went around to look through the windows of the house. But he saw no one, only the usual confusion of semi-packed moving boxes, a old left-over mop, and some scattered construction materials and paint cans. J. was supposed to rent the place out, or sell it. I write "supposed to" because he didn't want to, he said, but his wife and his daughter wanted him to. They also wanted him to get a new car, so they "made" him sell his beloved old Toyota, and he didn't like the new car, he said. Didn't like it at all. Missed his Toyota ("that was a good car, a quality car.") They had made him give up his boat, too, he had told us, and he had handed the boat over to his daughter. She has it somewhere, he said, but he didn't know where. One got the feeling that everything familiar to him, everything he loved, everything that defined him to himself, was peeling away like objects scattering in zero gravity, and that what he recognized as his life was irretrievably disappeared. He was lost.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The next day we were leaving the Lighthouse to return to Piedmont when J. appeared, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">perhaps just returning from a lunch out, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and he drove into the parking lot as we threw our bags into the trunk of our car. We're headed out, we said. Remember, if you need our help with <i>anything</i> here, you just let us know, okay? We'll do whatever we can, we said, reminding him that he had all of our contact information -- and did he need us to write it down again? Nope, I've got it and will do, he said with a crooked smile, standing there on the gravel of the parking lot, his arms limp at his sides like an old teddy bear with stuffing missing. He looked gray, dazzled and lost without his glasses -- </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">where were his glasses? -- </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in the stale, unflattering winter light. He had no coat on, and it was cold. I felt that pull, a pull I've had before, that starts somewhere in my chest and that makes me open my arms and say, "Hug?" So I walked over and I hugged him, and asked him to please take care himself. And then we said goodbye.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I guess we weren't surprised to hear that J. died there, alone, in his house by the river a few days ago. Snowstorms happen, earthquakes happen, and every minute of every day somebody's world comes to an end. J.'s wife called us a few days ago to thank us for trying to help. Our numbers, she said, were the only ones he had kept in his "file". </span>Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-50401601052373670472014-01-08T21:44:00.000-05:002014-01-08T21:44:23.635-05:00Dark Country<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW8cwSosiI/AAAAAAAAAKc/cJtC1cK7a-M/s1600/%5BDarkStreet2.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW8cwSosiI/AAAAAAAAAKc/cJtC1cK7a-M/s320/%5BDarkStreet2.jpeg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532034919479947810" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 222px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
Here in Tiny Town on a Sunday night it was already dark at 6 in the evening, and I had pretty much lost my will to go on. I had spent hours on the help lines of both Apple and Dell trying to figure out why my new Apple DVI mini adapter was not bringing a picture to the Dell 1800FP analog display that FF gave me, and my "unresolved issue" seemed to have quite destroyed my desire to accomplish anything. That, and the darkness.<br />
<br />
It is very dark now in Tiny Town. A velvety black darkness falls upon us earlier and earlier out in Stag County as autumn creeps up on us and our gardens. It gets to 6 PM and we are stunned that it is night already, and even though we know the winter's coming on like it does every year, we say to each other "what happened?" Behind closed doors, we talk about what it would be like to move to South Carolina, or anywhere south where the light and the warmth hang on a little longer. Oh sure, we can stroll to Main Street where the colonial-style street lights cast a dim yellow on the brick sidewalks, and where twinkling strings of Italian lights illuminate the faces of the faithful huddled around the gas heaters at the Lenape Inn's outdoor tiki bar. But the feebleness of the illumination only serves to emphasize the vast depth of the darkness and does nothing to cheer it. Chill autumn seeps in through the cracks in the old wood of the the garage siding where the Virginia creeper goes scarlet, and works its way into the drying leaves of the hydrangeas and burns the cheeks of the maples along the Delaware. I check the shed for shovels, salt. I wash sweaters, and I realize I don't have any that I like very much.<br />
<br />
It is dark in Tiny Town, and the elections are almost upon us. FF and I watch the TV in the evening and are left speechless by the dumb viciousness of the political attack ads that all the commentators seem to agree "work". But to what end do they "work" except to mislead the voting public and fan the flames of generalized middle class anger? If that is "working" I'd rather have disfunction. When FF and I have the energy, which is rarer now as the light fades, we check out Politifact and research the inflamed statements delivered to us by the candidates themselves and the rabble-rousing "non-profits" that place their ads on Comcast: We find that most of the accusations made are either "mostly untrue" or "pants on fire". Our airwaves are absolutely gummed up with deliberate, nasty lies. Oh, did I say "our"? Yes, I know, the airwaves stopped belonging to the American public year before last and now Mom doesn't have TV because she refuses to pay for cable and instead has a converter box, swearing that the stations come in better when she sits the iron on top of the TV. The political stank smells pretty bad here in town, and it almost overcomes the perfume of the drying leaves. FF and I might just start leaving the television off, which will leave the house a little bit darker still.<br />
<br />
Next week, I will cast my ballot at the Tiny Town Eagle Fire Company Engine House where we keep our bright shiny fire trucks and the new EMT ambulance bought with funds raised from the Wednesday night spaghetti suppers and a few private donors. It will be the first time in over 25 years that I have not voted in New York City and (as you all have reminded me) my vote will likely count more here in bright blue Stag County. I am taking the morning off to do it, and I plan to hang around the polling place for a while to feel the vibe.<br />
<br />
Tiny Town is proud of its spirit of self-reliance and its spaghetti dinner fundraisers. Here lives a piquant mix of extremely wealthy country squires and very middle to lower middle class workers and immigrants. Our county is the third wealthiest in Pennsylvania, and Republicans outnumber Democrats by a very long shot. There is a fair rumble of Tea Party sympathy, though we have no Tea Party candidates in this upcoming election. The Tea Party is too extreme and déclassé even for Stag County. Anger at and distrust of government has reached hissy fit on the dial, and that's the most popular sentiment you hear over the counter at the Eagle Diner where the working class gathers for the blue plate special. The problems of society have become too complex and overwhelming for those too intellectually impatient, unprepared or unwilling to bend their minds to ideas, and so comes the bitter call to "get all the bastards out". At any cost.<br />
<br />
I am afraid of these sentiments, afraid of the growing feeling that we can just emote our way out of the problems in which we finds ourselves. I am afraid of our willingness to be attracted to terrible bombast and be dismissive of thoughtfulness which, by nature, is quieter. Yes, our problems are complex, but not too complex to think out in a reasoned way. But that kind of thinking takes patience and a kind of focus that is hard to come by in this time of money and attention deficits. Social, economic and personal disappointments weigh hard on the people of Stag County, and if we drive west to York where FF's parents live, I can see the discontent-o-meter rising higher on the faces of the people with each mile west we drive. They wouldn't say so out loud, but the people farther west and north of Tiny Town don't understand why their kitchens don't look like the ones on HGTV, and they're sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Free-floating discontent feeds free floating anger feeds "get the bastards out". At any cost.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW-MOYAW0I/AAAAAAAAAKs/jH7t27OczZQ/s1600/pennsylvania.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW-MOYAW0I/AAAAAAAAAKs/jH7t27OczZQ/s320/pennsylvania.gif" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532036834521013058" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 234px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
I want to go see it for myself. I want to go northwest where the Alleghenies meet the border of upstate New York and maybe stop at a diner in Dimock, Susquehanna County where it's 98% percent white, 60% registered Republican and dirt poor. That's where <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=natural-gas-make-water-burn"><span class="Apple-style-span">Norma Fiorentino's</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"> </span>house blew up because methane gas leaked from the drilling in the Marcellus Shale into her well water. The utilities, all part of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, are sucking the natural gas out of the good Pennsylvania shale around Norma's house and out of vast tracts of Pennsylvania countryside. They promise jobs. They promise to turn dirt farmers into millionaires with royalty payments, the kind of overnight "success" that the people yearn for. The voters of Susquehanna County are grabbing for that gold ring and, after all, who wouldn't? Things have not changed in Dimock at all in over a century except that the buildings are older and dirtier now. The folks in Dimock don't take kindly to the thoughtful suggestion made by the Democratic candidate for governor that we need to take another look at this shale drilling thing, regulate it, and fund the EPA properly to keep an eye on the drilling companies. No, "Drill, baby, drill" is the motto the people can get behind in Susquehanna county. And if someone's house blows up, well, that's just the price of progress.<br />
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<br />
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A place where they tell you to open the windows before you take a bath is not somewhere I want to live. And the idea of flaming tap water is downright Apocalyptic. Oh, yeah, it's getting darker in Susquehanna County.<br />
<br />
The Dark Ages began when the Roman Empire fell. Go read it for yourself; Gibbon is still waiting for you, all six volumes. You connect the dots: Superstition, ignorance, desperation, the decline of cultural artifacts, the rise of belief over knowledge. Oh, for the darkness of the womb! But I want to have that discussion, Susquehanna, about why you vote almost straight Republican when the same fellows that brought you the trillion dollar boondoggle called the Iraq War where your sons and daughters got their arms and legs blown off, are now trying to bring you methane-flavored water so that you can blow up your own own house by taking a bath. Can we have that discussion, Susquehanna?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW9qMm1mlI/AAAAAAAAAKk/0H6-2USlOrs/s1600/dark+room.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Uq3KEsNfKXY/TMW9qMm1mlI/AAAAAAAAAKk/0H6-2USlOrs/s320/dark+room.jpeg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532036249930799698" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 256px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<br />
In New York City, where it is always bright and the night sky takes on the comforting aspect of a soft violet pink dome, I was sheltered from this darkness for so many years. We heard about it, read about it in the New York Times, but in New York City you can always go downtown and forget all your worries, forget all your cares, just like Petula sang. There, in the glittering 24-hour midway of writers, hipsters, Rockefeller University wizards, university kids and the lords of hip hop and poetry jam, you can believe that you're living in a world that is getting brighter and more brilliant, not darker and dumber. But here in Stag County, it's getting darker. And it's getting darker still in Dimock, and all over Susquehanna, Johnstown and Juniata counties. There's no soft, pink dome hanging over the dark, hulking, cool coal backbone of Pennsylvania, north and west of the Alleghenies. All that they have out in those parts is the kind of chill that takes a century to set into your bones, the lonely whistle of the train in the night, and the stark rage that comes from being left in dark for too long while other people get to dance with the stars. From the shadows of northern and western Pennsylvania, they see the bright lights of New York City twinkling like the eye of Sauron from the TV in living room. But there amongst the TV trays, the sprung sofas, the smell of disappointment and the unpaid mortgages, a spark of longing ignites into stark fury.<br />
<br />
It's getting dark now in Stag County. Here in the comfort of Tiny Town, I am not nearly as sunk into the shadows as many others. But now that I have left the shining dome of the Emerald City, I can peer a little deeper into the night and, as winter comes on, I see a dark country.</div>
Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-64590891870174881132013-10-03T12:05:00.000-04:002014-02-22T21:27:39.255-05:00The Vultures Weep Over the Beautiful Corpse<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JQ_-mSjcbkg/Uk2TuEYhZ5I/AAAAAAAABL4/7KlQg-8K-Rc/s1600/vulture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JQ_-mSjcbkg/Uk2TuEYhZ5I/AAAAAAAABL4/7KlQg-8K-Rc/s1600/vulture.jpg" height="200" width="179" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Vulture cross section: From the Household Cyclopedia, <br />scanned and reproduced by Matthew Spong.</i></td></tr>
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<h2>
<b>The Vultures Weep Over the Beautiful
Corpse</b></h2>
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There are no tears that taste so sweet</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
as those the mourning vultures weep</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
when at last the meat's completely gone</div>
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and all that's left is gleaming bone.</div>
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<br /></div>
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All its sufferings calmed and past,</div>
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In death the corpse is who laughs last.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Spirit is not meat.</div>
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Still!</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The vultures seek repast.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> - Dorothy Potter Snyder, October 2013</span></div>
Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-17954407316898306242013-09-18T23:02:00.001-04:002013-09-18T23:08:05.966-04:00Pelican PassingWe took the ferry across the Big River, and drove a half hour to Bonaventure. As we rode across the sparkling water, through the piney woods on the two-lane highway, and later sat on the sun washed deck of a waterfront restaurant with our dog watching the wild horses play on the barrier islands just across the marina, I had that woozy, lighter-than-air feeling that I sometimes have when I see myself living this new, prettier, completely different life. It's a feeling that, if I let it go that way, can nauseate me or make me feel a bit crazy; but if I contemplate it as a spectator rather than as if it were mine, that feeling just makes me grin like a fool.<br />
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After lunch, I struck up a conversation with the captain of a yacht with whom I had a lot in common, including the university from which we had both graduated. He now takes people out on cruises, he said. Better life, he said. I passed the million dollar mark this year, he said. That's how much money I've put into this tub. Then, before setting sail with the business casual types who had just contracted his services for a Saturday afternoon cruise, he handed me the long, clean, white wing bone of a pelican. "Don't know what those bumps on it are," he said, handing it to me with a wink. "Might be a message."<br />
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And he was gone. </div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-62024047376143860932013-09-01T12:00:00.000-04:002013-09-02T11:12:12.064-04:00Don't Look Away<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She watches the breaking news about the sentencing of Cleveland rapist, kidnapper, and murderer Ariel Castro. She is completely mesmerized by the rich flow of tears and snot that run from from Michelle Knight's tiny, broken face as she bravely addresses the court in front of the man who tortured, raped and imprisoned her for over a decade. Judge Russo addresses the man in the orange jumpsuit as if he were an ordinary guy, explaining to him wearily that Castro, contrary to what he has said in his own defense, is indeed a violent person. The criminal responds, speaking uninterruptedly for what seems like way too long a time. She wonders how can they let him talk so much. The defendant tries to formulate words, sentences, and paragraphs that will elicit the understanding and compassion of the court, and ends up proving only that he is a sociopathic narcissist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She hangs on every word transmitted from the Cayahuga County Courthouse today, letting other tasks go unattended. She is hypnotized by the images on the screen because one summer when she was a child, she herself missed being a victim of a man like this. Missed it by a hair. </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>She was 10, and riding her mother's old WWII-era blue bicycle around the flat, suburban streets of the rural, mid-western town where her grandparents lived. She had grown up spending vacations there, and she loved spending those six golden weeks each summer in a place where she was free to roam, free to play with the neighbor kids, free to get tanned and transformed by the sweet, dry, western air. It was the freedom that was the best part of those summers; the feeling of safety and limitless freedom.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>One day she rode up S. Avenue from her grandparents' house on Buchanan, there in the "Presidential Streets" neighborhood of town. Pump, pump, pump, on she rode the big WWII-era bike, flying along and naming the streets out loud as she passed them: Buchanan, Pierce, Fillmore, Polk, Tyler... All the Presidents in neat historical order. That day, she went past Washington Street North where well-kept yards with brick suburban ranches gave way to dusty, weed-filled lots with low, stricken-looking wood buildings.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The TV commentators say that Castro offered the girls rides home in his car, and they got in because they knew him. He was just another guy from the neighborhood. Before they knew it, they were at his house. Before they knew it, he was pushing them through the back door, through the old house, and to the top of the old wooden stairs that went down to the basement where they saw chains coiled on the floor. Chains.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Just past Adams, the girl saw a sleek black cat crossing the bar ditch into a weedy lot followed by five tiny black kittens. So she dropped the heavy bike in the dust at the shoulder of the road and followed the cats into the car park, which fronted a series of low structures that had once been painted the sick green color normally reserved for the walls of old gas station bathrooms. There was an old aqua and white Oldsmobile parked there. It had fins and pointy red parking lights projecting out from the back like rows of missiles. </i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The girl was startled when the driver's side door suddenly swung open.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She listens as the well-groomed TV news anchor recounts how one of the women tried to escape what they are now calling "the house of horrors". As punishment, he chained her to a pole in the basement and made her wear a motorcycle helmet on her head. Castro taped her legs and taped her mouth shut, and other things "too terrible to say on air", says the news anchor. Not too terrible to happen, but too terrible to say on air. You have to wonder, muses the anchorman, how Castro managed to convince the women to accompany him into his house. </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>She does not remember what the old man said when he appeared so suddenly, opening the door in such a way that she nearly walked right into it; he must have seen her coming in the rearview mirror. But she did remember that after he swung open the car door, he stuck out his dirty, denim-covered legs so that she was trapped between the door and his legs. He wore "over-hauls" on his big, old man's body, and he had very red, sunburned skin with a dusting of white hairs all over. He was poorly shaved, and gave off a strong odor of stale sweat, cigarettes and beer. He did not smile.</i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The old man asked her questions. She was afraid that she had been trespassing, so she stood straight and respectful, hands clasped loosely in front as she did in music class. She responded to his questions shyly, looking up to answer and then quickly looking back down at the rubber toes of her sneakers. He asked many, many questions: Where was she from? What was her name? What was her Daddy's name? How old was she? Did her Daddy take care of her good? She itched where the sweat trickled down the back of her turquoise wash n' wear shorts and top, but she didn't dare reach up to scratch. Her mouth had gone dry.</i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>He told her that he lived "all alone" and said other words designed to evoke sympathy. She said, "Oh, I bet you never get a nice home-cooked meal," and she immediately regretted the intimate sound of the words as they left her mouth. He invited her into the low wood structure with the fly-specked screen door that was only feet from where she stood. Are you hungry? he asked. I have some snacks inside. No thank you, she said. Not "no thanks", but "no thank you", still smiling politely and dipping as if to curtsy, awkwardly holding onto the protocol her mother had taught her to use with adults. But a creepy tingle at the base of her brain kept saying "uh oh uh oh uh oh", and it was as if an invisible lasso were being slowly lowered around her as she stood frozen, staring at the rubber toes of her sneakers.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On the TV, the police officers and lawyers around Castro in the courtroom are all men. They avert their eyes from the alleged monster as he speaks, or look in his general direction but somehow just past him with odd grimaces (of anger? shame? discomfort?) on their faces. Castro's lawyers do not look at their client either, but rather at the judge, leaning slightly forward with hunched shoulders. Castro says "I am not a monster, I'm sick," and incongruously raises his handcuffed hands in what seems to be a gesture of prayer. And still all the men look away, look everywhere but at the man in the orange jumpsuit. Look at him, she thinks, look right at him.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The old man asked the girl, what are you doing this summer? She, her sister and the neighbor kids friends were collecting aluminum cans to turn in at the recycling plant for money; the kids were proud of their little business and pursued it vigorously, even though they would come home smelling of stale beer as a result of plunging headfirst into waste baskets at the municipal golf course, and even though their grandparents really didn't like them "canning". But she didn't say all that; she just said in a small voice "collecting cans". "Tell you what," said the old man in an over-bright voice as if he had just had the best idea ever. "Get into my car and I'll help you look for cans!" He scooted a little further out on the car seat, reaching one big, red arm out on the open door just inches from the girl's thin, sun-kissed shoulder. The hot summer air went completely silent except for the sound of the girl's heartbeat. Uh oh uh oh uh oh, said the prickle at the bottom of her brain, uh oh uh oh uh oh. She started to back away but, suddenly spry, he caught her between the two dirty denim legs that were strong and not at all like the legs of an old man. The legs squeezed just enough to show that they could squeeze harder if they wanted to.</i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Which is when the old man asked, "Does your Daddy pet you?"</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The CNN reporter asked how it could be that three women were held prisoner and tortured for so many years with no one in the perpetrator's family or the neighborhood knowing. Could anyone have done anything to stop this horror? One neighborhood guy tells the reporter that he had known Ariel Castro since junior high school, and he was stumped because he always thought Castro was a nice, outgoing person. "A very nice guy," he says. A very nice guy? What made him a very nice guy in this person's opinion? That he played salsa music on the porch and had barbecues? What did they talk about? Women? Sports? What did this guy see when he looked at Ariel Castro? </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The girl had no idea what the old man meant by "pet". "Yes," she said, unsure of the answer, blushing as she said it because she didn't understand what he was getting at. She was thinking of pets, of her cats back home, of caresses, of kindness which was what she was used to from her Daddy. "Yes," she said. And that was when the old man reached out and traced his big meaty hand from one small breast to the other one and then down between her thin legs. "I bet he does," said the old man.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The handsome anchor man clears his throat and says that Castro's former wife accused him of breaking her nose (twice), breaking her ribs, knocking out her teeth, cutting her, causing a cerebral hemorrhage, dislocating both shoulders, and threatening to kill her and her daughters. She received an order of protection against him which was later dropped, asserts the anchorman without elaborating further. She can't understand why someone who habitually assaults and injures people doesn't end up in jail. She wonders further why such a person was allowed to become a school bus driver. Why do the police, courts and schools avert their eyes from such crimes? How much damage do you have to do to another person before society has to put you in jail? How many times can you assault people and still qualify as a school bus driver? Is justice really <i>that</i> blind?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The T.V. reporter stands in front of the "house of horrors" and tells the TV camera that people saw Castro driving his bus around, parking near schools where he would try to "befriend" teenage girls and offer them rides home. In light of recent events, says the reporter, it is suspected that Castro was trawling for a fourth victim. </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The old man touched her there, there and there, where no one had ever touched her. The girl was no longer thinking; somewhere in the most primitive part of her brain an enormously strong survival instinct took over, and her skinny knee flew upward, jamming itself hard into the soft inside of the old man's thigh, making him grab at it instead of her. He howled and she jumped backwards as if she had springs on her feet. The old man clawed at her, shouting, but she was already loose and running, gulping the hot, dry air and running for the road. She lifted up the heavy old bike in one motion, fumbling for the peddles, pushing hard to get going. She heard the gravel crunching behind her, but she didn't look back. Pump pump pump. She rode like the wind.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Cleveland School District fired Castro for unprofessional behavior, but it did not investigate his strange activities further. She thinks how amazing it is that no one ever thought that that the bus driver might be a pedophile, that no one thought, here's a guy with opportunity. Maybe<i> he</i> knows what happened to little Gina? I mean, how amazing is it that he could he be in plain sight hunting for a new victim and yet remain completely invisible to a community whose girls had been disappearing?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Her mother took the girl to the town police precinct where they both sat in big old wooden chairs that smelled of rancid furniture oil. A very young policeman sitting behind a big old wooden desk asked the girl questions that he seemed to be reading from a script. He asked his questions in a neutral voice, one by one, without looking at her when she answered. The mother's face was taut and distracted during the interview; she appeared to be studying the wanted posters on the precinct wall, or checking the time on the big gun-metal gray wall clock. Looking at her mother's expression, the girl wondered if she were in trouble. She tried hard to answer each one of the policeman's questions correctly. In between questions, the big clock on the wall went tic-tic-tic, the second hand bouncing lightly just past the second and then back with each tic. Tic-tic-tic. The policeman asked the girl about location, time, and the appearance "of the suspect". Then, studying his paper as if he might burn holes in it with his eyes, he asked her, "Did the man have sexual contact with you?"</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She listens closely to Castro's neighbor Daniel Marti as he talks to the reporter. "It was happening right in front of our face, and we didn't even know," he says. Family came over sometimes, but Castro made them use the back door; when they asked to go upstairs, he would make excuses saying the house was too messy; then there was the abandoned bus, the child left trapped (<i>trapped!</i>) inside, and the troubles at work. Castro walked home regularly with huge bags of McDonald's take-out, states the reporter standing in front of the "house of horrors". Heck, we had barbecues on his front porch, says Charles Ramsay, the neighbor who finally freed Amanda when her heard her screaming behind the storm door. "My neighbor," says Ramsay referring to Castro, "you got some big testicles to pull this off, bro."</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>"Did the man have sexual contact with you?" repeated the young officer, still examining his paper. Her mother continued to study the wall. The world went completely silent and breathless; even the clock stopped ticking.</i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"No," said the girl.</i></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The clock started ticking again, and everyone breathed out and smiled. The girl's mother looked at her, smiling. The policeman, made a swift check on his piece of paper and looked up with a bright grin. "Okay", he said briskly, "I guess that's all I have!" That's how the girl knew that she was right to say "no", because everyone looked happier.</i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>But everything was not alright. Because the truth was that the girl had been sexually molested by an old pedophile who had probably molested other kids before, and would probably go on to molest more. The truth was that a dangerous man had tried to do something terrible to her. And she grew up with the secret of that awful event lodged in her brain like a worm; she learned to say that she was okay when she wasn't, and from that one event she learned to associate sexual feelings with fear and powerlessness. She wondered for years what would have happened to her if the old man had caught her and pulled her into that old car. But she was a lucky, lucky girl. Because she got away.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Michelle, Amanda, and Gina were not lucky girls, she thinks now as she watches the breaking news on CNN. While Ariel Castro gives his speech to the judge, the other men in the room cast their eyes down or look at a point in space somewhere just past him. Only tiny little Michelle has her eyes focused forward, her determined, broken little face shining with the triumph of a victor, snot and tears cascading off her nose. Castro looks straight at his first victim. Why does the judge let him look at her like that? Why don't the other men in the room at least raise their eyes to stare him down, to challenge him? Why, she wonders. Why does everybody look away?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She sits there for a long time staring at the TV screen. She wants to turn it off and go do something else but she has to keep watching. She has to hear every last awful detail. She will not avert her eyes from this. Because she knows better than anyone that it's when you look away that bad things happen.</span><br />
<br />Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-42389029659917809362013-04-22T14:23:00.000-04:002013-12-15T10:00:08.674-05:00American Dream, American Nightmare<div>
I am sitting in the balcony of The Lighthouse facing the Big River which today sparkles blue-gray, reflecting the Sunday sun in the little river hamlet of Milestone. I can see the ferry <i>Chicomacomico</i> returning for its 10 A.M. discharge of cars and trucks at Milestone Landing. The regularity of the ferry's comings and goings, and the slow, purposeful movements of its crew calm me, and give me a window into the practical and unhurried daily life of the Big River and its people. I am happy that no one I know got shot or blown up today.</div>
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The Boston Marathon was bombed yesterday. My childhood friend Amy lives four blocks from where they finally arrested the younger bomber, bleeding himself out in a boat. I found out where they had cornered him on my smart phone in the dark, empty parking lot of a Food Lion outside of Bethany Crossroads in down-east North Carolina. I sms'ed Amy, but got no response. Less than an hour later, after the capture, the streets of Boston erupted in chants of “USA, USA” and “Boston, Boston”, and shirtless young men grinned and flexed their muscles for the news cameras to film.<br />
<br />
The images were unseemly, uncomfortable, and completely unworthy of the suffering of the victims. It was too <i>loud</i>, too <i>proud</i>, too much like a sporting event. It was as if this life of ours in America were one awesome continental Super Bowl and that our team had won. There was no winning in Boston. There never is when reason is abandoned to violence. There was only the panicked applying of tourniquets to blasted flesh and bone, ruined lives and the professional, self-sacrificing work of public servants who speedily brought this incident to a bloody close. There are no winners at such “events”, so why all the cheering? Was this response related to why the bombing happened in the first place?</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s4QMXJr8KLI/UXVSdL6gb8I/AAAAAAAAAtg/wqO8SeLx4q8/s1600/Cummo_BostonCelebrates_007-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s4QMXJr8KLI/UXVSdL6gb8I/AAAAAAAAAtg/wqO8SeLx4q8/s1600/Cummo_BostonCelebrates_007-web.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boston men chanting "USA, USA" after capture of Bomber<br />
(photo: dailyfreepress.com)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
After 9/11, New York City became for me a steel and concrete trap where one day I felt I would wind up unhappy -- or dead. The smell of burning buildings and mass death had changed me and had shown me how vulnerable urban citizens are to anyone with a mind to destroy. But I had also seen a decline in the city environment's ability to support the lives of ordinary citizens on a day-to-day basis. I had seen young students of mine, dedicated to living in what they believe to be the center of the world, mortgage themselves to the hilt for the next 30 years in exchange for the possession of a 1-bedroom apartment in a sought-after neighborhood. I had seen a one-hour disruption of train or subway service turn large crowds into a dangerous, growling mass of fear and loathing. And I had not seen our "experts" devise or promote any major, creative solutions to this congestion, un-sustainability and un-livability. While I think rooftop gardens are lovely, I do not believe that they are going to save us from drowning in our own waste. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
So when I left New York, I was safely tucked into my husband's black truck with the last of my cardboard boxes containing my remarkably few souvenirs from 23 years of living in the city. I had turned the key in the lock of apartment 41 of 464 W. 152 Street Harlem for the very last time. I had smelled the dusty, gray perfume of those mud-colored mosaic floors and those humid plaster walls for the last time. I had felt beneath my feet for the last time the smooth surface of the pink marble risers worn down from a century of tired, black men and women trudging up the stairs with their sorrow and their bags of groceries. There was urgency to my movements, because I knew that the door that would allow me to escape from New York City was closing quickly. And I wanted out. Badly.<br />
<br />
We now know that after Boston, the bombers' next stop was to be New York City. I am glad they didn't follow through, but I am equally glad that I removed myself from the natural path of their homicidal hurricane. I worry sometimes that my sister is still there.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Years ago, a vigorous young red-headed student of mine said, “I have been in New York City for three years and I'm leaving before I make it to seven. If you don't leave New York before 7 years is up," he said, "you <i>never </i>leave.” Then and now, I found his words astonishingly mature for a 26 year old. Perhaps having cancer at 15 grows you up fast, but he was right and I took the lesson to heart. The city takes you like an alligator, and once you're in its grip for enough time, it pulls you into a death roll so slow and gradual that you barely know what's happening to you. You get used to filth. You get used to tough. You get used to the four flights of stairs and five block walk it takes to do your laundry. And it becomes impossible for you to believe that a life outside of the city limits is possible or desirable, just as for a prisoner it becomes eventually unbearable to live outside the walls of his cell.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
I rescued myself from that death roll by deciding to travel abroad. Becoming a troubadour, I went to sing in the bars and the cruise lines of Europe. And there, in the cold clean air of Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden and in the smoky, wine-stained venues of France, I woke up. I woke up from the illusion that New York was the center of the world. I learned that I could enjoy making music without any real hope of becoming famous or rich doing it, or eventually living in the clouds with the beautiful people to whom I had come so tantalizingly close when I worked at the big magazine. I learned all of that and more. Traveling through Europe with my guitar, I got over the American sickness of cultural narcissism and I enjoyed life for its ephemeral details, the moment to moment pleasure of simply living it.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xK5date3434/UXVU_L-UJMI/AAAAAAAAAtw/w6fVXN6VTGc/s1600/m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xK5date3434/UXVU_L-UJMI/AAAAAAAAAtw/w6fVXN6VTGc/s1600/m.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author with bandmates <br />
onstage in Berlin, Germany</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div>
In the smallest towns of Germany there were men who sat all night on a bar stool gazing in silence at me for hours as I sang to them the songs of Carol King, Paul Simon and Iron and Wine. Beer after beer, they quietly worked to resolve their own internal conflict between their attraction to rock and roll and me, and their fierce disapproval of the American Way. "You. Disney Land," they would remark enigmatically.<br />
<br />
They asked us about our lives in New York City, which was like Oz to them, a destination they considered beyond their ability to visit even for a short time. "Oh, New York! It is my dream", they would breathe. But it also happened sometimes that after passing the hat for the last time, a working man with a heavy gaze and a few too many pints in him would add 5 Euros to the tip jar and say to me in the slow, strong-accented tones of the German countryside, “You like Bush. Bush <i>ist </i>murder.” And in those moments, when I wanted to argue, to defend, to cheer for my team, I learned to practice silence. And I learned something equally important: That there is a universe of people who don't share my country's beliefs, values, or its feeling of "exceptionalism". Singing for my supper, I earned that scrap of humility that I had been unaware that I sorely, sorely lacked.<br />
<br />
I viewed my country from a distance during the awkward years of Bush the Second, through the eyes of working class Europeans. I didn't always agree with what they said about America in those smoky, beery nights in Bordeaux, Cologne, Paris, Helsinki and Berlin and all the little towns in between where we stopped to sings a few songs, pass the hat and sell a few CDs of our music. And we saw no irony yet in the "car bombs" (a shot of whisky dunked in a glass of Guiness) that our audience was eager to buy for us to see if they could get us smashed (which they sometimes did). But I did finally get it, really get it, that I had been living in a bubble that reflected only an distorted image of itself, and that I was woefully ignorant of the gritty, smelly realities of most of the rest of the world. Part of that distorted image was the American idea of what it really looks like to be a winner.<br />
<br />
Or a loser.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Returning to New York, I no longer fit it. Yes, of course I still fit into my little apartment with its view of the flat asphalt roof of the police station and the white towers of the City University a few blocks to the south. Indeed, I was overwhelmed by the space available to me in my four rooms in Harlem after four years of living from a suitcase with my guitar on my back. But what I didn't fit into anymore was the <i>illusion </i>of New York. I couldn't be party to that silent agreement that is perhaps the only thing that binds the wildly rich and the desperately poor there, which is the belief that New York City is the greatest place on earth. I could no longer pledge daily allegiance to the words of Sinatra that “If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere.” Now I saw a terrible death dance every day between the hunger for fame and the debilitating feeling of failure shared by the many millions who hadn't “made it” and never would. Take the illusion away and all winning was about was getting the big pile of hard cash and everything that flows from it. Take the illusion away, and the City just looks dirty. And I began to see that New York City was eating people, and that it found its casual snacks among the weakest of us, the low-hanging fruit. (Strange fruit, indeed.) If I could not make myself see fame and money as goals in themselves, then I would always be a stranger in New York City.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tGw3gldOyFY/UXVTLRrKxXI/AAAAAAAAAto/0MhYrYPt8XU/s1600/3295679-220x165.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tGw3gldOyFY/UXVTLRrKxXI/AAAAAAAAAto/0MhYrYPt8XU/s1600/3295679-220x165.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">River ferry, NC.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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During the time I have been writing these lines, the shadows on the balcony have shortened and the day is ripening toward mid-morning. The ferry <i>Cape Point </i>has arrived at the station and as the day grows older, more vehicles load the boat which will now head towards the military base in the piney forests across the Big River. What are these folks doing today? Are they going to have lunch with friends? Are they returning from morning services at one of the many tiny white clapboard churches that are scattered around these coastal woods? I know that down-eastern North Carolinians do not live for New York values, but rather to go fishing or hunting with their friends early in the morning, to go to church on Sundays and, afterwards, to enjoy a cold beer and a plate of shrimp and grits with their family. I know that for them, a nice clean trailer on a pretty piece of earth is a pretty fine way to live. I know that the chances are absolutely nil that a resentful youth in coastal Carolina who feels himself a loser will decide to blow up the ferry. And that will remain so as long as you can fish for free on this waterfront, feel the fresh breeze off the sound and go home to someone who loves you. Here, that makes you a winner.<br />
<br />
A young man lies in a hospital in Boston with a bullet hole in his neck having done something unimaginably awful, presumably mentored in his evil by his own older brother. Does he think about his dead brother now? The one they say he ran over with a car in his haste to escape the police who were shooting at him? That older brother who wanted and failed to achieve the dream of becoming one of the most American of things, a Golden Gloves champion? Will he ever consider that he may have gotten roped into this awful affair not for Allah, not for <i>jihad</i>, but rather to take revenge on the American society that denied his big brother his shiny American Dream? America had promised his older brother that if he bulked up enough and hit hard enough he would be a winner, and then it left him stranded on the shores of the worst of all American outcomes: Loss, anonymity and mediocrity. <br />
<br />
How do you live with the bitter pill of having lost your American Dream so early in life? Well, you might travel to another country to learn how to kill us. After all, such an option has been clearly marked out for you in living color and high-definition by numerous media outlets. And how many deaths does it take to compensate for a failure to win? How many bombs does it take to erase the horror of discovering that you're a loser at age 26? How many people's lives to do you have to destroy to prove that you're a man?<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
In Milestone, the ferry pulls out and makes a quick 180 with its single propeller. It heads cross-current to Cherry Point. And as the churning of the diesel engine fades, a calm falls on The Lighthouse. The tide, the birds, and the creaking of the old twisted oaks in the wind lull me and quiet my spirit. In this silence there is sense, there is peace, there is victory. In the exploding of bombs and the fist-pumping and shouting of the mob, there is none. </div>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-82519035434138534702013-02-24T09:58:00.001-05:002013-02-24T09:58:09.825-05:00The Weather Report from Milestone.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oeHCQNwCvxo/USonnrVkRqI/AAAAAAAAAks/TLYq0697jdg/s1600/IMG_20130224_070521.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oeHCQNwCvxo/USonnrVkRqI/AAAAAAAAAks/TLYq0697jdg/s320/IMG_20130224_070521.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Chicamacomico</i> at Milestone landing</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This <span lang="en-CA">morning</span>,
the <i>Chicomacomico </i>woke me from a deep sleep with the low frequency vibration of its big diesel
engine, powering down as it glided into the landing at Milestone. D O G heard and
came to tell me it was time, putting one paw on my arm and I got up, leaving my husband warm and curled up on his side of the bed.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The <i>Chicomacomico</i> does a lumbering, watery minuet with the <i>River Neuse</i> today. The
schedule is regular, so you know more or less what time it is here by
calculating the height of the sun and the arrivals and departure of
the ferry. The two flat boats with tall, slender pilot houses cross
each other mid-channel, moving vehicles across this widest section of
the Big River near where it elbows a degree or two northeast before it bells out into the Great Sound.
Both are about 275 gross ton ferries with a vehicle capacity of about
26 or less, depending on what kind of vehicles load on. Sometimes a
truck pulling another boat will make the trip, taking up three or
four vehicle's worth of deck space. But the car ferries are completely free, no matter what you're hauling, and they lace together the outer
and inner shore points, from the great web of inland waterway
out to the barrier islands that face the wide open sea.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I don't know what the <i>Chicomacomico</i>'s
doing here. Our wake up call usually comes from the <i>Floyd J.
Lupton</i>, a larger capacity ferry which plies these waters
regularly. The <i>Chicomacomico</i>'s traditional route is from
Hatteras to Okracoke, but apparently she's on loan to us, maybe
because the <i>Lupton</i>'s in for a seasonal over-haul. I wonder if
she came here with crew and Captain, or whether they just delivered
her into the hands of the usual crew. Which is more important?
Intimacy with the boat itself, or knowledge of the river?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
D O G and I go out for a walk at about 6:45.
This early-rising is a sign of my new maturity. I am willing (and
able) to haul myself out of bed this early to take him out for his
morning walkies where once moving around at such an hour would have been almost physically painful for
me. I can do it without coffee now. I wake, wipe the sleep from my
eyes, and pull on a soft old sweatshirt, chinos and some
broken down Nike Airs. It gives me pleasure to wear my old clothes,
and to pull a wool hat over my head in order to avoid brushing my
hair, even with my fingers. I hook D O G on his leash, and we head out the door.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
All D O G needs is one briny whiff of the outdoors and he's awake and wiggling down the stairs from the top of the Lighthouse, ready for
adventure. We get to the bottom, and I can feel how much we both
enjoy that first silent step onto the incredibly spongy coastal turf and the
sweet, balsam scent that rises from the soft, wet beds of pine needles. There's a light and bracing brininess to the cool mist and the air is still. The slight chill pouring in off the River is opening my eyes and bringing me gently to full
consciousness in the half-light of early morning. Every thing's gray, and what's not gray is a muted version of its normal color. We walk down to the
ferry landing to see what's going on.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The <i>Chicomacomico</i> does a slow
180 before sending up a black cloud of diesel and sliding bow-first into
the slip at Milestone. The <i>Lupton</i> doesn't do the flip, and
since I haven't ever been up in the wheel house, I'm not sure how it
accomplishes the trip from Point A to Point B on the Big River going
<i>backwards</i>. But these smaller vessels do the flip, and then
power down to glide into the dock making silent contact with the
cushioned pilings. The crew drops the metal gangway and it clanks onto
land. Then there's the shout “<i>UN</i>-load!”. I am startled. It's the
first human sound I've heard today. Two cars and one truck bump-bump
over the gangway onto the reassuring solidity of the Ferry's asphalt
lot and, once all three vehicles have disappeared west down the
highway and into the pines, D O G and I turn to leave. That'll be all for the traffic in Milestone for the next 45 minutes or so.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I feel satisfied to have held
off on the pleasure of the first sip of hot coffee that awaits me back home.<br />
<br /></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_jGns9_lhAI/USonoi1jyQI/AAAAAAAAAk0/thCxW3VR_Gs/s1600/IMG_20130224_070611.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="203" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_jGns9_lhAI/USonoi1jyQI/AAAAAAAAAk0/thCxW3VR_Gs/s320/IMG_20130224_070611.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gray morning and ducks on Big River, Milestone.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-5970402676976594712012-12-22T11:14:00.002-05:002013-12-14T20:54:35.892-05:00Advent at the End of the World<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Some say the world will end in fire,<br />Some say in ice.<br />From what I've tasted of desire,<br />I hold with those who favor fire.<br />But if it had to perish twice<br />I think I know enough of hate<br />To say that for destruction ice<br />Is also great<br />And would suffice.</span></i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">- Robert Frost </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Advent
has come, and along with it the end of the world. Again. FF, Dog and I are spending this apocalypse at the
Lighthouse, our secret hideaway here on a high bluff overlooking the Big River in Milestone, not far from Bethany Crossroads in inter-coastal, down east North Carolina. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is not the
famous Outer Banks, where jet-setters go
to build million-dollar mansions and pursue the pleasures of yachting,
deep water fishing and the perfect tan. These are the Inner Banks, a
sheltered system of islands, rivers, creeks, bays, inlets and peninsulas
that spread across the North Carolina coast like an irregularly woven fisherman's net. This is where the Appalachian waters filter into into the Sound before finally losing themselves in
the Ocean. This is a place that feels as far from the center of things as you can
get and still be able to find a hardware store.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d32kbp0-t30/UNPYEop0ZGI/AAAAAAAAAgI/yIsuiLr7xkA/s1600/BigRiverSunset.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d32kbp0-t30/UNPYEop0ZGI/AAAAAAAAAgI/yIsuiLr7xkA/s400/BigRiverSunset.JPG" height="400" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Big River, by R. Taylor Monk</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Inner Banks are our new secret spot. Now and going forward, this will be
our place for going deeper, for thinking and meditating, for writing, for the solitary thinking work that can't seem to get done even in quiet
Piedmont. Milestone, where our place is, is further away from New York City than the
map shows, and if the end of the world is today, I am glad to be here at land's end to greet it.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Quick investigation reveals that the Inner Banks are mostly inhabited
by Carolinians, the majority of them farming and fishing people of
humble means who are permanent residents. Even the seasonal and sporting folk that come here are
mostly from the Carolinas, and they have their pleasure boats docked in marvellous, hidden marinas that are tucked up into the land like watery diverticula on the Big River. Houses and cabins are passed from generation to generation. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here people of any sort are blessedly few. Milestone, with its stretches of white
sand river beaches, twisty live oaks and wind-tortured pines has a
population of only 300 or so souls, and no town center. Just
inland, Bethany Crossroads shelters 556 men, women and children in its piney
groves and extensive tilled fields, and it lies along a curvy stretch
of paved Croatan Indian trail that features five blood-curdling turns and at least as many small, private cemeteries. There is one
market in Bethany Crossroads, one restaurant, one charter school, one post
office and three churches of different denominations. In these
parts, the love of God and guns is great.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Milestone is at land's end, and is part of an extensive and economically poor county that boasts only two traffic lights. All we have here is the ferry launch, a locksmith, a
marine engineer's shop, a bait and tackle shop, a brick town hall that looks like somebody's granny's house, and a boarded-up commercial building on our corner that used to be a gas station but more recently was The Sunset Café. There's a country club here that appears to be the preserve mostly of folks from the bigger cities inland. And there are some summer camps in Milestone, too, but
they sit silent and empty most of the year. In short, for most of the calendar year, we are among
the very few people not from here that can find any reason to come to Milestone at all. Now you know about as much about the place as I do, which isn't much. We're new here. We'll learn.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The
Lighthouse is my name for our place because it sits high on a bluff
overlooking a sandy beach at a bend in the Big River which has the distinction of being the widest stretch of river in North America. Our place is tower-like, and therefore enough like a real lighthouse to warrant the name, and anyway I always wanted to live in a lighthouse since I was small. I like to turn our balcony light on at night and pretend that passing sailors are comforted and kept safe by the small, yellow lamp. From our high perch we also overlook the Milestone Ferry, and our days pass to the rhythm of its
comings and goings and the thrumming of the big diesel engine
which starts up at 5:30 in the morning and goes quiet just
past midnight. If it weren't for the activity at the ferry and the occasional
private plane buzzing low overhead to the tiny airport across the
river at Sandy Point, there would be little noise here at all except the nearly constant blowing of the wind. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mD4PGQQu-L8/UNTe2L4Dg2I/AAAAAAAAAgo/PfKoCF2oJvY/s1600/IMG_20121219_111812.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mD4PGQQu-L8/UNTe2L4Dg2I/AAAAAAAAAgo/PfKoCF2oJvY/s400/IMG_20121219_111812.jpg" height="400" width="298" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Soldier and Guardian Angel from the art bins at</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Lowes, downeast, NC.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Advent is upon us, and today is the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar. The last time FF and I greeted the end of the world it was in a Greek Diner in Virginia Beach, before Dog came to live with us. This time we will greet the apocalypse resting and doing the solitary work of introspection that the season requires. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
The end of the world came early last week for a classroom full of children and their teachers in Sandy Hook, CT, and it made me so sad and tired inside just thinking of the fear and the sorrow and the hot gunfire, and the incomprehensible coldness inside of some people. The end of the world comes every day for around 150,000 people by various means both natural and unnatural, but another 220,000 are born, too. So in the long, long life of the Big River, perhaps we people seem rather like an itch it can't seem to get rid of, always more of us creeping up on its shores. Are there already too many of us human beings? And has the tipping point been reached at which our sheer numbers, arrogance, evil ways and failure to grasp our correct place in universe has shifted the planet irrevocably in the direction of real apocalypse? If we have no mercy for each other, what mercy can we expect of God and Nature?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
Dog has no existential questions that I am aware
of. FF and I each ponder our own questions, those matters
of identity and purpose that sometimes occupy the minds of people who
have passed the half century mark and think perhaps a tad too much. At the Lighthouse we are companionable and unintrusive. He writes over there,
I write over here. Dog, sensibly, sleeps.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">FF and I are older now, but our species is still so very new. The Big River is old. All
that lives and breathes on these shores even since the heydays of the
Croatan and Lumbee nations is just a speck of dust in the eye of the
Big River. Births, deaths, loves, losses, suffering and joy, all
those things that are big to us now are trivial and unimportant to the
river. For it, there is only water moving from the mountains to the
ocean. For it, there is no search for meaning. And we human creatures who fuss and bother about our houses, boats, families, money, guns, religions and existential questions are as gnats to the Big River which is eternal and imperturbable.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">During Advent I like to face my search for purpose head on, and while I sort through what I have done and
what I have left undone, and the Big River is never far from my sight. Even at 52, I wonder what I should become and while I wonder, the river is there. While I struggle to write these sentences, to make sense,
the river is there. And if I were to
truly model myself on the Big River, perhaps I would never write
another word. What if I were to find my own ocean and pour myself into it again and again? Is it possible for a woman to become like a river? </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Last night there was a storm. The wind blew hard, and the rain pelted the Lighthouse in buckshot sheets. The river doesn't mind heavy weather and it keeps on rolling along. But FF and I huddled together last night with Dog curled up at the foot of the bed as the temperature dropped and the wind raised its voice to a howl, and we registered with mild trepidation each tremor that passed through the Lighthouse's wooden beams. We just held each other quietly in the darkness, waiting for the storm to pass, waiting for the sky to clear, waiting for the sun to come out again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-2671713584535552422012-11-04T14:44:00.002-05:002012-11-04T14:48:23.989-05:00Swept AwayMy extended absence from this blog would make it seem as if my breakup with New York were complete. Things have demanded my attention: the election, my business, the fall planting, and an array of time-consuming personal matters that demand more attention as the years pass. Principally, though, the urge to do write about you, New York, deserted me as FF and I passed our one year anniversary here in Piedmont. After 28 years, New York, you'd think it would take me longer to get over us, wouldn't you?<br />
<div>
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<div>
Am I over us?<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q4ewQBzAIL0/UJah3K4ePeI/AAAAAAAAAb8/lk45Tyfa0I4/s1600/403378_10151490738316982_553977012_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="265" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q4ewQBzAIL0/UJah3K4ePeI/AAAAAAAAAb8/lk45Tyfa0I4/s1600/403378_10151490738316982_553977012_n.jpg" title="Rainbow over Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2012/11/to-market-to-market-the-job-fairy-helps-you-land-your-next-job/">Tenured Radical</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I felt keenly vulnerable in my last years as a resident of New York City. I knew what it was to watch a skyscraper crumble, a subway line flood, a mischief of rats storm up the A Train platform to escape the fire and fumes of downtown. I knew what it was to bend myself double against a winter blast, ten times harsher and colder than normal because of the glass canyons of midtown. I knew the desperation of walking more than 100 blocks in summer heat to get home when the transportation system shut down. People weren't made to live like that, I thought. I wasn't made to live like that. And what pretty pipe dream of fame and fortune is worth that much trouble, anyway? Why endure it? Just to say I live in New York City?<br />
<br />
As Hurricane Sandy pummeled the Northeast last week, here in Piedmont we were sitting pretty. Cozied up here in the folds of these ancient hills, we were spared and are spared the worst weather most of the time. Hurricanes rarely penetrate deep enough inland to threaten, and the scattering of tornadoes seem to come to a cartoon-ish, screeching halt at RTP. Sometimes it rains a lot, but our abundance of fragrant balsam forests handle the water pretty well, except in those spots where developers have been too imprudent in their love affair with concrete. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Last week, FF and I noted that we still had our preparations from hurricane Irene pretty much in place: The baker's shelf of canned goods, the lantern, lamp oil, flashlights and batteries, the Coleman stove and bottled gas, and the gallons of bottled water. This time, we added sandbags, filled and stacked neatly against the cellar door, and a backup sump pump and a manual pump just in case of power outage. Seasoned firewood was stacked cozily in the garage, the patio furniture stowed in the crawl space and, thus prepared, we waited. But we didn't have to break into our stores for Sandy and we merely passed several cold, gray days watching the hurricane gather itself, follow the train tracks north, and then punch you, New York City, right in the <i>schnozz.</i></div>
<div>
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<div>
When FF and I left New York for the last time a year and a half ago, having dropped the key to my Harlem apartment with a clatter into the mailbox, we passed over the George Washington Bridge and I felt a tug at my heart as we made our way to the mainland, the lights of Riverside Drive receding in the rear view mirror. But beyond the nostalgia, I felt an urgent sense that I was getting out just in the nick of time. And when the apartment finally sold and I pulled my last material assets out of the city, I experienced a breathless feeling as one might if a nightmare magically resolved itself and that dream suitcase you had been trying to pack was finally packed, or the dream person you couldn't find was finally found, or whatever anxiety-charged situation you were facing in your sleeping life suddenly morphed into a nice dream from which you woke up, warm and smiling in your own bed. I felt as if I had cheated fate when I got out of New York City without suffering heavy losses, like a person who had the presence of mind to leave the casino with a few dollars still in his pockets.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This feeling of having escaped in the nick is not something I've talk about with almost anyone. It's not a conversation I imagine that my old friends, who still see the City as the center of the worthwhile universe, would want to have with me. I lived through 9/11 there, and I experienced first-hand what it's like when things go very, very wrong in that huge Rube Goldberg device called Manhattan, and I know how hard it is to make it work again. I was there in hurricane Gloria in 1985 which, though it didn't hit the city head on, caused the evacuation of all the high rises. I'll never forget fighting my way in to work that day because I was new on the job, and finding no one on the darkened 32nd floor of the Time and Life Building except my obsessive compulsive boss, reading the Times in the yellow glow of a desk lamp, and the big plate glass windows shimmying so fast in the wind that they rang like bells. I've been in floods, snowstorms, blackouts and pretty much everything that could go wrong in a big city except invasion by zombies, and when the chance presented itself to opt for a less disaster-prone environment, I leaped at it and into the waiting arms of my beloved FF, who never trusted the place, anyway.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Sandy with and her peak 80 mph sustained winds doesn't come close to matching The Long Island Express of 1938. Sandy was a big fat, wet storm, but she wasn't nearly as powerful as the storm of '38 that killed nearly 700 people in the New York City area and changed the topography of Long Island forever. But it's possible that when all the numbers are added up that Sandy will be the more expensive date, not only in terms of dollars but also for the cultural losses. Coney Island is a muddy memory now, and Staten Island a place of homelessness and death. Out in the Rockaways, fire and water consumed communities that had already suffered airplane crashes in the last decade, and had lost nearly 300 people in 9/11. The word "apocalypse" has been used a lot for Sandy, and such low-lying places as these cannot help but continue to be victimized as changing climate, urban congestion and global political unrest heighten indefinitely. </div>
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Idiots and heroes were in abundance on TV this week, making me hoot and weep as I watched you take it in the teeth, New York City. I fumed angrily at the story of the man who refused to open his door to a woman in distress with two little boys who later drowned. My heart swelled in admiration for a man who rescued his 81 year old mother from her flooded house with only waders and a surf board as equipment. And yesterday, somebody put up a YouTube featuring the whole Lower East Side cheering for about 15 minutes all up and down First Avenue and beyond because the electricity was finally back on. And at that moment I had a pang of missing you, New York. I actually missed being part of that cheering crowd that had spent the last five days dealing together with the miserable cold, the food rotting in the refrigerator and no hot showers. Briefly, I felt as if I were missing the main event. Will I ever know such difficulties again? Will I ever know such triumph? Are the highs you offer worth the insane lows you inflict?<br />
<br />
25 years in New York and I was never convinced that I was a real New Yorker. I felt most like a New Yorker when I was somewhere else, on a stage singing in Germany, or working a cruise ship. "You're from New York? Wow!" the Europeans would say, a glimmer of admiration in their eyes. But it felt good to bask in your reflected glory, good to accept that prize of specialness that being from New York (undeservedly) gave me. Back home, though, I lived in Harlem where I was nicknamed Snowflake and where I was never really an accepted member of the Harlem club. Neither in the other neighborhoods where I lived did I ever feel like a New Yorker truly, nor did I understand what truly linked New Yorkers to each except the capacity to endure insult after insult, and a tireless belief that maybe one day they would "make it". Or at least know someone who did.<br />
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Here in Piedmont, life is smooth. The mountains are old and round, the rivers are many, the forests are big and the coast is long. I know already that I'll never really belong to this place any more than I did in New York City. But I have adopted Piedmont wholeheartedly as the place I will likely spend the rest of my life, and I hope I can offer it something while I'm here. Carolinians are not, in the main, interested in far-fetched ideas of glory, power or drama. They like to be outdoors, enjoy the back porch, watch the seasons pass, and they are known for making things with their hands that take patience, like guitars and quilts. Carolina smells good, and the beauty outweighs the ugly by a long shot. These old mountains don't care about roller-coaster highs and lows: they are the face of eternity and the glory of nature, and are unconcerned with the self-glorification of mankind.<br />
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As they say here, there may be something better somewhere, but this is as good a place as any to wait for better to come along. So I can't imagine a true Carolinian ever feeling, as I did for a brief moment this week, that I should have been in New York City, not in this peaceful place, when a bunch of cold, dirty, tired New Yorkers cheered in the streets just because the lights came on.<br />
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Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-9628077497788880432012-02-26T09:56:00.000-05:002014-01-08T21:17:39.356-05:00Invasive Species<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><i>The terms "alien", "exotic", and "introduced" have slightly different meanings but generally are used interchangeably to refer to plants which are not native. Some exotic species are vigorous growers which are displacing our native plant and animal species, hence the term "invasive". (<a href="http://www.ncwildflower.org/invasives/invasives.htm">North Carolina Native Plant Society</a>)</i></span></span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">I am eliminating English ivy from my yard. Honeysuckle and wisteria, too. The poison ivy is dismissed with prejudice, though not without guerrilla counterattacks from its side. My all-out war on invasive plants has raised some eyebrows, especially among my Northern friends who are used to being grateful that <i>anything</i> survives the winter in their yards. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoiaGah0WlDJhA39jK2ajH02sCMj2btKu5tFjooC7eeN-scsD5a-2NUfXwIHl9KHpJwb6dZScNzViY4z4Xn6C5zp_yHHDI1qvICiE9B7sinX6peraaaHMYleWtb_gHCQv5iKQ0SP-mAPA/s1600/north_carolina_state_bird_and_flower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoiaGah0WlDJhA39jK2ajH02sCMj2btKu5tFjooC7eeN-scsD5a-2NUfXwIHl9KHpJwb6dZScNzViY4z4Xn6C5zp_yHHDI1qvICiE9B7sinX6peraaaHMYleWtb_gHCQv5iKQ0SP-mAPA/s320/north_carolina_state_bird_and_flower.jpg" height="315" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The North Carolina state flower and bird. </td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">"Ruth has a </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>beautiful</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> wisteria," sniffed Ann when I told her. "She </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>prunes</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> it <i>carefully</i>, of course. You have to take </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>care</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> of them," she added with emphasis, as if I were simply remiss, as if it were my personal <i>failure</i> that had caused these thigh-sized vines to wind around the oaks until they screamed for help. The wisteria </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>alone</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> had pretty near overwhelmed every native variety in our small forest, including the noble pines, some boxwood, native hollies and azalea and an established stand of Camellia sasanqua. What the wisteria hadn't gotten, the ivy and honeysuckle were in the process of finishing off. I could hear their low munching sounds. It horrified me.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">I grew up on Ivy Lane. I went to an Ivy League college. I have warm associations with the vigorous, glossy leafed </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><i>hedera helix</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Now I am its worst enemy.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">The Federal Government declares Feb. 26 to March 3 (contemporaneous with my birthday) <a href="http://www.nisaw.org/">Invasive Species Awareness Week</a>, and I am celebrating by learning all I can about how to restore my little piece of Paradise here in Piedmont to its native glory. But I am doing some thinking about how far I am willing go with this restoration project. For instance, I recently found out that periwinkle <i>(</i>vinca, both major and minor) is an invasive species, too, so if I were a purist I would be ripping it up by the roots along with the ivy. I am not. I like its tiny lavender-blue blossoms, the first to bring color to the spring. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">And what to do about the well-established Japanese holly, the big-hipped English holly, the arms-akimbo Syrian fig and the delicate Japanese laurel? What about the marvelous crape myrtle, emigrant from the India that seems to do so well here? </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">All are clearly illegals in a native garden. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">But we love the smooth, fleshy trunk of the myrtle and its long-lasting raspberry colored blooms which stay from spring to the end of fall. Indeed, I recently and gleefully accepted a specimen of the latter from a neighbor and plopped it into a space which I had cleaned of....wisteria.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">So you see, the business of eschewing the non-native in favor of the native is not so simple. Favorites are played, rules are stretched. And while it's easy enough to muster an attack on poison ivy, nobody can get hot and bothered about a pretty little crape myrtle that offers a nice puddle of shade by the patio and blooms for half the year. Can they?</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">So what to do. After pondering the matter for a while, I decided that my policy would be as follows: True invasives, the murderers of the plant world, will be destroyed, though it may take years to do so; exotics may stay; and from now on, only natives will be brought into our near acre of Paradise. The only exception to the latter will be food plants in the vegetable garden and the few fruit trees. Not growing tomatoes, that sweet Aztec jewel, would be just plain self-denying. Anyway, Central America is still America, right? Right?</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">But last week, I was smitten by an anise tree: It's long, dark green leaves smelling faintly of licorice, it's dark red buds...I could not help myself, I bought it. It is from Japan. And the big, broad-shouldered Delaware Valley azalea in 10 gallon pots I bought (<i>too good a deal to pass up!</i>)? The same genus but not the same clan as our lacier, fuzzier-leaved native azalea. And what of that coral pink quince that I covet? Japanese, Japanese, all Japanese!</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Again, I ask you: What to do? It sounds great to say native garden, as George Washington did way back when he planned the gardens at Mount Vernon keeping them 100% American, or so they say. It's another thing </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">to confine oneself to the indigenous</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> in the 21st century, when so many lovely foreign varieties are perfectly naturalized, inoffensive and oh-so available, and the selection of true natives is so very slim.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">So -- My revised immigration policy for my tiny kingdom is currently as follows: </span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">True invasives, the assassins of the plant world, will be eliminated with prejudice.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Foreign plants who are naturalized, well-established and do not harm other plants may stay.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Plants that are annual and produce food may come on a seasonal basis, though they are to be confined to specific areas (for their own good) and they are not invited to seed themselves here. </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Plants that are native receive priority for land resources, and those natives who have lost their footing due to the depredations of the invasives will be given subsidies to re-establish themselves. </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Specific funding will be targeted to reclaiming land for the fern, ginger, phlox tribes and other blooming ephemerals, and I will help them to establish small communities in forested areas. I consider such horticultural affirmative action to be both necessary and desirable for the overall health of the land.</span></li>
</ul>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">So what have I learned so far? </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">For one thing, carefully planned plant immigration is not only possible but also desirable. After all, while our native dogwood is lovely and graceful in its short blooming time, only the Asian myrtle offers that wash of lipstick pink that lasts and lasts like the Energizer Bunny. Also</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">, as I slowly clear and pick encrusted bits of plastic, glass, mop heads, broken bathroom tiles and even a metal file cabinet from my soil, I've learned</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> that it's a lot easier and cheaper to destroy an environment than it is to build it back right. But there's enormous satisfaction in taking on the job.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Now I feel that little tickle in my mind, that familiar Utopian wiggle in my step as I stride out to the forest, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">putting my back, time and money into the reconstruction of this earthly little slice of Piedmont Paradise.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span>Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1637124212160373071.post-19641362914046658362011-12-30T22:32:00.001-05:002012-01-01T17:19:05.838-05:00D O G<br />
He stands four-square, his big head slightly lowered, floppy ears akimbo and his great dark eyes tilted up, focused entirely on me.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">D O G</td></tr>
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"Come!" I command, in the sharp authoritarian tone of voice I've been taught to use by the professional trainers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Now, again, in a slightly higher tone, "Come, Carter, <i>come</i>!" And I crouch a bit, arms wide, a big smile on my face. Oh, that gets his engine running! Here he comes, galloping straight at me, thinking no words, expecting no thing: Perfect enthusiasm and trust on four legs.<br />
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"Goodoggoodoggoo<i>daaawg</i>," I enthuse, rubbing his head, his shoulder blades, his broad white chest. "<i>gooooood</i>dog!"<br />
Carter is my first dog.<br />
<br />
He is not my husband FF's first , though. FF was brought up with dogs, had dogs in his previous marriage, and indeed has certain dog characteristics himself, all of them positive, like loyalty and razor sharp intuition about how I am feeling in any given moment. How did the word 'dog' come into negative use in modern parlance anyway? It's a usage based on sexual politics and invented, I believe, by people who don't understand dogs and are apt to abuse them. Thanks to Carter, to me the word 'dog' is synonymous with the word 'good'.<br />
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I spotted him on a flyer in one of our local diners and was mysteriously and immediately attracted to his big black nose and huge dark eye sockets. A few days later, I was overwhelmed with emotion as I sat on the floor of his foster family's apartment with all 48 pounds of him seductively curled in my lap, leaning his great heavy skull against mine, breathing and snuffling into my ear. I was utterly taken by him as I have rarely ever been taken by another living being, with no words exchanged, only a kind of Super Soul Meet in which I understood that this creature was utterly innocent and one hundred percent good. When we returned to our car that night without him, I burst into tears: There was no other option than that Carter should come to live with us.<br />
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Carter is about a year and a bit old. He was rounded up by Animal Control here in Piedmont, lived in an Animal Control shelter for a while, and then was boarded by a foster family for six months. He owes his life to an unbroken chain of generous humans who quietly fought for him and believed that he ought to keep on living. He has had three names in the course of his short existence, so we let him keep the last one they gave him to spare him more changes. He's good-looking and smart, and we can't quite figure out how it is that he managed to stick around without being adopted for almost six months: He was waiting, apparently, for us. He was waiting for me.<br />
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Carter is a great dog; he is also a clear sign of my successful breakup with New York. It would have been both impractical and also unkind to keep this jumping, running, digging tribute to animal grace in a fourth floor walk-up apartment. Furthermore, we never would've found a dog like Carter in New York City: this mix-up of Akita, bull terrier, and typical Southern hound dog is a product of the liberal propagation of dog genes that occurs only in wider spaces and warmer climates. Carter, FF, this house and this garden are the tap roots I am sinking down, the visible artifacts of a decision made to become part of this place that is so very far away from the winter cold of Tiny Town, so very far from the hard, punishing surfaces of Manhattan where I strove for so many years. I look around me at the evidence of the work we've been doing here in the house and on the property and I know I've made some intelligent decisions lately.<br />
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I hear Carter's trademark shake in the other room: 7, exactly 7, shakes of the head and body that make his dog tags jingle-jangle. He's letting us know he's on the move, making sure where we are, checking what's going on outside. During these last two and a half months of forming our pack of three, Carter has come to see FF and me as his leaders, the givers of all good things, of all correction and praise. He wakes us in the morning, and he doesn't go to bed until he knows we've retired too, no matter how sleepy he is. He greets us when we return home with sustained enthusiasm evident in every tensed and quivering muscle that wants to jump up but has learned not to; he follows us down to the TV room at night, curling up between us and falling into a contented sleep. He knows what good is: praise, food, sleep, running, digging, sunshine, play, being together with the pack.<br />
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They say dogs don't think. Not like you and I do, anyhow. But Carter thinks and I know he does because we watch him trying to decide if he's going to obey a command he knows -- or not; we see him design squirrel catching strategies of different types and then modify them when they don't work; and his quick cleaving to our daily routines shows me his brain is working just fine. What he <i>doesn't </i>do is worry about tomorrow, dwell on the yesterday or have moral dilemmas. Training him requires me to be aware of his enviably straightforward world view, and be utterly connected to what can be understood <i>without </i>language; no assumptions can be made, consistency and clarity are the foundation of our relationship. Carter gives me big clues about how I might be a better friend and a better person.<br />
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Carter is also, oddly enough, helping me to become a better language teacher. In the first month or so of training him, I had regular epiphanies about how to work better with my students and I started to emphasize techniques I was using with Carter in my work with the human students. Among these techniques are:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Be consistent.</li>
<li>Smile a lot.</li>
<li>Repeat a lot.</li>
<li>Always reward good performance clearly.</li>
<li>Always indicate poor performance clearly.</li>
<li>Make sure the rules of the game are clear.</li>
<li>Don't make the game too complex.</li>
<li>Treat each element of a complex game as a skill in itself and practice it separately.</li>
<li>Don't play any game for too long.</li>
<li>Use body language carefully and with purpose.</li>
<li>And <i>be</i> <i>consistent.</i></li>
</ul>
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I already knew these ideas from 20-plus years of teaching, but Carter is helping me become more careful still because, unlike my human students who have an ego involvement in trying to be<i> right</i>, he invariably and shamelessly shows me immediately when I've screwed up as a teacher. Watching him, I've become more alert to my students' expressions and body language to figure out when I need to make an adjustment.<br />
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Carter is out in the yard now, enjoying the bright Piedmont sun, still trying to catch a squirrel. It's been two and half months and he hasn't caught one yet, but still he tries. I wonder at his optimism, his ability to remain stock still for as much as 15-20 minutes. Soon, I'll go out and we'll play a game in the backyard, and once again his doggy world will blend with my human one, each soul become finer for the time spent together.<br />
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Come, Carter, come! Good dog.<br />
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<br />Dorothy Potter Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15437027506822572629noreply@blogger.com2