https://connect.garmin.com/page/profile/minprofile.faces?displayName=KarlJH

https://connect.garmin.com/page/profile/minprofile.faces?displayName=KarlJH

Home From Virginia

We have been home from Virginia for a week now and are starting to get back into our routine, if you can ever get back to a routine after a great event. Visiting Virginia and the surrounding area was a great event to me. Other than getting to spend time with my daughter and son-in-law and seeing the growth in my grandchildren after almost two years, getting to see D.C., Gettysburg, and Washington and Lee University was fabulous!

It was so exciting to see places I have read about for almost 60 years. Getting to walk battlefields that Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and Custer walked was amazing. Walking on the streets that Lincoln, Jefferson, and Madison walked was moving beyond compare. And to see the great monuments we have built to honor them was exciting. And to do it with my grandchildren can not be topped.

We were also lucky enough to be guided around the campus of Washington and Lee University by our beautiful granddaughter.

All in all a good trip.

Enough By Katie Peterson

Poem of the Day: Enough BY KATIE PETERSON So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers, scattered, you'd say, if there weren't so many everywhere, as many as the stars last night in between the branches above the porch, behind the house. Was it an argument or were there just things they had to say? I could have faith in so many creatures— the old setter from the neighbor yard who follows me around the corner and no longer, the chick with its new beak just past breakable whose lighter top feathers have a bit of flight, any mother bear— you say things and the next day it's like they don't matter, we want our faces to alter though we don't want to get older, neither do we want to get younger, repetition with less knowledge is ridiculous, just ask the Greeks, you get to keep being a tree but without the branch that showed the sky your starlike shape? I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful, but my loyalty loves a form that will follow me through changes. At a diagonal the dark woods on the back slope have enough space to walk between, not enough to hide. He looks into them and writes notes to his mother, she looks into them and finds alignment, or looks for what she wants. She has a human skeleton on her desk. He has a protractor. I had wishes for both of them yesterday but the weather has become so kindly, so temperate, I forget what blessings they don't think they have. Katie Peterson, "Enough" from The Accounts. Copyright © 2013 by Katie Peterson.  Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Source: The Accounts (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Flickers

I think Flickers are the most beautiful birds that fly into our backyard. the flash of red that you see when they are landing or taking-off, the red under their tail that is visible while they are perched on a limb, and the slash of black across their throat is unmatched by the others. We have two or three pairs that stay here year round to take advantage of the suet we place out for them and the woodpeckers. They are one of the reasons that I am reluctant to ever move from here even though I would sure love to live in a warmer climate.

Democracy and Nobility | The Weekly Standard

Democracy and Nobility | The Weekly Standard

Flicker by the Weather Vane

We feed a lot of birds in our yard, but my favorite is the Northern Flicker. They stay the whole year, raise their young, and fly with their beautiful flicker of red.

If you weren’t born in Seattle or the Northwest, you’ll never be one of us | Pacific NW | The Seattle Times

If you weren’t born in Seattle or the Northwest, you’ll never be one of us | Pacific NW | The Seattle Times