Anne of Green Gables and Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn

A random set of thoughts: when I was walking today I was thinking of Anne of Green Gables as I often do. It was probably the most influential of the books I read as a child and being a total book worm, I read a LOT of books. I read adult literary classics right alongside girlhood favorites like Nancy Drew, and Cherry Ames-Student Nurse. But the one that touched my heart and influenced my life was Anne of Green Gables. Her profound response to the natural world matched my own. Her attempts to do the right thing even though they sometimes went awry matched my own. I realized with Anne of Green Gables that I wasn't odd or singular and that there were others in the world with a similar set of aspirations and sensitivities. Anne of Green Gables has walked through my long life with me. I am so glad I visited Nova Scotia twice although both times I was with a male companion who was captaining the expedition and so despite my desire, we didn't visit Prince Edwar Island. Nonetheless, I got the feel of the air and sky and sea from my visits.

Of course, being a girl in the last half of the twentieth century, I read the boyhood books as well as the girl books. So I read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and in fact, most if not all Mark Twain's novels, although some of them were completely incomprehensible to me like A Connecticut Yankee i King Arthur's Court. But those boys, Huck and Tom, never reached my heart in any meaningful way and I never think of them now even though I have watched the film versions of the books as well.

It seems to me in some profound way, these two novels of youth represent the female and male worlds even through the vast stretch of time and change from when they were written to now - something more on the psychological level. And if I were in a literary program, I think I might want to explore this relationship. Anne of Green Gables still has spin-offs appearing on streaming tv services and has perhaps had more film inte rpretations that Tom Sawyer or Hickleberry Finn. Maybe women cling more to the literature of their childhood than men do. In fact, I knew very few boys who read for pleasure, neither of my brothers, for instance and non of the boys I knew in the neighborhood or in school. It wasn't until college and the literature program that I was in that I met young men who loved books and wanted to talk about them. That was a revelation and a joy!

Anyhow since this literary pondering wasinsisting on being put down somewhere, here it is.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

UnDo It update - Day 2 Aug. 4, 10:00 a.m.

Well, a small victory and a small defeat (so far) I did manage our walk to Martin's Lake and I went with a neighbor who often walks with me and Uma, my Lab. I did NOT get to the gym, at least not yet. One of the reasons I was so keen on trying this Ornish program was because I have been having a symptom for about a year - a queasy stomach in the morning, often before I awaken and it is pronounced enough that it wakes me up. I googled it and the result was probable low blood sugar. I am still trying to figure out what to eat or drink and when to eat or drink it. But I hoped that if I followed the program, I might be able to ward off diabetes if that is the cause of the nausea.

By the way, the grocery shopping that I did yesterday only cost a total of $40. I will make the salad again today for lunch because I am determined to have fresh vegetables EVERY day for the 8 week program.

Also, I had hoped to get to the gym today to help raise my daily step count which, yesterday, by the end of the day was 3300 and I am aiming for 5000. Today, the park is only 1500; it is a half mile park and takes about 30 minutes at my glacial pace. Because I have arthritis in my feet, knees and hips and a bad back, I walk very slowly. Also I have to be careful walking because of my eyesight problems, one issue is I can't see depth properly, so a crack in the sidewalk can be a fall for me if I am not slow and careful. My back holds up just enough to make it around Martin's Lake which makes this walk perfect for this stage in my fitness attempt.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A New Start - Dr. Dean Ornish's book - UnDo It! Tracking my progress

Yesterday I began to listen to Dr. Dean Ornish's new book UnDo It! about reversing and preventing chronic diseases. I was familiar with his Reversing Heart Disease book and I was hoping this new book would get me back on the track to improving my health and mobility.

For 3 days, I have done my morning walk around Martin's Lake with my dog Uma. The weather has been superb. Today, after Woodbury Friends Meeting, I stopped in the ShopRite and from the organic dept. in produce I bought: broccoli, shredded carrots, baby leaf spinach, and tomatoes. It is my goal to make a fresh vegetable salad every day at midday. The two areas I have fallend down on most are eating vegetables and getting to the gym for my half hour workout.

I will track my progress here: So today, Sunday August 3rd (It is good to start at the beginning of the month!) the full process, at least the walking and the fresh vegetable meal begin! I forgot to get mushrooms, and I want to add sunflower seeds and black olives. Oh yes, I also had an ear of corn microwaved in its husk - delicious! I am on chapter 2 of the UnDo It! book. I will keep you posted.

The main idea I take away so far is that instead of compartmentalizing heart, separate from brain, and diseases separate from each other, like diabetes separate from diverticulosis, they are all in one system and that system needs the proper fuel and maintenance: vegetable based diet, and strength training with cardio - walking and the gym. That way, the cardiovascular system can deliver the right stuff to the brain and the organs and can keep modulated the balances of sugar and fats and such. Forgive me if my explanation is less than AMA ready.

Happy Trails! And may your trail run through good weather and fair skies! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Another Strategy to Save Myself

Yesterday a friend on a phone call recommended a book to me and today, by coincidence, I read about it in my daily e-mail news feed: Dr. Dean Ornish's book UnDo It! - Lifestyle choices to reverse chronic disease. In particular, this book, acccording to my friend, strives to focus on brain health and early intervention against cognitive decline. Mp/> This blog post is only to introduce the idea. I have borrowed the book via Audible and I will be listening to it at bedtime which is my habit. I have lost so much vision due to Fuch's Dystrophy - a degeneration of the cornea due to the break-down of the Fuch's pumps responsible for cleaning and protecting the cornea, that I can't really read anymore - it is such a struggle and I need a magnifying glass. So, I listen to audio books. I doubt there is much new in this book to me, as I read Dr. Ornish's heart book in the beginning of my heart disease fifteen years or so ago, but I think of it as a REVIEW and Inspiration to get back to the good lifestyle.

In truth, I do a good many of the recommended things as do many of my friends including - I am a vegetarian. The friend who recommended the book is a vegan (Marilyn Quinn) as is my other best friend, Barb Solem. I haven't been willing to go that far but I am close. I still have dairy products in my diet, cheese, ice cream!, and a milk based protein drink, and, to be honest, I DO NOT eat enough vegetables and fruits each day. I am a carboholic.

My main failure, however, is in the area of exercise. For the month of July I have done no exercise. The previous couple of months I was doing well - going to the gym 3 times a week for a light workout: 15 minutes on the bike, two arms machines, two abs machines, a couple other weight machines here and there, a total of 30 minutes. And I was walking EVERY day at Martin's Lake, a half mile walk on a good sidewalk around a charming pond. Then, the dog got sick with a serious illness, pancreatitis, and my days were taken up with getting my sister in Clarksboro each day to help me carry the dog out, fix her special foods (boiled chicken and rice) and get her to the vet. That took two weeks, and then I got sick with a recurring stomach bug - diarrhea and nausea that lasted a day or two. The same illness hit me last summer.

That little health crash got me off my exercise track and I never got back on. The excessive heat of this month didn't help. Following that, I became apathetic, sad, lazy and struggling. My sister's bi-weekly cleaning visits really helped me keep my head above water, but I wasn't doing the minimal exercise component.

Fortunately, I was able to keep one thing going - my writing (my daily journal and my blog) and working in my Art Journal - creative exercises. Also, I work pretty diligently at keeping up with friends in whatever way possible, texting, phone calls, lunches.

So, with this blogpost begins my journey with the new Dr. Dean Ornish Book and whatever program or ideas for saving myself that it inspires which I will share with you. I have recommended the book to two other friends and we are tossing around the idea of a casual book club based on it. I will let you know how that progresses! Happy Trails - wrightj45@yahoo.com

Old People Talking - Conversation

One of the things I love about this blog is that I often have a lot of thoughts and conversations and this is a place where I can put them. I don't know if I am sharing them. Various friends have told me from time to time, that they read something in my blog and recently a cousin from my childhood found me because he looked something up and it took him to my blog! This morning I was talking to my sister about my latest passion for dressmaking in the late 1800's as a career and an art.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my Great-grandmother was a skilled dressmaker according to the Federal Census, by the age of 16. Also by that age, I was taught in high school Home Economics Class how to sew and by 18, I was making all my own clothes. My sister and I both could sew and we grew up watching our mother re-upholster furniture and sew all the curtains for our houses. My mother also made some of my clothes and in particular, I remember an Easter outfit she made for me of pale yellow linen in the style of Jackie Kennedy, a slim skirt and bolero jacket with a paisley brown and yellow cummerbund. It was beautiful. Being a teenager, I didn't respect the garment or my mother's efforts or art - I wanted jeans and a sweater set - the going fashion for teenagers.

But I digress, and that brings me back to my subject, old people talking. This morning I asked my sister if I was boring her talking about sewing clothes and the cost of fabrics in Philadelphia in the 1960's and she said I wasn't because she liked to sew too. I asked her because I had stopped phoning my brother because although I listened politely to his endless stories about getting tree trunks and renting a log splitter to make his wood piles for the winter wood stove, and his detailed accounts of car and truck repairs, if I talked about something interesting to me, he was in the habit of putting his phone on mute. When I got hip to what he was doing, I confronted him and then stopped calling. It is a two way street. You tell your stories and listen to theirs. My sister and I do that. She talks about work rlationships and the adventures of her daily bus commute which I find interesting because I took the bus to the city daily for years when I worked at the library in Glouceter City and my bus and hers used the same route and things have changed!

Recently, however, atlunch with two friends, I was talking about discovering the death of an old friend I had looked up on the internet. The friend and I had known one another in the 1970's and hadn't kept in touch much over the years. I looked him up and found his death notice an the Canadian registry of artists. He died in 2022. It was remarkable to me because I have reached the age where often when I look up someone from the past, I found they have died. The friend with whom I was talking had done her share of the conversation on the topics of her frivolous daughter-in-law, her son's lack of control of his wife, and her still painful hip replacement surgery, and I had listened politely, but when I was talking about the Canadian artist and how we had met, she was getting impatient and interrupted and told me to get to the point and complained that I digress too much. I was hurt. I fought back and reminded her of the social cotract of friendship where we listen to one another with patience and respect. She and I haven't spoken since and I feel the friendship may be waning. Waning friendships in aging is another good blog topic for another time.

Anyhow, talking about sewing my dresses for work as a young woman working in Philadelphia in a publishing company in the 1960's may have been one of those well known 'old people boring conversations' so I asked my sister but of course, she is prejudiced in my favor and said it wasn't boring.

The friend with whom I am having lunch today was mentioning to me how when she gets together with her gentleman friend's young family, his adult children are middle-aged and their children are in their teens, none of them ask her even one question about her books or her writing or her life. They aren't interested in her at all. She has written three wonderful books on the pines: Batsto and other Quirky Places in the PineBarrens is her most popular one. She is very popular at Pinebarrens events like the antique glass and bottle show and the Clountry Living Fair and hundreds of people tell her how much they love her books, but her boyfriend's kids have no interest at all.

I have seen this before in regard to old people. Once at the photo department of Walgreens an old man showed me a photo of his Navy ship in the arctic. They were there searching for parts of a Russian crashed craft of some kind. He was trying to tell the store clerk who was visibly bored and impatient, which I have seen before, and which I understand. After all, they are working! That clerk didn't give a hoot about Russian aircraft or the arctic and the old man was keeping him from his tasks probably stocking shelves.

We have no place to tell our stories if we have no friends. That's one of the things I LOVED about my previous involvement with historical society volunteer work - we all were interested in history and enjoyed the stories we shared. Plus it was all older people who were polite by a lifetime of training and because historical clubs and societies seem to attract polite people.

I don't have any conclusions to draw from this set of observations about aging and conversation, except that I suppose it is a big challenge and an important one to continue into our aging to cultivate friends in social groups who share our interests so we have people to talk to. And, perhaps, to take up writing and also take up blogging! It just occurred to me that one of the reasons I have been so interested in my Greatgrandmother's life as a dressmaker is because I listened to an old person talking when I was young.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

New Art Journal Page project - The Dressmaker

As you may have read, if you follow this blog, I have my Great Grandmother Catherine Sandman's 1929 sewing machine. As a young child, I actually met her, although at the time, she was suffering from a catastrophic stroke and my Grandmother Mabel was taking care of her in Ocean City, New Jersey. She has fascinated me ever since. I am fortunate enough to have a series of photographs of her from the ages of 16, 20's, middle age, and just before she died in her 80's.

During the time that I was focused on family history I found CAtherine in Phildadelphia on the Federal census living with her family, German Catholics just south of center city. Catherine was listed as a seamstress and I had the oral history from her daughter, my Grandmother Mabel, that they both sewed uniforms for the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia. Most of my ancestors grew out of the fertile fields of South Philadelphia, which is where I, in fact, was born and raised until age 11.

My German ancestors in Philadlphia worked in traditional trades: brewers, bakers, dressmakers, watch repair. The tradition of sewing was passed down to me in the form of the quilts my Grandmother Mabel sewed for all of her grandchildren, one of which I passed on to my own daughter, Lavinia.

I didn't realize it at the time, by the course in sewing that was given to girls in high school in my youth, was to play a contual part in my life. From those early introductory lessons I lerned to make a skirt from a pattern. The paper patterns were a thin tissue of a pale cream/coffee color. I learned to use a device with a spoked wheel and colored carbhon paper to trace darts and other details from the pattern onto the fabric. Thanks to the Simplicity Easy to Sew patterns, when I was 18, working in Philadelphia at a publishing company, I could buy fabric in the many fabric stores and sew a simple stylish sheath dress in less than an hour for less than $5.00. It took about 1 and a half yards of fabric which I could buy on sale from a remnants table, and since I had been taught how the patterns worked, even such arcana as finding the direction of the weave of the fabric (not really that important in the kind of basic sewing I was doing), I had no trouble learning how to make up the simplest garments. Later, I used that skill to make my toddler's adorable little cotton overalls. These could also be made in under an hour for under $5.00 which was a great help as I was living on very limited income until the 1990's when I was able to supplement my meager income with part-time jobs. By the time my daugher was school aged, I was buy clothes because I had no time to sew. For all those years, I used my mother's Singer sewing machine. I have written about that machine in an earlier post this year. According to my sewing machine repair-man, Chuck McGowan, it is the best model Singer that was ever made. I would have to agree as it has been sewing for me for over 60 years and for my mother before me.

My high school education prepared me for a job in the clerical world. I guess if you put a simple, broad chronology to Women's Work, the kind that earned money (for the common woman), it would be housekeeper, seamstress, nurse, clerk, schoolteacher. All of my friends in my age group - 70's, were carried by the stream of current culture into the last three of those career choices. The generation of women that I knew from my mother's period were almost all home=makers, although one or two had jobs in offices as clerks, or saleswomen in department stores. In my Grandmother's generation all the women I knew were homemakers, housekeepers, or in my Grandmother Mabel's case, saleswomen. She worked in Stainton's Department Store in Ocean City on Asbury Avenue.

Her mother's generation were housekeepers, seamstresses, bakers, cooks.

The important point to me, however, is that they had a way to earn a living. My interest has also shown me that many women in my Grandmother's and Greatgrandmother's time worked in factories as well which I saw in photographs of the early textile mills. I guess the one thing I left out because it was outside my experience was farm work. I do know that many women from the lower economic class in Philadelphia were transported by bus to do farm work during harvest seasons in New Jersey. Many brought their children who also worked in the fields during harvest. Now that work is done by immigrant labor and by machine.

To get back to the tools of the trade, however, which is what my next pages in my Art Journal will be about, I have a deep fondness for these things which made it possible for women to free themselves, by however so small a degree, from total economic dependence and domestic servitude: the sewing machine, and this trade, dressmaking, seamstress, was a SKILLED trade! It also involved beautiful resources, fabrics, laces, buttons and beads, and creativity, at the same time that it demanded backbreaking labor and exactitude. Take a look at those dresses in the next museum you visit and the painstaking details of pleating and beading and fitting. Those dresses were a creative and a tormenting process, and a kind of prison for the wearer.

Recently I came across an interesting detail about the white dresses worn by the famous poet Emily Dickinson. They ahve always caused a bit of mystery in those familiar with the life and work of the great America poet. She 'took' to wearing the simple white garment at some point in her life and stayed dressed in them until she died, a recluse.

What I learned recently was that the style of dress was a common "house dress" worn by women in that time, loose fitting and relaxed and most importantly NOT REQUIRING A CORSET! Can you imagine spending your days laced up in a suffocating torture chamber of a corset restricting both your movement and your breathing? I can't. No wonder Emily opted for the house-dress.

Even this simple garment however, had many tiny pleats and lace trim on collar and cuffs. Lace, remember, was hand-made from about the 1500's to the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800's and early 1900's in factories. Lace was imported from such centers as Italy and Belgium where it was handmade by skilled craftswomen.

Even in my own childhood, women plied some ancient fiber arts such as crocheted doilies and tableclothes, as well as the yarn arts of knitting. I have sample of each of these arts and they are magical - to be able to take a length of string and turn it into a lacy filigree! But these skills are dying out in my generation. We all have too many jobs to juggle along with housework and childrearing.

Many years ago when I was in Mexico, I bought a shopping bag finger woven from cactus fiber! I wish I still had it, it was unbrakeable but I have long since lost it. It is a long thread from those early women taking a fiber and figuring out how to turn it into a frabric, to the seamstresses making shirtwaists and ballgowns and the factory workers keeping eh bobbins loaded and the machines running.

Happy Trails along the thread that runs so true! wrightj45yahoo.com

Finding Inspiration-Fighting Ennui

July 26, 2025 - I was feeling a common apathy of a hot summer morning and in my e-mail news feed, I came across an npr essay on what columnists did to give a perk to the morning. As it happened, I was thinking that I felt uninspired and I began to think of what I do when I am looking for insspiration and I thought of my big tub of resource files in the back room of my little bungalow.

Over the many many years, when I am working on a new project for an art show, I will print out pictures from photographs or other resources to use for reference. There are so many, I could go right up the alphabet but the most common are family, friends, historic places, landscapes, pets, memories. After the pojects are over, the files become scattered, but this Spring in a major organizing effort of a couple of weeks, I got all my art supplies and my downstairs folders into labeled tubs. (The attic will have o wait, maybe forever)

My morning latte' gave me enough energy to go back into the Den and pull the heavy tub off the shelf and rifle through the folders pulling out promising prints: pets, my favorite willow oak tree on Station Ave, in Mt. Ephraim, the Railroad trees (60 of them in a column beside the tracks) throughout the seasons, mushrooms and a Mary Oliver poem. I also found an old wooden ruler that I liked and I have been searching for.

I have been wanting to do a project on the railroad trees through the seasons for years. I have photos of them in winter in snow, in Spring in bloom, and summer in green and fall in russet colored leaves. Today may be just the day to do that page in my Art Journal.

I also found an old dinosaur birthday card that I filled out to mail to a friend whose birthday I am celebrating in August with tickets to the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, part of Rpwan University. The card must be from my daughter's childhood, hence, more than 40 years old! In a few minutes I will take the dog for a short ride to the post office to mail that and another card I am sending to an Art Journal buddy. We will ride around one or more of the local parks while we are out which is another thing I do to get inspired and to cut through the haze of apathy that often fogs me in in the mornings.

This is a special day because it is the second day when, thanks to my sister's energetic and expert help on Thursday, all the chores are done and I am free to do whatever I please! So, the ride to the PO and the parks, then I will pick one of the pages and start an art journal page. I think it will be the railroad trees!

I hope this inspires some ideas in you for what to do with your one and only unique and irreplaceable day! By the way, I also received an essay from an old classmate that he wrote about the death of his family companion, Buddy the Labrador Retriever. My files inspire writing as well as providing imagery for my Art Journal, as can be attested by this blog entry. Maybe you'll be inspired to write. How about a summer memory?

By the way, if you are interested in starting an Art Journal, you don't need any specific or special artistic skills, you can begin by doodling, any pattern, any idea, any sketch. I think I wrote a blog entry earlier about a man who wrote a column in this month's AARP magazine about his 50 years of keeping journals! Good for the brain, good for the memory, maybe even good for posterity!

Happy Trails - wrightj45@yahoo.com

Groundbreaking Ceremony at Benjamin Cooper House, Erie Street, Camden, NJ

"America’s 250th birthday will be celebrated on July 4, 2026, marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 in Philadelphia. The celebration will involve various events and initiatives throughout the U.S. spanning several days." This excerpt is from a very much longer piece in my e-mail from the Camden County Historical Society of which I am a member and have been for many years. Once, after retirement, I was also a volunteer/part-time worker in the suitcase school visiting program for a couple of years. In that program, we (the volunteer/part-time employees carried a trunk of artifacts from two significant periods of our history - Colonial Settlement, and The Underground Railroad.)

Also, at that time, I was very much involved in what came to be about 15 years of intense family history research. Our family, on my mother's side, had a long history in the Camden/Gloucester County area: Major Peter Cheesement (a road named for him runs along Camden County Colege campus) was an ancestor. His daughter, Rachel Cheeseman married William C. Garwood a teacher, storekeeper for the Turnersville Store, and postal employee as well as some municipal and church posts in the Turnersville area. His grandson was my grandmother, Lavinia McQuiston Lyons, father.

Most of the family at that time were involved in the many mills that lined Timber Creek, saw mills, and grist mills.

One of Major Peter T. Cheeseman's ancestors was also a veteran of the Revolutionary War, Richard Cheeseman. During my voluteer days at Gloucester County Historical Society (Camden and Gloucester counties overlapped one another during their history) I found Richard Cheeseman in Strickers revolutionary War Index. Proving his blood connection to Major Peter T. Cheeseman seemed too complicated for me to pursue given the scarcity of paper trails in the time of wooden buildings and fires, not to mention the use and re-use of the same names throughout family history.

Anyhow, even without the family history, my volunteer work in the 20 years after retirement took me to many places that fired up my interest in our fascinating history in this early colony of the new world. I was also a volunteer at Red Bank Battlefield for many years, giving tours of the Anne (Cooper) Whitall and James Whitall House at that historic site.

I am eagerly awaiting the opening of this new venue to celebrate our history and grateful that speedy and brilliant strategy saved this landmark from the fate of the historic Harrison/Hugg House in Bellmawr which was demolished by the Department of Transportation.

You can find more on this landmark place and event via google and it would be a helpful and valuable thing for you to send in a check and become a member of Camden Historical Society. They have a terrific magazine and the e-mail flyer that I get gives literall dozens of wonderful events in this remarkable County!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Batsto Citizens Committee Summer Newsletter item July 15, 2025

The Batsto Citizens Committee Summer Newsletter is a great read and I always enjoy it. You can become a member and get your on-line copy as well! There was a fascinating essay about the history of the paper mill turned Playhouse in this issue. What I can share with you however, is the Events Calendar.Special Events for 2025

7/19/2025 ~ The Second Pennsylvania Regimental Reenactment

7/27/2025 ~ Batsto Dog Show

9/28/2025 ~ Fall Antique Glass & Bottle Show

10/19/2025 ~ Country Living Fair

10/26/2025 ~ Haunting in the Pines

12/7/2025 ~ Winter in the Pines

I haven't been very often in recent years but Batsto was a favorite palce of mine since my teen years and I strongly recommend it for a family visit, or for a single solitary hike and enjoyment of the history of this wonderful place. If you go to an event, go early and be prepared to park at a distance as the events are very popular!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

My Morning read - AARP Mag. Two Grandmothers & a Journal Keeper

Tuesday, July 15, 2025 and 11:30. I should have been leaving for lunch with dear friend Barbara Solem today at Maritsa's but instead I an on the sofa sick with diarrhea and upset stomach. I think it was mushrooms in Chinese take-out leftovers. Anyhow, the AARP Magazine came in time to keep me company. I tore out two articles to put in my current journal, one on a man named Chip Brown who has 138 journals kept over 50 years!

I have a trunk full in the attic and a shelf full in my bedroom ceiling to floor bookcase, probably over a hundred at the rate that I keep them. They help me structure my life, figure things out, find a safe place to put my complaints and emotional pains until they fade. I also glue in countless articles on simple sets of exercises to do each day (I don't) but I am hopeful, and articles about artists among other things. I highly recommend journal keeping and it has been mentioned in many articles about keeping our brains healthy over the long haul.

Speaking of health and the long haul, there was an article about two grandmothers, very very different from one another who both lived to be 104! Was it genes? One did have a healthy life, the other had an ordinary life without particular efforts regarding healthy meals and nutrition. In the article they mentioned the pillars of aging: gemes.exercise, diet, sleep, social connection, purpose. Then they added resilience forged in hardship, sustaining poser of love, the anchoring power of faith, and the surprising power of conscientiousness! I thought those worthy of taking a break from my reading, toast and tea and making this blog entry.

My maternal grandmother was solitary (agoraphobic), melancholy, anxious, although she did have nearby and loving family. She spent her last ten years with dementia. She did have an ordinary but poor diet (a lot of crackers and cheese and tea). My paternal grandmother worked on the boardwalk every summer at the seashore where she lived and at a local department store in the winter. She walked every day and read and made quilts. She had friends and belonged to a movie group as well as the Democratic Women's Club. Both lived into their lat 80's but in dramatically different lives.

Something to ponder as I work my way towrds 80 this year.

Happy trails - wrightj45@yahoo.com

From the Eco-Justice Collaborative Newsletter July 2025

Eat Less Meat! That’s the answer many people give when asked to name the single most effective change we can make in our personal lives to lower greenhouse gas emissions. If you’re looking for protein from sources other than animals, you might be interested in this recording from Climate Action Now’s recent Plant-Based Revolution Climate Action Party. And at the website of the Good Food Institute (gfi), a nonprofit think tank “working to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals,” you’ll find their primer, “Alternative Proteins 101.”

As anyone who has followed this blog knows, I have been a vegetarian for most of the past 40 years since I read DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET, by Frances Moore Lappe. To help you, Colonial Diner in Woodbury has a vast menu of vegan items. One of my former favorites, no longer on the menu but very easy to make was: vegan chili in baked potato boats! My vegan chili is so easy: 2 cans of each - red beans, black beans, white beans, a large jar of mild salsa, 2 cans of corn. Bake several potatoes and scrape out the insides (save that to make potato pancakes!) Just put a scoop of chili in each half potato and if you are a vegetarian you can sprinkle some grated cheddar on top, if not, just eat as is or sprinkle some coconut bacon (Vegan item I buy at The Station in Merchantville - very tasty).

I am always trying to adopt more climate freindly hapbits - first, I became a vegetarian. After I bought this house, and read up on permaculture I have long since gotten rid of a lawn in favor of a little shady grove of trees and shrubs. Over the years, we (my daugher and I) planted Christmas trees we bought with root balls instead of cut trees. This past 2024, I started buying sustainable bamboo sourced toilet paper in place of the toilet paper made from Canadian trees. There are many ways I can improve still ahead of me that I haven't adopted yet. Of course, I use only oil cloth shopping bags, but I could get rid of my Dunkin Donut's latte' cardboard cup in favor of a re-usable metal thermos, and one of these days I have to stop using Poland Springs gottled water. I have two great water filter pitchers but I am not good at drinking as much water as I should, and using the bottles is a good way for me to make sure I drink what I should each day. Room for improvement.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

a Canadian Artist -Salmon Harris

Back in the very early 197's, my then-husband, Michael and I took several trips in our camper VW van across the United States and across Canada, East to West. On one of those trips, we picked up three hitchhikers, not an uncommon thing to do in the trusting 1970's whe so many young people had hit the open road for adventure and travel. We dropped off one, a Quebois whose name I no longer remember, but we kept two and brought them to New Jersey with us for a visit. We had picked them up while headed West and they had taken us around near Vancouver. We visited an artists home and studio, and we hiked up a mountain.

The mountain hike was a disaster for me. I was trying to be strong and equal so I carried my own backpack and I wore new hiking boots. Soon, I was left behind by the two Canadians who wore sneakers and carried very light. I labored the rest of the way in pain, out of breath from the high altitude and with bleeding feet. When I got to the top, I was rescued by a band of women Scouts who took off my blood soaked boots and socks, cleaned my feet and bandaged them while Mike and the Canadians went fishing. They had brought a pretty young woman with them who pranced up the mountain unburdened by anything, like a young mountain goat, free and happy.

I didn't hold a grudge or resentment, but I was sad and I did learn a lesson. I carried too much and since I wasn't as strong as the others, my ex having been in the military and trained for long hikes with heavy packs, I was a fool to carry as much (or more) than they did.

The Canadian artists were a tall, twiggy fellow with a long curly mop of red hair named Salmon Harris. He looked a lot like Bert Lahr as the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. The other artist was a handsome blonde with a large sailing ship tatooed on his chest named Christian Schmidts. They were slyly humorous, good natured, and full of fun.

One of the things I admired most about them was that they had created a fictional vacation camp called Camp Camosun and they had printed bumper stickers and other paper art in relation to it: envenopes with a line drawing of a dog, a scattering of stickers, a World War II airplane for one. I may still have these items lost up in the attic.

I thought this was such a fun and clever kind of art project. They stayed with us in Collingswood for a couple of weeks in our top story apartment with the small landing that was perched into a tree canopy. It was summer. I can't remember a lot from that experience, but I think we took them to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Also, while they were with us, I had gotten an IUD inserted at Planned Parenthood. I had been told it was relatively pain free.

We took LSD while they were with us, and my IUD wasn't at all pain free - it was agonizing as my body attempted to eject the foreign object. My LSD trip was filled with malicious monkeys jeering at me from the tree canopy off our landing.

Over the years, we heard from them by mail. Once about ten years ago, I looked up Salmon Harris and got in touch with him. He was working as a storyboard artist for the film industry: 2010 The Twilight Saga - Eclipse, The Grey 2011 and others. He also published a book of his Art Work which is now out of stock on amazon and for $95 via Diatrope Books. We kept in touch a bit and when I next heard from him he was working as a tax collector in rural British Columbia so that, as he put it, he could be near his son who lived there. The last time I heard from him via e-mail, he was in advertising, developing souvenir materials for tourist development in Summerland, BC. H had, allegedly founded a company to that effect called Samalot. Of course, who knows if that was even true! I sent him some mail there but it was returned as undeliverable. I never heard from him again.

Yesterday, while I was watching a series of natural disaster documentaries, one about snowboarders was set in British Columbia and I thought of Salmon Harris. I googled him and a notice in a Canadian artists' registry gave his death as January 6, 2022. He was born in 1948, three years younger than I am. I couldn't find any more information about him at all, no obituary. I couldn't find anything about Christian Schmitz either. I did find out that Salmon Harris's real name was Frank G. Prodnuk at his graduation from Vancouver School of Art.

It i an all too common event for me now that I look up old friends and find they ahve died. It shouldn't be surprising as I will be 80 on my next birthday and by my age, a lot of people die. I was sorry that I lost touch with Salmon Harris. His comic spirit and his artistic talen were bright like 4th of July sparklers. I remember both of those young men, both young and beautiful, lithe and joyful, ready for life and adventure and full of creative energy and good humor.

During one of my searches, years ago, I had been able to find some of his film storyboard work. I wish I had it in my photo storage but it was long ago. I would have posted it here. He does have a listing in the Internation Movie Database under artists for his film work. Sorry to see you go Salmon Harris - Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Making friends and living longer

My morning e-mail today contained a CNN report on how socializing is an essential to a longer life. As is so often stated, we are social creatures and increasingly people live isolated lives - delivered meals, work at home, delivered groceries. This CNN article mentioned some ways to find and make new friends. I want to add that making and keeping friends not only lets you live longer, but better!

Let me start with my two newest friends and how I met them and how we developed our budding friendships: A couple of years ago, my brother's granddaughter moved from Philadelphia, Pa. to New Jersey. I had tried off and on to make a greater/warmer relationship with her father, my nephew, but he didn't take to it. Like some other male relatives of mine, he tends toward morose and is not particulary inviting or friendly, so I gave up. His daughter, however, is in education, so we share a career and she is friendly and was receptive to my efforts. We have developed a monthly lunch routine. Today we will be going to lunch at one of two local railroad stations repurposed as cafe's. Developing friendship: I took an active interest in her house hunting projects as well as in her career and I avoided topics where we might not agree - politics, for example. I like my great-niece and she is easy to spend time with. She is polite, pleasant and cheerful.

My newest friendship developed out of an Art Show at one of the repurposed train stations I just mentioned. I show work there regularly in their group shows. At one show, I saw prints by a South Jersey Art Group and inquired into contact information since printmaking was my major at Rutger's the State Univ. for my second bachelor's degree. I contacted the group, joined up and there I met an artist who specializes in Art Journaling, something I have always wanted to get into. We met for lunch and she brought two of her Journals and I was stunned by the beauty and complexity of her work. I bought supplies and got started on one of my own. I hope to meet her again and I will get in touch to try to work out another lunch date, to a place closer to where she lives as she is quite a distance from me.

The CNN article suggested making small talk at group events with people standing or sitting nearby. You have the shared event for a take-off point. We just had a holiday and if you attended a group event, it was a great way to meet new people, staning on the side of the road watching a parade, for example. Attending historic site events as well as celebrations is great for meeting new people! I belong to two historical societies and I get e-mail notifications of their events, that is helpful, as are libraries! I met one of my best friends at a hike with an Outdoor Club decades ago. She wrote a book and I bought a copy.

Because I keep this blog, recently, I heard from a relative I hadn't seen or spoken with in decades. He read one of my blog posts and shares an interest in local history. We have been e-mailing one another weekly ever since! I am also very diligent about birthdays and keeping in touch with old friends and relatives, such as my cousin Patty who lives in Cape May. It is far to drive but I try to get ther one a year.

I have a small group of old work friends who meet seasonally for lunch. Some are still teaching. One of the group of about 6 always takes the initiative to set up our next lunch date.

The neighbor who kindly walks my dog for me each day has a couple of groups of friends he meets for breakfast regularly. Many articles say it is harder for men to maintain friendship groups but my neighbor is a chanpion at it. He has a golfing group, a hgih school classmate group, and he is always present at the games of his granchildren.

Helping a neighbor is a great way to make a friend, as is walking the dog. Both of these have brought new friends into my life. A neighbor I passed frequently while I was walking my dog has become a good friend; we started walking together! And a neighbor with whom I had been discussing an adjoining backyard fence has become a good friend. I introduced them both to one another and the three of us meet for lunch about once a month.

I hope this gives you something to think about and an idea to try out - it reminds me of the girlscout rhyme "Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other is gold."

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Trends: housing, women's fashion (July 3rd 2025)

Today, in my news feed, I read two interesting articles from The Atlantic, a magaizine to which I used to subscribe before my vision failed so much I have too much trouble reading fine print. Fortunately on the laptop, I can enlarge the print. One article was about how so many people are still flocking to the sunbelt, in particular Arizona and Florida, which was interesting to me because I know of people who are doing that, both relatives of my friends, and people with whom I went to high school. It is surprising to me because I HATE the heat! And I mean I HARE it. I lay the explanation for that at my ancestry: British, German and Scandinavian. These are cool and moist places. My expewrience with Florida came during my marriage when my in-laws retired to New Port Richey on the bay coast. The steamy heat was like living in a sauna, enervating and unpleasant. My favorite seasons are and always have been autumn and Spring. Autumn takes the lead - the cool crisp weather, the taming of the sun.

The article went on to detail many of the detrimental aspects of living in the sunbelt, burned barefeet from the blazing hot sidewalks, windshield wipers melting onto the glass fo the car and the threat of an electrical grid failure which woul allow for people to die of heat in their homes. One thing they didn't mention, in regard to Arizona, was the lack of water. I read once before that deveopments were built that were entirely dependent on trucked in water supplies. The south is steamy and unpleassant, the west is dry dry dry and scorching. I hae a cousin with two sons who live in Arizona and the temperature is regularly over 100.

My other experience with heat was in Morocco, in the desert with my then husband, and the heat was so bad, it scorched my throat and mouth and I couldn't breathe. My body couldn't breathe. Same thing happened in southern Spain. It was unbearable.

If I migrated anywhere, which I would not, it would be north. I wonder why people are going to these places? They mentioned in the article, affordability. Sprawling developments made housing cheaper in those sunbelt regions. I do remember many older pelple talking about how it is more affordable living in certain states. They don't factor in the absence of municipal resoures we take for granted here, liek trash pick-up, municipal sewerage, and municipal water, all things my parents did without when they moved to the mountains of West Virginia. It didn't matter so much when they were in their 60's but when they reached their 70's it mattered a great deal. There was also no snow plowing on the back roads.

True, where I live, the taxes are fairly high. But it is so much easier to live here when you are old. Also there is the factor of old neighborhood living. My little house, where I have lived for 40 years this year 1985-2025, is a five minute drive from the grocery, the pharmacy, any kind of shopping mall or municipal entity. Also, because of our taxes, we have senior/handicapped transport if you don't drive anymore and senior income based housing available if you put your name on the list and wait long enough. I have neighbors I have nown for those 40 years and they help me with my trash and recycle and walking my dog. We share things with one another.

I have said many times before that I love my hosue and I love my neighborhood and town and even my state. No complaints here. No reason to move. I pay fairly high taxes and it is WORTH IT! Also, we have senior/freeze, so my taxes were frozen a decade ago. I pay the full freight but get the difference between the current rate and my rate when it got frozen back in a rebate in the summer which I use to pay the August quarter. My brother who lives in Wewt Virginia has very low taxes and no municipal resources at all. He is much more of a penny pincher than I am and he won't even run his air conditioner to save on electricity!

Here is where the housing and the fashion topics overlap - I thik people moved south and west because it was apopular trentd, something they all talked about and it became a 'fashion' - that's how so many of my high school classmates ended up in The "Villages" in Florida, just like a fashionable trend running through a high school, a kind of shoe (Weejuns) or a kind of backpack. Claire McCardle made a fashion for women that changed our lives in big ways, thank goodness.

I still have a few articles of clothing with no pockets, but not many. Epecially now that I have to carry my cell phone everywhere for my safety as well as convenience, pockets are a necessity, but it wasn't that long ago that most women's clothes had no pockets. And it wasn't that long ago that women worke shoes with high heels even in the daytime. I ust watched two Doris Day movies recently and she was cinched up and crippled into high heels all during her adveture. We had such inconvenient clothing. I grew up in the time before pants were acceptable attire, pretty much anywhere. To work each day all of us women in Phildadelphia offices wore high heeled shoes and skirts and dresses so our legs froze in the winter waiting for the bus!

So today, I am thankful for pockets, flat and comfortable shoes, pants, and those helpful trends. I am aslo grateful for staying in my small and comfy bungalow in a small town in a great state, my good neighors, and even though sometimes too hot, or too cold, mostly temperate and bearable weather. I live in paradise! Glad too that I don't have any arguments with a spouse over "money saving benefits of rural living." A lot of the people I used to speak to at the dog park or other public spaces, it was the husbands who wanted to go south or rural to get out from under taxes or paying for yard care of snow removal. The wives wanted to stay near the children and their communicty conneections. That was certainly the case with my parents. My dad wanted the woods adventure and my mom lost her church friends, ceramics class, neighborhood visits with lifelong girlfriends, and many other social benefits.

Hope wherever you are, you are happy there! Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Creativity - Three Parts

1 - Yesterday at 12:30, June 27th, 2025, I was driving to The Station Cafe' (Eiland Arts Center) on Chestnut St. in Merchantville, NJ to meet a NEW friend, Tamarie Bitgood, who is president of the Salem County Arts League. We met through Loren Dann who is a founder of the South Jersey Artists Collaborative (or Collective) the group that will be renting one of our buildings at Woodbury Friends Meeting.

The radio program I was listening to as I was driving on 90.9 fm was on creativity and the speaker was talking about two parts of the process: inspiration, and "Flow" He spoke of the neutral, relaxed mind that allows new ideas to spontaneously emerge. I have certainly found that to be true. But I also derive a great deal of inspiration from input, from magazines, stories, objects. I read a book on Flow once by the famous reseacher/author Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: Flow, the Psychology of the Optimal Experience. published in 1990.

My best description of what FLOW feels like when I experience it is that I lose all sense of time and of myself and I become one with the activity whether it is writing or painting. It feels like surfing the wave, a smooth melding of action and thought. Hours can go by and I won't notice. It is a calm center.

2-At our lunch, Tamarie brought two of her ART JOURNALS to show me. I had three pieces of art in the latest show at The Station on the theme - Travel/Collage. I have wanted to make Art Journals and get into the ArtBook field for years but I couldn't seem to find the inspiration. I have kept journals since the 1970s and have hundreds in a big trunk in the attic but they are mostly narrative. My prose mind takes over and very little art ever gets into the journals. I wanted to change that and get away from art that needs to go on walls as I have no wall space left and I don't sell or move enough work and I don't want piles of it gathering dust in the attic. I felt the best solution to continuing to be creative visually was to turn to Art Journals. Tammy's were beautiful and mind-blowingly complex, and she had mastered the combination of idea and image. Her work far exceeded anything I had ever seen in the many magazines I had bought hoping to be inspired: Somerset Publications.

3-The way the creative process works for me: I have, in my living room a one hundred year old Singer Sewing Machine inherited from my Great-grandmother Catherine Sandman Young who made her living by sewing from her teens throughout her adult life. She and my grandmother made uniforms for the Schuylkill Areenal in piece work which allowed them to mind the children and make a living at home. The Sewing Machine, to my mind is a great tool of women's survival and labor. There were so few decent ways for an immigrant/poor woman to make a living in the 1800's, mainly cleaning or, if they were skilled, sewing. Since all clothing had to be made by hand before the industrialization of that industry, many women were employed in the task. Men did tailoring and women did sewing and haberdashery.

That sewing machine is an inspiration to me and it is also an item of beauty. When I think of the era of home-sewn dresses, I can see the fabrics, the trims, laces, buttons, beads, and the spools of gem like colored threads. How beautiful!

Because I have also sewn in my life, both my own clothes in my 20's and my daughter's in her toddler years, I have an inside experience of the art. So at some point, I began sewing as part of my artistic output - I made the other symbol of women's experience: the handbag/market bag. The first one I made was when my daughter was one year old in 1984. I sewed panels like quilt squares with a pocket in each panel and then I sewed the together like a book with a shoulder strap so she (my daughter Lavinia) could carry it and sit and pay with the toys in the pockets.

My first artistic piece I made was a set of 4 'pocketbooks' of 5 panels each and a painting in each panel behind a clear pocket. It was 2019 and the two hundred year anniversary of Women's Suffrage celebrated in a show at The Station called BRAVE 100.

I expanded from that idea and did a set of 12 pocketbooks/market bags which I put up at Woodbury Meeting and then gave away to friends. My latest was a piece I called Ireland Market Bag, a black bag with pockets on the front with clear panels and in one panel a portrait of my daughter at Bunratty Castle in Ireland, and in the other pocket, some memorabilia (a set of Ireland postcards in a ribbon, a boarding pass, a set of Irish stamps) that I had saved from a vacation we had taken to Ireland when my daughter was in her mid teens. I called it "functional art" because you could hang it and look at it or you could use it to carry things from the market or the post office or wherever. I really liked sewing those bags, using my mother's Singer Sewing Machine which was, according to my sewing machine repair man, the best model ever made. My great grandmother's sewing machine, an electric cord model, I have never tried to get to work. It is so old.

This Ireland Market bag connected all of it, the female experience of sewing and shopping, the art of painting, and my experience of travel, especially since Ireland was the country of origin of the maternal side of my ancestry, the McQuistons. It joined my German female ancestor Catherine Sandman Young, to my Irish ancestor Lavinia McQuiston, and carried on my daughter's name which has flowed down through 5 generations of women on my mother's side and was my mother's middle name as well. That to me made this piece my most perfect artistic creation.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

ps. Tam's books and my bag have inspired me to do an Art Journal on women's tools, starting with sewing notions!

South Jersey Quaker Fellowship in the Arts

The theme of TriQ this year is "Growing", and, relatedly, the name of our Art Show is: "Growing Compassion through Art". As is usual, your visual or performances do not have to be all related to that theme. However, we would like to invite all visual and performing artists to showcase at least one piece having to do do with that if possible. Not a prerequisite to showing, though! Artists do not have to stay for the Gathering, though you might want to stick around at least for a day! Artists do not have to be members of a Monthly Meeting or FQA(Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts), although you might be interested in our website at fqaquaker.org

We always welcome new artists, whether beginners, amateur or professional. Spread the word to arty friends! If you've not yet told me you'd like to show, or if you want more info, email me at dpulone@comcast.net or text/leave a message at 609-670-7625.

Drop off for art will be Friday, Sept 26 from 4:30-7 pm and Sat, Sept 27 from 9:30-11:30 am. Art Reception is Sat. 3:30-5:15. Artists must pick up their art by Sunday, Sept 28, 3 pm.

Attached fyi is Intent to Show form. I will have them there at Art Building(DeMartini Building) when you drop off your art, or you can print out and fill in beforehand.

If you are interested in performing, let me know asap cause slots are filling up fast!

I'd love to hear from any of you!

Doris P.

The SAD IRON

In my living room is the turn of the 20th century sewing table holding the 1929 Singer Bentwood cased sewing machine of my Great Grandmother Catherine Sandman Young. My Great Grandmother born 1864 and died 1954, was a seamstress from her teen years (according to the Philadelphia federal census) I also have her 'Sad Iron' which weighs about 6 pounds and is solid cast iron. The name "sad" comes from the old English/German word for solid and this iron was in use for a couple of hundred years, at least until the 1880's when the first electric iron was invented. Since most households had a constant running fire in a fireplace or a coal stove, the iron was heated on a surface near it and then placed on a trivet.

The sewing machine that I have from Great-Grandmother Catherine is a 1929 Singer made in New Jersey and there is a longer blog about it further down the list. These two artifacts of female life are the oldest heirlooms from my female ancestors that I own. The oldest heirloom from a male ancestor is a deck chair from the early 1900's that belonged to my paternal Grandfather who was a Merchant Seaman. I don't know what significance this chair has or why he kept it but I was always fond of it from childhood because it has those desk arms for a book or a drawing pad. I saved this chair when my parents moved to West Virginia and my father was clearing out the garage attic where it had been relegated for some reason.

A kind friend fabricated a missing piece and helped me put it togeether as it had been disassembled.

These items have great emotional value to me, a connection with my forebears, and in particular the sewing machine has meaning because it is how my Greath Grandmother and my Grandmother supported themselves during and after widowhood.

I began to ask friends what their oldest heirloom from a female relative was and one told me hers was an afghan knitted by her Norwegian Grandmother who had raised 10 children mostly on her own. She had been a cleaner and she had done farm work..

I am very taken with the kaleidescope of thoughts connected to making clothes from the 19th century, the thought of the piles of fabrics, the wooden spools of gem like threads, the buttons, beads, lace trims, velvet trims. What a rich and artist resource.

Once, I did a lot of sewing myself. In my late teens and early twenties, I made all my own clothes from Simplicity patterns, and when my daughter was born, I made most of her clothes until she went to grade school. The putting together the pieces from the patterns, all the parts of the process of making an item of clothing from choosing the material on were pleasurable to me. Sewing on a machine is kind of magical and I still do some Art work usig my sewing machine passed down from my mother, the best model every made according to my repair man, Chuck McGrath.

AS it happens I have several heirloom items, one from my other Grandmother, the Irish line in Philadelphia - Lavinia McQuiston (married name Lyons) which is a chocolate pot made in occupied Japan. I have that pot because I admired it in her China Cabinet and she gave it to me. >p/> Once I made a scrapbook about the family heirlooms that I have so that when I die, my relatives will hold onto them and not jsut let them go to Goodwill or someplace anonymous like that. These came down, after all, hand to hand, relative to relative.

What is your oldest artifact/heirloom from a female anestor? wrightj45@yahoo.com

Northern Exposure Season 5, episode 11 - Childbirth

All This below is true but I hve to put in a foreword after thinking and say it is no small feat to create a human being! I guess you have to expect some pain and trouble to have the gift of creaation like that. You make a human being who grows up and reads and writes and sings and plays instruments and makes a family and makes friends and has a career and moves on into the infinite future! It i a godly gift. All mythic heroes suffer for their miraculous powers.

In later episodes, Shelly gets to meet her daughter at different ages and I was taken back to the days of my daughter at different ages and remembered the greatest adventure of my life which was being her mother. It is epic.

The Episode I just watched of Northern Exposure is about Shelly Tambo's baby shower. Women tell their horror stories, men make ridiculous comments about things they know nothing about yet feel entitled to lecture on. The truth about pregnancy and childbearing is never told. Too daring? No one ever tells the truth about childbearing. We can't. It is like there is a kind of unwritten law that you can never be honest about that experience. Well, you can neer be honest about your own experience of that event, even though it is your own. It is really a horrible situation. What happens is that you hide that truth from yourself and the rest of the world because it is too much to bear - the truth. Once it begins, gestation, after those first few months, there is no going back. You are committed and you have to go through with it. It would be interesting to r=write The Red Badge of Courage about Childbirth instead of war. Those last couple of months, just think about it, that baby is almost fully grown, you know how big that is, and it is inside you squeezing al your organs to the side, moving around like a little whale or a porpoise, inside you. And those months you have to contemplate that large lump of huanity squeezing its way out of your body.

I saw a movie once that came a little close - Tulley with Charlize Theron (2018). That is mainly about her post-partum depression after childbirth, facing up to the relentless demands of caring for anewborn when your body hs been through an unspeakable trauma. The pain of labor is mind-bending. Fortunately for me, I faced it with Yoga, meditation and breathing. Since there is no escape, you MUST fall back on something and just HOPE it will help you survive this unbearble agony.

Of course there is that miraculous moment when it is over and you have survived and the baby is alive and whole, and you are relieved, you are rescued, and you experience that flood of supernatural love. But it is quickly replaced by the ceaseless demands on your body, your energy and your mind. Your time is never again yours. All of your time and all of your attention and energy is bent towards the demands of the little person your brought into the world. You carry that little burden everywhere until your arms ache. You are grateful for a stroller, an aunt, a playpen, those stolen moments of physical freedom.

I remember what it was like to kneel beside the tub at night and just deeply wish my child would get old enough to shower so I could be divested of this nightly ritual. Most of us are not sorry we did it, at least at some point but equally, at some point most of us are sorry we did it. I am astonished at how many women do it again, and again. I don't get it.

It is another reason I am so against dog breeding - to put some enslaved animal through that pain and trauma over and over for money is brutality at its most basic lack of compassion. It is a basic lack of compassion that allows men to put women through this over and over again, that and the fact that they are never exposed to the reality of it, the agony, the trauma, the soul crushing enslavement of it. Even if they were, they would still do it 0 lust would triumph over compassion.

Thank heavens for birth control that spared me all those years for maturing, educating myself, getting a career so I could be independent and self supporting. Thank heavens for birth control, all the many forms, that allowed me the one experience and no follow ups, no sequels. Thank heavens for time, that allowed me gray hair and celibacy and a release from all that reproductive bondage. That's how I truly feel. And thank heavens my child grew up safe and sound and healthy and independent and self-sufficient so I got my life back.

wrightj45@yahoo.com Childbirth is in a real sense, enslavement.

Lazy Hazy Crazy days of summer - Film Fest Ideas

Hello, pwehaps like me you are feeling like a crocodile on a river bank on this hot hot day (it is 98 according to my phone app) I just have no energy, and apparently it isn't just me because my pets are all lying around too. We have air conditioning so it is quite comfortable in the house, but the outside world must be pressing us down. So I was thinking of my annual summer film festival. When I am stuck in the house each year during a heat wave, I tend to think of a themed film fest. Over the years I have enjoyed:

All the JAWS movies, the Jurassic Parks and even the Star Wars prequels, sequels and other quels

Surfer movies both old an new, beginning with Endless Summer and going up through Blue Crush among many others

Himalayan Mountain Climbing adventures like Everest 1998 or Vertical Limit 2000

If you want to jump way back and go lighter, there are the Beach Party Bingo movies and Gidget

Music Festival movies are a perfect way to laze out a too hot to trot summer afternoon and evening: Woodstock, the perrenial favorite and Festival Express!

Maybe a dip into the old paintbox: Vincent and Theo is a lovely look at the borother love of the Van Gogh siblings and there is At Eternity's Gate, and there is always FRIDA (2002)! and Georgia O'Keeefe (2009)

Perhaps you'd ike to re-visit the great epics: Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace

And with July 4th coming, you might prepare with some Revolutionary War movies like The Patriot or Last of the Mohickans, or some series like John Adams and The Turncoat!

A series I am revisiting is Northern Exposure. I am in season 5. It is available for free on amazon prime.

You may be trapped in the house but your tv or laptop can set you free to roam the world! Enjoy!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Demolition of Woodrow Wilson High School & thoughts on high school

Two summers ago when some of my teacher friends from Mary Ethel Costello School and I were meeting for lunch at Maritsa's in Maple Shade, there was a group of lively and cheery elders at a table nearby. I couldn't help but notice there was an array of high school memorabilia at a table beside them, they were alumni from Woodrow Wilson High School, class of 1955. Although they were obviously elderly with the usual short white permed hair and the seriously outnumbered men, they were joyful and having a great time. I think there may have been about ten people, about two or three men. There was a yearbook, a letter jacket, a large format class group photo, and a couple of other artifacts.

My own high school group still meets for reunion and I was surprised to find from several friends with whom I spoke about this event that other high schools didn't! Perhaps it is because my high school is from the old days of small local schools with smaller class sizes. We had 150 graaduates, about a hundred of us survive and about 50 of us come to the reunions.

I have often said that high school had little impact on my life but I was wrong. When my family moved from South Philadelphia to New Jersey, my life took a radical turn to the better. Merchantville High School at that time took tuition students from Maple Shade because they didn't have enough teens to keep the school open and the neighbor towns had the new developments springing up for the upwardly movile veterans of World War II. Lots of huge housing ventures sprang from that event and the resulting baby boom.

The kids at Merchantville were sophisticated, well dressed, well behaved and a good example to set a standard for those of us from Philadelphia. I dread to thin k what my high sschool life would have been like if we hadn't moved. The schools in South Philadelphia were notorious for fighting, bulgarity, and low class behavior of all kinds.

Immediately, I learned how to talk like the kids from Merchantville, and eradicated expressions such as "youse" and "I senen" from my speech. It also raised my expectations. My best frieds went to college, so it occurred to me that perhaps I could go to college too. Of course, eventually I did go to college and in fact, pretty much never stopped going. I got my fial dgree, a masters at age 60!

We are dwindling, the alumni of Merchantville High School class of 1963. Just a yeaar or so ago, I lost two classmates, my best friend Chris Gilbreath (married name Borget), and a neighbor and teen friend, Romeo Benrtura.

I am one of those people who feel that places hold a residue of emotion. Can you imagine the layers of teenage emotion that went into the dust of the demolition of Woodrow Wilson High School? I bid the building a sad farewell and a memorial honoring of the memories that now exist only in the hearts ad minds of the thousands of young people who once passed through those halls on their way to adulthood!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

July 12, 2024 Butterfly Festival Red Bank Battlefield, National park

There will be a Buttefly Festival sponsored by the Certified Gardeners of Gloucester County at the Red Bak Battlefield i National Park, on the 12th of July. There will be art, crafts, tours, and presentations soif you are free, what better way and better place to spend the day than along the Delaware in the lovely park grounds of Red Bank Battlefield! Here follows the program:

Check out the Event Schedule

11:00 All About Butterflies

11:30 The Buzz on Bees

12:30 Bugs on the Go Bug Show

1:15 The One Man Circus >p/> 2:00 Bugs on the Go Bug Show

3:15 Bug Parade- put on some wings and join the parade.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

I am starting a new series which I have dipped into before without a thematic thread joining episodes. Annals of Aging

My episide today is the mystery of MOTIVATION and the m ysteries of NEW MEDIA

About two. or maybe even three years ago, I ventured to the apple store in the Cherry Hill Mall with an excellent tip from the local Verizon store guy to go just in time to be at the door when it slides open at 10:00.

Motivation: I had been going to the verizon store for help with my iphone which was failing in its mission to provide music for me at the gym. I won't go into that - it is a blog post of its own. Suffice it to say it was a wifi complication among other things but NOBODY had been able to solve it at the gym, or the verizon store and they couldn't solve it at apple either. The phone just kept cutting out so I was replacing it as it was old and the battery was failing.

At the apple store, I took advantage of the August back-to-school-special offers and replaced my old laptop (which had been given to me by my daughter some time before) as well as my old iphone and solve the issue of my ipod as well.

The ipod was dead, couldn t take a charge, and would never be replaced as they were being phased out by the iphones. After much time and struggling I emerged from the store with a new laptop and a new iphone at great discount prices (the whole thing for $1200) and a free set of wireless ear buds! At home, I was able to manuever my way through the new media with patience and perseverence but I was mystified by the ear buds. My daughter was due to visit at some point and when she did, she set up the ear buds rapidly and with a small display of irritation that I wasn't able to do so easy a thing. I couldn't do it because I had no instruction booklet, only a small square plastic jewelry box with two buds inside - period! She installed an app and said I was ready to go and she left.

I opened the box like a monkey finding a satelite phone and put it away in my coffee table drawer where it lay for two more years.

Recently when I returned to the gym, I decided at first to just listen to the cacophony of static and incomprehensible shrieking that is the sound system at the gym rather than again enter the fray of trying to make my iphone work at the gym and listen to music. Then, I discovered that my old corded ear buds didn't work with the new iphone anyhow and the new buds remained as pristine and mysterious as the day I first saw them. No buttons, no instructions. No clue how to make them turn on.

First clue: at the hair salon recently, getting my annual shearing before the heat set in, I asked my hair stylist, Shana, a young person that I presumed may have some knowledge of these things. She didn't but another stylist nearby, a few years younger did: "charge your buds with your phone charger first, then just squeeze the post on the buds and they will work automatically. Look on the case for a little light that is hidden until the buds are charged, then you know they are ready to go."

I charged adn charged and looked and looked and the mysterious light never came on. This morning, in a rare spell of apathy and laziness that my morning latte' hadn't been able to budge, I took out the box with the buds once more.

First, though, I had done some research via google on ways to listen to music at the gym that didn't require the phone or the buds and of course, I was referred to the venerable mp3 player, which I had used about 20 years ago until some innovation had outdated that as well. Hopeless, I took out the earbud box and opened it for one last look before I relegated it to the drawer for evermore, and lo and behold the mysterious light was ON INSIDE of The little white Box!!!

I put the buds in my ear and opened apple music on my phone and subscribed for 3 months FREE and listened to Joni Mitchell! I was ELATED! Out of the jaws of abject failure had come success and the sound was remarkable.

A surprising consequence of this victory was that I was motivated into two of my more avoidance prone chores - shower and replacing the dog covers in her dish tray.

MOTIVATION: Generally a Dunkin Donuts latte' is enough caffeine drive and motivation to get me to do the chores I find myself most reluctant to do - cat litter boxes, laundry, showering. You may have heard how older people don't like to shower and there are reasons for that. One reason is that it is dangerous and we know it. Our balance is poor, our joints are not reliable and it is hard to climb over the tub to get in and out of the slippery tub. I have handles which I had installed and my tub/shower enclosure has built in handles so that is a big help. I like to be clean and that helps. Usually, I parlay one chore with another as in, I will get the litter boxes done first and the bathroom will smell nicer and then I can shower.

My resolution of the $100 valued ear buds wasting away in the coffee table drawer for two years was such a powerful motivation boost that I changed the absorbant cloths in my dogs food try and got my shower in 15 minutes flat!!!

I would say this is a result of the power of learning something new which every kind of newsletter recommends as a healthful factor in countering the ravages of aging. I suppose most young people have other young people to help them figure out new media, or I guess they go to youtube for help (which I have tried for other things but I don't do well with auditory instruction - I am a reader and NO new media comes with written instructions anymore). Anyhow, when I go to the gym on Wednesday, I will have my ear buds, and Joni Mitchell to help me pedal through my 15 minutes on the stationary bike as well as rhythm up my repititions on the seated rower, the abs machine, and the leg crunch!

Persevere, my friends - ask for help, and keep on trying to move incrementally into the future!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Movie Talk - 50th Anniversary of JAWS and more

For the past 2 or 3 weeks, I have been watching Northern Exposure which is 25 years old this summer, in JUly. It ran for 5 years from 1990 until 1995. Back when we had VHS, I boufht the series in a video club I joined and wasted hundreds of dollars on. Who knew that the obsolenescence of various media was around the corner. I have somewhere two storage tubs of videos that I couldn't bear to throw away, although I did throw away all my home videos because: 1.they were on a small format for my camera, and 2.they needed a caddy to play on a vhs equipped tv and the caddies were no longer available, and then the video tv were gone too. One summer in a radical cear-out necessitated by my small home and my tendency to save things, out they went. I do regret it. But you just can's save everything.

Every time I watch Northern Exposure, I am chrmed and touched and impressed by the complex and affectionate portrayal of the characters. They become like friends. Each time, I notice things I didn't think of before. Always in the past I have LOVED Chris of KBHR because of his erudite philosphical and artistic take on things and how he shares ith with his audience, never assuming they won't understand. He doesnt' patronize or talk down to his audience, he trusts them to make of it what they will. This time through (probably my dozen time through the entire series) I took note of the way Ed Chigliack understands the world through movie plots and narratives. I would say that I have understood the world through the prism of European authors who captured my young mind before I was twelve and marked it indelibly.

Often I have noted here in this blog how I rummaged through the ccollections of European classics in my Grandmother Lyon's basement bookcase. She let me read them all and they were way too old for me but I was ready! I read deMaupasant, Boccacio, Doestoyevsky. Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote the Last Days of Pompeii and to my last days, that will haunt me. I actually got to visit Pompeii when I was married back in the early 1970's.

But movies also have taught me quite a lot. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of JAWS, from the novel by Peter Benchley which was based on the New Jersey shark attacks in the early 20th century.

I think one of the plot engines that sticks with me is how the honorable and intelligent 'everyman' sheriff tries to protect the people whie the greedy businessman mayor is ready to sacrifice them for the profit of the season. This battle between the common good and greed is going on all the time all over the world and in particular in our own country which has been sold down the river to the greediest politician of all time - Donald Trump. That is one superlative he really does deserve.

But what is more rare is the exploration of GOODNESS to be found in TED LASSO, a contemporary and award winning series about a coach who puts the emotional welfare of the men in his team above winning - how rare is that! Northern Exposure, too, in its own more divided way examines how good people strive to do good in a complicated world filled with challenges to their character and their intentions. There is the struggle between the greedy selfish businessman, as always, in the form of Maurice Minnefield, the grandiose bellicose braggart and bully who exemplifies the persona so on display in our nationald theater at present.And there is Dr. Joel Fleishan, struggling with his ego and his ambition but always doing the best he can for his patients. Probably the most kind and thoroughly good character is Chris of KBHR. He is generous, non-judgemental, accepting and helpful to all. In some ways he reminds me of Ted Lasso.

Anyway if you are looking for something to watch, amazon video has Northern Exposure for free, and apple tv has Ted lasso which you can binge for free for a week and cancel your subscription before you get charged a monthly subscription fee. I am not sure about jaws, but I am about to find out. For some time, I have refused to subscribe beyond pbs and amazone, because I use amazon frequently for so many household and art supplies that it pays for the subscription in gas and delivery. I hate to shop and I love to have my stuff delivered to my porch in a day or two!

Happy hot day tv viewing and if you want to chat about the shows, you can reach me at:

wrightj45Wyahoo.com

Juneteenth Celebration

Cherry Hill Juneteenth Parade and Festival at Borton's Mill from 10:00 a.m. to 3:oo p.m. Check the internet for more details.

For those who don't know what Jeneteenth celebrates, it is a celebration of the day that the last enslaved people in Texas finally recieving the word along with the Federal army of their freedom.

There are so many ways to celebrate via pbs on tv, or by reading and familiarizing yourself with the heroes of the Emancipation movement as well as attending any of the many celebrations being held around South Jersey.

Another event coming up is Family Archaeology Day at Red Bank Battlefield, please check with google for more information. And for added Black history, many of the troops who defended Fort Mercer 1777, were from the Black RhoDE ISLAND REGIMENT. Inreasingly over the years both volunteers like Harry Schaeffer and workers at Bank have been doing research on these soldiers. There is a book on the Rhode Island Regiment of African American Soldiers that the volunteers at the time (I was one) read in their monthly book club some years back. We also read "Never Caught" about Ony Judd, One of Washington's escaped enslaved people who got away and was never captured, same as with his prized chef Hercules.

Happy Juneteenth!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Finding and Holding onto Happiness

June 16, 2025 - As many of you who have visited are aware, one of my most frequent post themes has been on how to be happy. I get my tips from several wellness newsletters, magazines, friends, books, all kinds of places. Today from THE WEEK magazine comes this Yale University Study: "Take a few moments, a few times a day to slow down, pay attention and expand on those awesome moments." The awesome moments to which this sentence is referring were detailed in the article and included such small ordinary acts as stopping to admire some flowers, up close, on a walk with the dog, or the study the sky and the clowds while in a paprking lot, or to enjoy the swirl of a rising flock of birds leaving the ground and entering the sky. You can examine the veins in a dew dropped leaf on a tree beside your driveway, or enjy the yellow layer of buttercups in bloom rising up over a green yard, or the first bloom of the orange tiger lilies (which I just saw in their warm elegance along the fence at the end of my driveway. One of the ways I admire and get close to such things is to paint them! I keep a small 6 by 8 watercolor pad in the table by my sofa and a small Windsor Newton water color set there too and sometimes I just make some small watercolor paintings of, for example a group of red tomatoes from the supermarket joined by their green twisted branch, or a plucked branch of my neighbor's hydrangea which is a glorious shade of perriwinkle blue.

Anyway, the article goes on to say how these moments of awe and admiration can stave off depression. I believe that to be true and I believe it to be part of why I am so happy so much of the time.

Believe me, I am just as subject as anyone else to the sorrows of the world and the anxiety caused by the chaos and violence in our current period (the assassination of the Minnesota political couple, or the young Jewish couple in Washington DC the ongoing bombins in ISrael and Iran, the famine in Gaza, the suffering of the people in Ukraine). You would be blind and stupid to be unaware of all this, but as the serenity prayer reminds us all, we must be aware of what we can control and what we can't. I only have a few years left in this experience of being alive on planet earth and it is enormous - much bigger than these passing troubles.

One thing that reminds me of this regularly is to sit in silent worship at my Quaker Meeting in Woodbury where the Meeting House is 300 years old. As I sit on the benches made by the families of the founders and contemplate all the generations that have sat there worried about childbirth, crop failures, smallpox, wars (at least 4 in that span of time) the deaths of loved ones, the births of new ones, I am reminded that all things pass, but the aged trees in serene watchful splendor outside in the burial ground, and the old building are still here. All things pass. I will pass too, and my ashes will sit in the earth next to all the other human worriers who lived and loved an died and re-entered the earth from which we all originally sprang. So let me enjoy the infinity and power of the leaves, the trees, the birds, the clouds, the oceans, rivers, the squirrels, the purring affection of my companion cat and be grateful for what I have in this world of wonders.

Really importantly, if you are feeling down - GET OUTSIDE! Go for a walk or if you are too droopy to get up to a walk, go for drive and park in a nearby park and roll down the window!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A small Father's Day memory

In the summer of 1985, my Dad came up from West Virginia to help me turn the attic of the house I just bought into a bedroom and playroom for my daughter. A new peaked roof had been put onto this little bungalow and the floor of the attic was a lumpy mess of the old melted roofing tar and asphalt scraps which I had to scrape off. The roof wasn't insulated, just the beams, boards and the asphalt shingles.

Over two excruciatingly hot weeks that summer, Dad showed me how to put the insulation between the beams, then put up the dry wall, then tape and plaster the seams. It was hard work and a short ceiling, so we couldn't ever stand upright and by then my Dad was in his 60's.

Because I am human, and a sibling, I got slyly competitive and asked, "Dad, do you think I am better to work with than my brothers? I fully expected him to say I was because I was following orders and working quietly and carefully. He said, "You're better in one way, you don't know what you're doing and you know it. Your brothers always think they know what they're doing and they don't."

It was a disappointing complement but so typical of Dad, and it was a great sacrifice of him to spend that summer in that baking attic.

Happy Father's Day

wrightj45@yahoo.com

NO KINGS Protest Saturday June 14, 2025

HADDON TOWNSHIP, NJ — Protesters in Haddon Township and across the country will take to the streets Saturday in "No Kings" rallies nationwide to coincide with a military parade commemorating the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, which also falls on Donald Trump's 79th birthday and Flag Day.

"No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance," says nokings.org. "From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we're taking action to reject authoritarianism — and show the world what democracy really looks like."

Just a few of us will be gathered on the hill of the Woodbury Friends Meeting site with our own signs protesting Tump's ICE raids which have kidnapped people at work, at school, at college, and at municipal buildings where they have gone to work on their permits and visa applications. They claim through the propaganda Fox channel to be deporting gang members and criminals but in fact, they are kidnapping citizens, workers, students, families, storekeepers and farm workers. It is horrible that people working in the fiels must flee to the woods and hide from these ICE enforcers.

One trespass against our rights follows another. Trump is working on defunding public broadcasting, defunding colleges and universities, and criminalizing protest. In Los Angeles he sent military and National Guard against American citizens exercising their legal right to protest the invasion by ICE into communities to kidnap people, and his propaganda channel magnified the violence to inflame the public and lied about the people being arrested and detained.

What have we come to?

Here are some ways you can take action. Sat, Jun 21 @ 12:30pm

Roadside Rallies Against Fascism › Sat, Jun 14 @ 12:30pm

Safety Marshals for No Kings March and Rally › Sat, Jun 14 @ 1pm

No Kings South Jersey › Mon, Jun 30 @ 6:15pm

Learn Spanish Meetup! › Fri, Jun 13 @ 7pm

Pre-Mobilization Call for June 14 ›

All Information from Cooper River Indivisible

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

June - Tips for Creativity

One of my health and happiness e-mail newsletter has been offering tips for boosting creatity and I thought I would share 5 of them with you:

1. Doodle! The propt they offered with this one was to take 10 circles and make something different out of each one.

2.Write a poem: What I would suggest is to learn a classic poetry form like the sonnet or the villanelle, read some of the greats and then work on one of your own. I suggest you leave the haiku alone unless you are going to try to do the form which is a season, a philosphical insight, and a 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable form. Again if you do this, try reading some of the good ones first. Or ignore what I said and just write freeliy for the heck of it!

3.Daydream - observing free thought trails (not rehearsing ists of chores to be done) This is best done while engaged in a thoughtless activity like walking.

4. Do 10 percent more.

5.Try one new thing - take ukelele lessons, learn a language, try a new sport, attend a historic event, Try Origami

I just did my version of this when I did 3 art pieces for the neew show at th Eiland Arts Center at The Station, Chestnut Ave., Merchantville, a gallery and coffee shop. The theme was travel and collage was the suggested medium. >p/> Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Small Town Goodness 6/4/25

Yesterday when my sister and I took my Husky/Lab mix, Uma, for her daily walk around Martin's Lake in Gloucester City, she was fine! Last night, she started to be 'not herself' in that she didn't want to get up and go out before bed and she refused her bedtime dog treat - unheard of! This morning, before I even awoke at 7:00 she had had an accident on the landing to the back room, about a bucketful! I cleaned it up but I knew something was really wrong because she NEVER has accidents in the house and it was a ridiculously large puddle, like a small swimming pool of urine. She usually goes about a cup of uring on her walks.

She was collapsed on the floor when I finished the clean-up and she couldn't get up. I went to get my sister who often walks her for me and Uma ALWAYS wants to go in the car, it is second only to a walk in her list of most favored treats! She wouldn't get up.

When I got back with my sister, whom Uma LOVES, she did try to get up and we were hopeful. My sister got her as far as the sidewalk and Uma collapsed and couldn't get up. My sister yelled to me to get a bath towel that we could use together to hoist her up and carry her to the house and in the span of time it took for me to get the towel, a young man passing by came over to offer his help. His name wa Ely. Ely was able to pick her up gently in his arms (and she weighs 80 pounds!) and carry her into my house. He said "Dogs are in the center of my heart" and we agreed that was how we felt too. Also in that time, two neighbors from the across the street came over to offer help, and a police car stopped to ask if we needed help. After we were in, a neighbor who was doing yard work came over to ask if there was anything he could do.

Uma is collapsed on the gloor in the living room at present. I took my sister home. My vet, Dr. Sheehen in Fairview, is a wonderful veterinarian, but closed on Wednesdays so tomorrow morning, I will call and ask him to see her. As has sometimes been the case, she may be back up by then, who knows.

The point of this post is that in the face of all the horrible news of cruelty and murder that is headling right now like the smoke coming from the Canadian wildfires, here is a breath of clean, fresh, hope! All these people stopped what they were doing and came generously and lovingly to offer help to my sister, my dog Uma, and me. This is small town goodness.

Sometimes the goodness I experience in this small town of Mt Ephraim seems almost mythical. One neighbor told her babysitter about the house I live in when it was up for sale, 40 years ago. I saved her house from burning down when I walked by and saw her porch on fire. Her husband walks my dog every day. I helped a neighbor once who was stranded in a parking lot when his car broke down, he takes out my recycle and trash every week. When I thought his mother was alone too much after her husband died, I started a senior group for her which we ran together for 7 years!

My neighbors don't complain about the leaves from my trees and I share my driveway with them when they leap frog parking their two cars. We are all good to one another. This is the America of the Saturday Evening Post and Norman Rockwell. It isn't gone and it isn't a myth. It is alive and well in probably millions of small towns around America. I am so lucky to have found mine!

Happy and hopeful trails my friends, whoever you are who may be stopping by my post fence to chat! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Origins of Memorial Day from American Experience PBS

Memorial Day Origins in the Civil War

The generation of Americans that survived the Civil War lived the rest of their lives haunted by its terrible toll. Contending with death on an unprecedented scale during the four-year conflict forced Americans to improvise new solutions, new institutions, and new ways of coping with the unimaginable loss.   There was no effective ambulance corps to transport wounded soldiers from the battlefields to aid locations. As late as August 1862, a Union division took the field at the Second Bull Run without a single ambulance. After numerous pleas to the government by public health advocates such as Henry Bowditch, an ambulance corps was finally established in 1864.   Soldiers did not wear dog tags or have any system of personal records. Hundreds of thousand of bodies remained unidentified, leaving families with no knowledge of how their loved one died, or where they might be buried. When officials did attempt identification, it was often unreliable, resulting in live soldiers being recorded as deceased and dead soldiers being marked as only slightly wounded. By World War I, soldiers were wearing official ID badges.   There was no official system for notifying next of kin. If a body was identified, a fellow soldier might take it upon himself to write to the family of the deceased explaining how their loved one died and offering words of condolence. In the spring of 1865, Clara Barton established the Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, D.C. Her organization eventually helped provide information for about 22,000 soldiers who would have otherwise remained unknown.   There was no Memorial Day. After the burial of many Union and Confederate soldiers, "decoration day" rituals began to spring up, which included placing fresh flowers on soldiers' graves.   One of the earliest known celebrations took place in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865, when the city's freed Black residents organized a proper burial for hundreds of Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison, followed by a parade to honor their memory.   In the spring of 1868, General John Logan officially designated May 30th "for the purpose of strewing flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country," and Memorial Day as we know it today was established.

Vintage and Antique Toys

Richland Vintage & Toy Fest – Spring Edition

May 24th | 8 AM - 3 PM

Shoreline Vintage & Antiques

Richland Vintage & Toy Fest is back for our 4th Annual Spring Edition vintage, retro, toy, antique, pop culture, art and anything cool show! Free vending space & Free admission!!!

Sorry I couldn't supply more information on this particulary event, but I think you can google it. I got it from my Visit South Jersey e-mail newsletter. There were a great number of Veternas Day Events as well, many parades too.

I really don'thae many vintage toys, just one doll from the early 50's and I believe I have written about her before. My daughter however, has lots of toys in the attic and the shed incuding her American Girl Doll Collection. She also has Polly Pockets, if you remember those tiny gems. My one really old vintage childhood item is a Dale Evans and Roy Rogers lunch box, badly battered and rusty, but intact - no thermos of course!

he last time I went to a vintage toy fair, it was in Merhantville, NJ and I took a photograph of a box of mangled Barbi Dolls and printed and framed it. I entitled it "Oh Barbi, Is this how it all ends?" And in many ways, not just for Barbi dolls, time does often rob us of our hair, our glamour, our fancy fashions and we end in a box. But there is more than pathos in the vintage toy and doll world, there are the sturdy survivors! My daughters has, somehwere or another, a jeep and cast of characters from Jurrasic Park! We were both entranced by that series of films and the accompanying Museum exhibitions. That was a big cultural celebration! I think she may have a few dinosaurs somewhere too. All of her matchbox cars are gone as are her skateboard, her remote controlled cars and any other items I could pass on to my sister's son.

Looks like the weather will be good for the next couple of weekends so however you are spending yours, I hope you get outdoors. In my next post, I hope to do a review of Ted Lasso, the award winning tv series on apple tv. I took a free subscription to watch the series because it was recommended to me by so many people. It is in fact, GREAT! Happy Trails!

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Alleyways and Stone House Lane

Early on this splendid day, after my gym workout and walk around Martin's Lake, I drove down to the Delaware River through Gloucester City. On the way, I decided to drive around the Mill Blocks, oldest buildings in G.C. built in 1845 to house the workers from the two large brick mills that once stood just to the North of them, just before what was once the New York Ship Yard. Suddenly I realized the alleyways and remembered the ones we had between the rows of brick workers houses where I grew up in South Philadelphia, down below Oregon Avenue.

I hadn't given much thought to alleyways over the years, and how they disappeared in residential housing developmentw, although they were once a staple of village life both here and in England. The alleyways separated the the back yards of houses and made a track way for back yard entrances, probably very useful for cottage gardening and back door deliveries.

I remember the hucksters coming through my Grandmother Lyons' back alley in Spring and summer until autumn, delivering ice for the ice boxes we had in my earliest childhood before refrigerators were common, and selling produce. The hucksters had wooden wagons drawn by horses and as a small child in the city, I was amazed and entranced by the horses. Also, I have such a crystal clear picture of the tin weighing bucket and the gauge and how the black needle moved when the produce went into the bucket to be weighed and priced. I can also remember the large tongs the ice man used to haul out the big block of ice and bring it in our kitchen on Warnock Street for our ice box. My Grandmother's Alley was much better than ours. So many people where we lived on Warnock Street had cemented their back yards and had wrought iron fences, but Grandmom's back yards were all lants and flowers and trees and wooden fences. Also, the homemakers would gather around the alleyways to meet at the huckster for their produce and it was a chance to socialize.

My Grandmother in Ocean City, New Jersey had an alleyway behind her house at 623 Asbury Avenue too, also green with plants in the sandy yards and wooden fences. I never saw a huckster there, though, and perhaps the day of the huckster had already ended.

Our hucksters in South Philadelphia came up from Stone HOUse Lane, and ancient village reclaimed from the Delaware River estuary swamplands by enterprising early Dutch and German Settlers who dug canals and used the fertie soil to rais up agricultural beds where they grew the vegetables and the things they needed to feed the hogs and horses they kept there. Later the City took the land and the shipyard is there now, and the airport and industrial usage and Stone House Lane is almost lost to memory.

Although there were no interesting hucksters in my Gradmother Wright's backyard alleyways, I so well remember her meeting with her neighbor Mrs. Garwood, to chat over the fence.

Some things promote socializing and the alleyways certainly did that, so do gardents. I used to meet my neighbor, Mrs King, a German war bride, who kept a vegetable garden on her side of our fence in the backyard and when she was tending her garden and my small daughter was playing in her playhouse we would chat over the fence.

I hope you get out and enjoy this gorgeous, even exhilerating weather while it lasts. Go for a walk and maybe ghrow in a drive and visit someplace and find some wonders! Happy Trails - Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Lens: Finding Stonehouse Lane, South Philly's lost ...

WHYY

https://whyy.org › articles › lens-finding-stonehouse-la...

Stonehouse Lane, Philadelphia, Pa from whyy.org

Sep 2, 2016