Village Life (Small Town Living)

For the past 40 yers, I have lived in a small town in a small bungaow. I have known my closest neighbors, and although in this very mobile modern American world where people move around frequently some have moved on, I have neighbors who have been here as long as I have.

When I first moved here, my next door neighbor, Charlie Hooper, was the one who lit the fire under the Real Estate man who was dragging his feet on the purchase of my house. I was desperate at the time because I had givn notice on my apartment in Philadelphia and was all packed up when my first house purchase fell through. Those home owners had lost the house they were buying and the problem dropped down the line onto me, with a toddler and a full time job to handle.

Charlie gave me a wooden 1950's Coca Cola Santa he had made and that Santa has stood sentinel at the foot of my druveway every Christmas for 40 years waving at passersby with his hearty smile! I think of Charlie Hooper and his kindness every year when I put Santa back out front to greet the season.

Today on my way to the local Dunkin Donuts for my special treat of a lette' to give me the energy to help my sister with the final phase of the Christmas decorating, I saw Mark Cassidy, the man across the street who takes out my trash and recycle cans for me each week. He was just a little boy when I moved here and he is a handsome and chivalrous grown man now. His mother was in the Seniors group I founded to get her out and about after her husband died about 10 years ago.

Right now my neighbor from around the corner, John Krauss, is walking my big and energetic (even though she is old) Lab/Husky mix Uma. He walks her almost every day, only missing when he has a work appointment or a doctor visit or a grandchild's sports event. His wife was the one who told me about this house when it went up for sale 40 years ago. She was best friends with my babysitter at the time, Vicky T. My daughter and I saved the Krauss's house from burning down 3 years ago, when a cigarette in the planter ignited the fertilizer and set the porch furniture on fire. We were walking my dog and my daughter with her keen eyesight saw the smoke. We roused the nearest neighbors who had a fire extinguisher and who turned on the hose and put the fire out before the fireman arrived.

Another neighbor, Eleanor, a few blocks away is my sometimes walking buddy although we have both been out of commission in recent months with back and knee issues. Another neighbor, Debby, who lives in Marlton now, used to live behind me. Her backyard bordered on mine and I used to talk to her mother over the back fence. Her mother was a German war bride and every spring planted a little kitchen garden by our fence. Debby and I text with one another daily and her niece's family lives in the old house now.

My closest neighbors to the West recently moved but the new neighbors are friendly and warm. My neighbors to the east are sisters, one of whom is housebound with back problems. We see one another periodically when the well sister, Linda, is outsde getting in her car or doing a little yard tidy.

The town right beside mine is the one where I spent my entire adult career life, teaching, first working on a Federally funded program at the library, when I was right out of college, then moving pn to teach English at the High School, finally, as my continuing education and college degrees mounted and changed, I became Art teacher in the grade school (which is now closed, empty, and replaced). I visited the abadoned building once and it was ghostly, I could almost hear the echoing of childrens feet and voices as they raced down the hallways.

Often, I drive the mile and a half or so through my town, Mount Ephraim, into Gloucester City, the town where I worked and which is located on the banks of the Delaware, to look at the Delaware River.

Right across the Delaware river on the river bank in Philadelphia is the church my family attended for a couple of generations, Gloria Dei, Old Swede's Church. It was founded by the early Swedish settlers in the late 1600's. Several blocks away down Oregon Avenue is my childhood neighborhood, where my parents bought their first home, right after the second World War, in which my father served in teh US NAVY and was fortunate enough to survive.

It means the world to me to be so close and attached to these places, my home-ground, my village.

I watch a British series called Heartbeat, which is set in a Yorkshire village, and I can't help but note how my American suburban life is similar to the life of the village of Aidensfield in Yorkshire. My earliest ancestors are from England, as well as Southern Germany and Scandinavia. AS the modern world, here in America, is described more and more as lonely, I reflect on how my little hometown world is rescued from that anonymity and loneliness by our 'village' life, the neighbors who check in on me in my old age, and who help me, my sister who lives a small drive away. And I am sorry for the many people I know who do not have these blessings, whose children have moved across the country, whose brothers and sisters have retired far far away, or died, and who have no close neighbors or family. I think it takes a long time to form the warm family type ties I have with my neighbors.

This is something for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving, my Village Life!

When I went out onto the porch just now a raucous bird called out "Don't forget us!" and of course, the old old trees that were here when I first came and are now as old as I am, having been planted when this house was built 80 years ago, have been my neighbors too, the trees and the generations of birds and squirrels, opposums and raccoons, skunks and migrating flocks of small black birds that show up every Spring when the grass is bright green. These too are my neighbors in my Village Life.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends far and near and known and unknown!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Book Review - Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray

In the November 21, 2025 issue of THE WEEK magazine, there was a review of a new release, Taking Religion Seriously by Charles Murray, and I was intrigued.

Since my visual impairment precludes reading books in print, I ordered the book from Audible, an app on my phone that my daughter set up for me. It is a wonderful new way to enjoy books, having someone read them to me.

This is a most surprising and engaging book full of personal exploration. It is like a conversation with your most erudite and interesting friend. One of the biggest surprises was early on when the author, who is also the narrator of the audiobook, describes his wife’s search for a religion and her discovery of The Society of Friends! Since I shared this journey, that was very interesting to me. Both Murray and his wife had been raised in other Christian denominations and had, by college, lapsed in any kind of religious practice, as had I. Both end up becoming Quakers.

Murray is an author of several well regarded books, the best known of which was probably The Bell Curve. He takes a far- ranging kaleidoscopic exploration of the of myriad views of religion. He takes the perspective of science, through physics and the Big Bang, philosophy, psychology, history, and he brings us along with him in very accessible prose and a casual, conversational style.

I would say that this book was probably the most interesting and influential book I have read in the last ten years, and I have always been an avid reader. Since my vision decline in the past 5 years, I have been listening to audiobooks every evening.

Some other stimulating books on the contemporary religious experience that I have read recently were written by Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz Weber, whom I had heard speak in an interview on Fresh Air, an NPR radio program hosted by Terry Gross on WHYY-FM.

Both authors offer a 21st Century experience with religion and I found them invigorating to my own religious practice. Good reads for the upcoming winter months!

Happy Trails

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Single parenthood - a topic I want to discuss at some point

Just read this in my e-mail newsfeed - putting up here as a prompt for me to think about. by Pallavi Gogoi, NPR's Chief Business Editor For a couple of years now, I have been unable to shake two key facts about the American population: One, that 40% of all births in America are to unmarried women. And two, that America has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. I wanted to revisit the topic this year because the collective despair over declining births in the U.S. has led to ideas and proposals that promote marriage, including a bill to make marriage great again. As I started digging in, I discovered another fact that has become the fulcrum of my new journalistic examination. Births to unmarried women aged 30 and up have increased by 140% in the last two decades, a period when teen births have fallen off a cliff.

Marriage and fortitude

This morning I awoke thinking of a friend who is going through a difficult period of many years with her ailing husband. The word that sprang to mind, as often happens to me with situations - I like words and I like finding the one that suits the ocasion: Fortitude! I hae a dozen friends with whom I text, talk or visit on a fairly regular basis. Four of them are married and five are single (divorced) and three are widowed. All of their circumstances are very individual depending on when they got married, how long they were married and which of them is sick and which is the caretaker.

v One thing that they all share is a financial pattern: the arried women have had twice as much financial benefit as the single ones with the exception of one single friend who managed her money well invested, and rose through her career to a higher paying scale.

Of my widowed friends, one was married her whole life and raised three sons who live far away. She has managed very well, partly, I think because she was raised by a single mother who showed her an example of independence and self reliance. Also she was of a practical nature and we shared a grandmother who was widowed early and lived an independent and happy life, though one definitely fraught with financial challenges. Our grandmother never owned her own home until my father bought her a house that she only had for a short period before she had a heart attack and died. An old childhood friend married a much oler man who took care of her like a child. She was of a fragile emotional nature anyhow and had been babied and spoiled as a child, which she would be only to happy to say of herself. When her older husband died, she was incolnsolable and drowning in self-pity because she had no one to take care of her anymore and she did't want to face the demands of ordinary living. She was left with a house and sufficient income, but she didn't want to be stuck 'managing' ordinary things like repairs and car inspection and so on. She was a whiner and a crybaby. Our friendship ended, sadly, over an incident unrelated to that, and also our deeply divided political affiliations. I have a bare acquaintance with another women very similar - just not up to managing her own life on her own and full of self pity.

My single (divorced) friends who spent most of their lives on their own are much more resilient and have much more fotitude, as have I. I do, however, have my youngest sister to help me when I falter and in areas where I simpy am not physically capable of maintaining any more. My other single friends were married and ended up with much more money so they can afford to hire help, and one has since found a very helpful and accomplished boyfriend who does a lot for her.

The friend who has the hardest time, is the one who is caretaker to a slowly declining hisband who has no fortitude. He got weaker and weaker over a period of years and was not inclined to do anything for himself. He had neuropathy in his legs and was in chronic pain and suffered other kinds of debility. She has had to do everything for him, and he is a whiner too. He even has suffered bouts of pain medication addictions. It reminded me of a novel by Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

I haven't had to face that kind of challenge, that was a benefit of my free and independent life, and I am not prone to loneliness - I have pets and hobbies and friends, so my life has been FREE and peaceful, full and pleasant. I wonder if I could rise to the occasion. Some people are ennobled by their caretaking sacrifice. I knew a teacher friend who took care of her father in his dwindling health over a period of about 10 years until he died in his 90's. She was devoted and uncompaining I guess it is a lot like the sacrifice of raising a child. You are curtailed necessarily. You have to be home and in attendance to raise a child. You have to be directed toward their well being and happiness often at the sacrifice of your own. I did it, and I can say for myself, that my single, independent life is much more comfortable and pleasurable than either my parenting years or my married years. I am hppiest now. But it may be that I am just that personality - a solitary, independnt. Anyhow that is the way it worked out.

I have seen good marriages, however, and I suppose if you can find and maintain one of those, that would be idea. I wasn't able to do that. I live in what Elizabeth Cady Stanton described in a speech once as "The Splendid Solitude of Self." She was married and have 7 or more children! Whether you are married or single, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and I hope you are happy! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Toy Train Show - American Museum, Andaloro Way

Hi Everyone! It's time again for the Annual Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ! Starting November 28th, 2025 and running thru February 1st, 2026, the Show will be feature O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with cars attached, will race on two different platforms, each one decorated with vintage buildings, and other structures to give a traditional holiday appearance! The Museum is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 3pm.

Hope to see you soon at the Museum!

Jeffrey Norcross

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ NJ 08093 856-812-1121 sjmuseum@aol.com

Typewriters Part 2 - Underwood 1919 No.5

Also languishing up in the attique was a 1919 Underwood which I no longer remember how it was acquired. I have had it for as long as I remember. I can't imagine how I lugged that incredibly heavy cast iron framed monster from apartment to apartment, and to my house and up the steps to the attic! But today, I hauled it back down again, once again in risk of life and limb as I am 80 as of last week, and too old to be taking things up and down from the attic.

Although I managed to get it down and onto a shelf in my bedroom, emptied recently by my having donated most of my books to The Free Books Project of Camden, New Jersey, that's as far as I got. I am too tired now to dust it off and look for a serial number BUT a perusal of models indicates it is a No 5, and early model built in the first one or two decade of the twenthieth century.

Perhaps one of the reasons the typewriters have spoken to me so seductively is that I began my working career as a typist - first on an addressograph machine, another stalwart of the bygone era, and later, after a couple of years at Peirce Business School (now junior college) I became a secretary. By that time, we used electric typewriters. But these were the tools of my trade as the sewing machines were the tools of my grandmother's trades.

One line from a piece I found on the internet stood out - the evolution from manufacture of guns, to sewing machines to typewriters and then by World War 2, back to guns again.

John T. Underwood who founded the business built it from the manufacture of ink after he saw the success of Remington (yep the gun anufacturer) and soon, Underwood was the titan of typewriters in the WORLD. The Underwood 1919 5 was virtually indestructable which was part o its downfall as it never needed replacement. It was the tool of the governmental beaurocrat.

I began my typing life on a manual, befere the electric was available and I remember building up finger strength. At the peak of my office career as a secretary at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company in the 1960's, I could type 90n words per minute.

After I get the Rheinmetal repaired, I will see how fast I can type on it. The Underwood has a nice typing feel and a satisfying click, but I don't think I can afford at present to have them both restored.

Maybe at some point I will watch a YouTube and learn how to clean the old Underwood, and then find out how to get a ribbon or re-ink the one it has. It seems a fairly simple machine. (Yes, I know what a delusion this is!)

It is definitely in the realm of possibility however, that I will have the Underwood cleaned and restored at some point in the Philadelphia Typewriter Company that I will be visiting with my sister and the Rheinmetall next week.

It is interesting when you search the internet for some item and come across the collectors. I love reading the research they have done and engaging with their passion. My passion and interest for these items lacks their depth. I am a dilettant. Still, I say to my typewriter and sewing machine friends, nice getting to know you!

Happy Trails - wherever they may take you!

as always please contact me by my e-maill if you wish to comment as that part of blogspot is polluted by spammers wrightj45@yahoo.com as always

Rheinmetall Portable typewriter S 09/2552 USSR Occupied Germany

The Life Story of Really Old Things -

A few days ago I was lamenting the loss of the freedom of CD's because I liked being able to put a cd in the dash and play an album I wanted to hear. I am so far behind in IPhone and modern car stuff that I can't do that with my current technology although I am aware that it can be done.

At home, in my e-mail newsfeed, I came across an article about how some young people are embracing old technologies like cd's and cassettes for that very freedom and autonomy. We don't all want to be tethered to the cloud or wifi.

The thought persisted and I was thinking how I wished I had a portable typewriter so I wasn't dependent on my always unreliable printer. I have spent literally hundreds of dollars on having the repair guy come out and get it working when I was doing a project and none of the usual processes could get it working again. Every storm knocked it (wifi) out. I had to turn off the router, unplug everything then wait a couple of hours, plug everything in and wait for the router and hope it would work, which it often did not. So then I would start replacing the expensive ink cartridges that seemed to get used up or dry up on their own regardless of usage. How cool it was in the past to put in a piece of paper and type what I wanted and there it was!

I looked up vintage portable typewriters and found most places that had them on offer had closed and their telephone numbers didn't work anymore. Amazon had them starting at #190. Suddenly, I remembered I had a very old portable up in the attic that I had used years ago when I did presentations on World War 2 Women Journalists! It was a 1947 (?) Rheinmetal portable in perfect condition, though gummed up by age. I had bought it for $25 from a vintage shop that has since gone out of business. It was a popular prop in that presentation and kids in particular were entranced by how you could hit the keys and the words came out on paper! Back then, it worked.

I took my life in my hands and climbed the attic steps and brought down my prize. It was so gummed up the keys couldn't rouse themselves to the task so I looked up typewriter repair and restoration. Again, all the ones in New Jersey were out of business, but there was one in Philadlphia that was still open and functioning on Passyunk Street. I called and indeed they were still there and still repairing and restoring. I told the man on the line my model name and number and he said it was a very good model. In fact, my online search had told me that my model S 09.2552 was a very good model. That was what the S stood for 'Special high quality' and the 09 gave the location which was Sommerda, Germany. It also said it was USSR Occupied Germany, so it was a post war machine.

I had to decide if it was worth it to put that money out to restore the typewriter but I decided that it was because it seems to me that something that had survived bombs, occupation, all the destruction and chaos of that part of Europe for almost 80 years deserved respect and care. Maybe I feel that way because I just turned 80.

My sister, bless her generous heart, has agreed to go with me next week to take the machine to the repair shop. I am excited about this new venture into the past.

Some of you may have read my posts about my 100 year old Singer sewing machine and my quest for a 100 year old sewing machine table to go with it. This makes me think long and hard about these formidable survivors, these hard working companions. I wish the typewriter could type its own story and tell me how it got to New Jersey, how it left Europe, and who it traveled with and when. My heart goes out to these survivors; I guess that makes me a kind of romantic. I still think about the metal trunk I bought that had the letters and baby shoes of a Greek immigrant in it. How sad that these items were unloved and put out into the market. I feel I have rescued this typewriter which, unlike the sewing machine was not a member of my family, but it deserves a family.

If you wish to contact me, please use my e-mail not comments which is polluted by spam. wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happy Trails

Ken Burns' The American Revolution

Last night I watched the 6th episode of Ken Burns' new masterpiece of hisorical documentary, The American Revolution. It has been a passionate interest of mine for decades due to the fact that I was a volunteer for several years at Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, and because I was born in Philadelphia and have been immersed in history since my retirement in 2006.

I always found The American Revolution confusing. I had drawn maps and chronologies to somehow sort out what was going on but it really never emerged from the fog of confusion until I watched this documentary. I have been to many of the nearest most important battle sites from the Revolution such as Morristown which I visited several times including during the big re-enactment event, The Cliveden House in the Battle of Germantown, Valley Forge many times, and of course, the Re-enactment of the Battle of Red Bank which I saw annually and volunteered during (Octobers).

Our Red Bank Battlefield volunteer history club also visited the sites of the Battles of Princeton and Trenton, and we even held in our hands what was claimed to be the skull of Count Von Donop (dna later proved it was not. It was the skull of a Native American Woman). Somehow, I could never get these places in order and I was entirely stumped by Yorktown. (I thought it was all New England and New York) Ken Burns made it all clear at last. He also brought clarity to some of the names and relationships such as the British generals Cornwallis and Howe, and the Continental generals, Greene and Knox, Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee. I actually visited Lee's grave at Christ's Church in Philadelphia. (a passionate atheist his wish was NOT to be buried near a church!)

Themes: One of the things I enjoyed in this monumental undertaking was the use of excerpts from diaries. I had collected and read many of the diaries quoted in the film, the Hessian soldiers, the young soldier, Joseph Plum Martin, the women, Abigail Adams letters, and the writings of the Indigeounos people. Natie Amerians had usually been left out entirely in other depiction of the Revolution or portrayed as merciless savages attacking the frontier folk. This film showed how they were central to the story, and the most impacted by it.

The other theme for me was the suffering. In a time of hand tools, the destruction of hand crafted homes and furnishings, the burning down of entire towns, the destruction of crops and orchards and the starvation that followed. And the suffering of people, young men cut down in their prime by the thousands, entire tribes of Native American peoples slaughtered and displaced. The struggles and terrors of women left alone on farms with children to feed and the constnt threat of marauding foragers who would take the last morsels of food, possible rape and murder the woman and her daughters, and burn down their homes. What a terrible affliction of misery and suffering on people who, like all people in all time, wanted to simply live in peace and survive. Everytime I see a depiction of the suffering at Valley Forge, it literally makes me cry.

This is a huge experiene and one that needs repeating. I am already feeling my clarity and understnding of this vast campaign beginning to cloud. I will watch this 12 hour documentary again, and again, probably every 4th of July, and my unerstanding of what happened will, hopefully grow. So many of the great historians who commented during the film brought out insights that I will ponder and one of them was the impact of this revolution on the revolutions in the 20th century of colonial possessions throwing off the yokes of European conquerors. Just a week ago, I watched a documentary about the Iranian Hostage event, and realized for the first time that what had precipitated it was the attempt of the Iranian revolutionaries to take over the Petroleum processing plant, the biggest in the world, that had been built and owned by Great Britain which took all the profits and kept the Iranians in a kind of peasant/serf vassal relationship.

What I never understood clearly before about the main importance of the locations of the battles was the importance of the shipping ports to re-supply the British forces. I did read a book once that detailed the gargantuan quantities of cattle, pigs, barrels of salted pork and fish, and other supplies needed to feed armies of the size of 20,000 and so on for months, and even years. There isn't much talk about that in most movies and documentaries and I admit when I read the quantities I was astonished. As always - please write to me directily if you wish to share in the conversation as the comments section of blogspot is ruined by spam. My e-mail is wrightj45@yahoo.com Happy Trails to YOU!

Zen Mind Beginners Mind - Books that changed our lives

In my e-mail feed there was a post from NPR about a new series they were running where authors, critics, and others write about going back to books from their past that changed their lives.

This idea has stayed with me and I have been thinking about the many many books that changed my life, and about books in general. Over the past couple of years, I have donated thousands of books, the major part of my personal library to the Free Books Project because I am losing my vision to Fuch's Dystrophy and reading is too hard for me now. There was no point in holding on to something I could no longer use, so I gave them away.

I haven't gone back to many books over the years anyhow because there are always new ones and because my interests change as my life changes. But a book sprange into my mind last Sunday during discussion hour at my Friends Meeting in Woodbury and I ordered it from amazon. Of course, I can't read it, so I am going to give it away, but I have two forms of borrowing audio books and I am listening to it on audio book: Hoopla (a free app from my library, and audible, a 'pay for app' that I can use on my phone or laptop.)

Every night, I listen to audio books for about an hour. Usually, I listen to light weight entertainment, like someone teling me a story. Sometimes, I dip into something deeper or more challenging, such as "Man-Up" by Cynthia Miller.

I first encountered Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in 1970. It is a series of lectures given by Zen teacher Suzuki and it was the book that brought popular attention to Buddhism to the counterculture in the US. All the young peope my ex-husband and I knew back in our hippy days were reading it and I suppose our dip into drug culture via smoking marijuana and taking LSD was the inspiration for learning more about our minds and thinking. I believe at the time there was another book called "The Doors to Perception" and we all became aware of both 'perception' and that it could be observed and altered. We felt it drug induced but we wanted to find it naturally.

This isn't such an odd thing, even today, when even the most mainstream people regularly alter their perception with sedatives, anti-depressants, and of course, the most popular one of all, alcohol. Also, at present, November 2025, in the majority of the states where marijuana is legal there are almost as many dispensaries as there are pharmacies or convenience stores. My little town has THREE!

My fist introduction to Zen Buddhism and indeed, the book, "Zen Mind Beginner's Mind" was baffling and even confounding, Everything seemed to contradict everything else, which, I realized in time, was part of the understanding because it is teaching us how to struggle with the most subtle of mind tricks - intellectualizing.

I read so many books on Zen Meditation, in particular, in the beginning, Jack Kornfeld, Phd, psychologist and Zen teacher. After the Englightment, the Laundry, was one of his best sellers. My goal, always, was to release myself from enslavement to moods, to understand more about how my mind was blown hither and yond and to release myself from captivity in the more negative and paintful experiences. I understand now that there is no escape from these normal experiences of ife in the corporeal world, but you can shorten the duration of the suffering when you can understand that, like the weather, it is a passing field of forces.

It seems to me that this is the most essential struggle of our existence. People die every day, every hour, because they can't endure the emotional pain of various states. They become drug addicts, alcoholics, even suicides because they can't find escape from the more painful states of mind such as depression.

Along with millions of other peopke I hoped that Zen Meditation offered a route into understanding and perhaps controlling these states of mind.

What I eventually discovered was that Pema Chodrin was the guide for me. She is an abbot and Zen teacher in Gumpo Abby in Canada, and I have read every book she has written and they, along with her cd's saved my life during the most emotionally and mentally painful period of my life. I bought a 5 cd changer, for those too young to remember, a music/media player that you could load 5 cd's onto for continuous playing - used before the cell phone was invented. At night when I couldn't sleep, I would load her cd's and her soothing voice and simplified, uncluttered and clear lectures would calm the storm of suffering in my heart and mind and lead me out of the prison.

Listening to the Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, reminds me of how much it sounds like Gobbledy Gook. In fact it is what reminded me of that old phrase Gobbledy Gook. It seems to me that it ties as many knots as it unravels. But now, at age 80, and after years and years of reading and thinking and studying and meditation, I understand a little more easily what Suzuki is talking about and how he is talking about it.

One thing that both confounded and infuriated me and stuck inmind for years for pondering was the concept that our minds "Make the world" = surely not - certainly the world is empirically existing regardless of our minds. But over time, I came to understnd how our developed filters change and alter and translate the world, "Perceive it" and make something out of it that we come believe is the whole thing, the real thing, but it is, in fact, a creation.

Recently I saw a marvelous science program on how the brain works. Simply, the idea that caught my attention was that we have a limited and unique and individual ability to take in the information about the world. We know that by simple things such as how our dogs can smell things beyound the abilities ofour olfactory sense, and cats can see things we can't see, and other creatures can percieve sensory information unavailable to us, so we know there is more going on out there than we can take in. Our brains take in what they can and then fabricate the rest to make a complete picture.

That's how we "make the world." Finally I get it, and what's more, from reading all the Zen books, I actually understand it as well. Of course that is only the barest inkling in the challenge of using that information to 'control' our minds and emotions.

Composure has become something I identify as an admirable trait. I am not a terribley skilled practitioner of it, but I have known people who were and I have admired them. It has taken a lifetime to identify what that trait was that I admired in those folks, my Godfather Neal Schmidt had it, my Grandfather Joseph Lyons had it, Joyce Connelly, a volunteer from Red Bank Battlefield had it. These people could demonstrate composure under the most stressful of situations. How did they get it? They seemed to be gifted with more of it than most people. Joyce was always AWARE; when we had meetings of the volunteers and staff at Red Bank Battlefield, say the Book Readers' Club, Joyce was so AWARE of everyone, the forces driving them and all they were saying, and though she had an idea and a book to suggest that she found especially meaningful, she could wait patiently, make her case in a composed and calm manner, and accept the decision of the group with calm acceptance. I remeber the book she really wanted us to read "Escaped and Never Caught" the story of Ona Judge, a woman enslaved to Martha Washington. I immediately bought the book that Joyce recommended, the group chose a different book, a book about the First Rhode Island Regiment. The group, at that time, was composed by mainly men, so it wasn't surprising that they should choose a military title over one about a woman and a slave. Nonetheless, Joyce respected me and we formed a friendship over my choice of that book and our discussions about it later. In a very real sense, I loved Joyce and admired her. Joyce Connelly died from cancer.

So, I have always wanted to understand states of mind, mind and others, and to learn more about the mechanisms that drive them. I wanted to be released from the more painful and embarrassing ones and to acquire a better practice of the more admirable ones, liek composure. So I read Zen Buddhism, and books on psychology, and joined the Quakers! To me, The best Quaker book on this topic was Rex Ambler's pamphlet put out by the Pendle Hill Quaker publisher, The Early Mysicism of Quakers. The books describes how they discovered and practiced meditation and then goes on to compare it to various forms of phsychology that use meditation techniques to help people understand and work to unravel the snares in which they find themselves caught.

The most recentl insight that I have discoverd from a New Years Resolution offered by an article in the New York Times, was to take note of when I feel happy. Yesterday, I was pulling out of my drive way when the Fed Ex delivery van was pulling up to the curb. The delivery man handed me my package of 80th Birthday photograhs which I had printed by Walgreens Pharmacy photo department. I was thrilled to have them to take to lunch with me. I got to the corner of the street and a group of about 15 men women and children were engaged in a Christmas decorating party on the lawn of a house and they all waved happily to me, and I experienced a fireworks of happiness. Zen has taught me, however, that this too is a transient state, so enjoy it an dlet it go. You can't chase that state, any more than you could be excited by an array of fireworks that never burned out or stopped. Zen Mind Beginner's Mind wasn't the best, but it was the first and it was the KeY to understanding the mystery of existence for me.

Happy Trails! and Calm seas.

as always, if you wish to correspond, please use my e-mail because 'comments' in blogspot is polluted by spam. >p/> wrightj45@yahoo.com

My 80th Birthday and The Robin's Nest, Mount Holly 11/13/25

The Lost Gypsy Caravan

This was my best birthday ever. The greatest gift was to see how many friends I had and how much they liked and cared about me. My neighbors, Debby and Eleanor took me out to lunch at Maritsa's and Debby gave me a bouquet and a great soup bowl that can go in the oven, the microwave or the freeer! My old teaching buddies, Jacky Brady, Joanne Wells, and Nancy Thomas gave me lunch at Maritsa's also! Then my daughter drove me to The Blue Plate in Mullica Hill for lunch with her and my sister Sue. Yesterday on my actual birthday, Sue and I went to Mount Holly to the Robin's Nest.

The Robin's Nest was a restaurant I used to visit regularly when I was able to drive all over the place. There were so many things in Mount Holly that I liked, the antique shop in the parking lot on Church St., the Christmas Shop, the hadicraft shop, the basket weaver, the gypsy caravan. I haven't been there since the pandemic and so much has changed.

At the Robin's Nest, I had potato leek soup because I always liked their soups. When we parked, I hoticed the little colorful gypsy caravan that used to be parked on the grassy lot next to the parking lot was gone. I asked our waittress what happened to it and she said she never saw any gypsy caravan and she had been there for 30 years! She made me feel like I had imagined it or made it up! Fortunately there were two women in a nearby table and one of them told me she remembered the gypsy caravan. I always liked it because it was so colorfully painted, tiny and beautiful and reminded me of the open road. When we got back home, after I dropped Sue off, I searched the internet via google to no avail. No mention of the gypsy caravan on anything relating to Mount Holly. That little gypsy caravan is really and truly gone. Also gone, the arts and crafts shop, the Christmas Shop, The Quilt shop. Susan said she thinks the pandemic killed all those little stores. At least The Robin's Nest was still there.

I still have two more lunches in the birthday festival, today at Kunkels with Joanne Spector, my old gym buddy, if I am giving 'origin labels' to my friends, and tomorrow at The Station, with Sue Troy, an old Merchantville High School friend. She also does art and I want to introduce her to the gallery.

Interestingly, at The Blue Plate with my daughter and sister, I ran into a friend from when I worked at Gloucester City High School, Kathy Tice, school secretary. She was always the sweetest, calmest, kindest woman.

If I gave this birthday a theme, it would be friendship. A secondary theme would be change and saying goodbye. For two years or so, I have been feeling as though I am sayig a slow goodbye to the world that I love! My medical reports have been so good this autumn that I have optimism that I may make it to 90, but I already feel like I am from the past and not entirely fitted for the future. A third theme would be TREES. I have been thinking and photographing and painting tree pictues a lot. When I die, I am to have my ashes scattered under the Salem Oak seedling tree we planted on Arbor day at Woodbury Friends Meeting. I want to be there with the peaceful people.

From that first tree on Warnock Street in Philadelphia in the 1940's and 1950's trees have been in my life and important to me. I have felt them to be friends of mine in this world.

A fourth theme can be visitors from the past - the memorabilia from my Godfather Neal Schmidt, deeased 5 years ago that came in the mail from his family friend, Mary Cook, Sheila from Tom Nicholas's woodland hermitage in the 1970's, Kathy Tice from the GCH years, and Sue Troy from my Merchantville High School y years. >p/> Lavinia gave me a flower press for my birthday and I am going to press the flowers from the bouquet that Debby gave me.

Happy Tails and if anyone out there remembers the gypsy caravan please let me know at wrightj45@yahoo.com

November 7, 2025 Joni Mitchell's birthday - age 82

I celebrate my 80th birthday in the same week as Joni Mitchell's 82nd birthday. I feel as though Joni's music spoke for a wide segment of the women of my generation, single mothers or single mothers who gave up their children for adoption, artists making their way in a male dominated world, struggling to find love and artistic, creative satisfaction and success, trying to express our experience of living in the world. I love the line in one of Joni's songs "songs are like tatoos" and her songs did pierce your skin and stay with you, but much deeper than skin, right to the heart.

Joni Mitchell's lyrics are poetic brilliance and narrative genius. You are there with her as she navigates her dangerous liason with the 'coyote' and his two other women, and in the tour bus with her as she passes the tragic farm house on fire. She has music for every stretch of the soul, from playful 'Cary' to the despair of 'Blue'.

Joni, I am so glad you were there to put our world into music and share our experience! "I wish I had a river, to skate away on."

Love and Happy Birthday, another 80 year old, still independent, still living

wrightj45@yhaoo.com

James and Ann Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield, National Park, NJ

'Join us in celebrating the Holiday Season at the historic James and Ann Whitall House. Step into a world of timeless elegance as we invite you to our beautifully decorated historic house this holiday season! Experience the magic of the holidays surrounded by charming architecture and rich history, all adorned with festive decor.'

December 5, 6 7 from 3 p.. to 8 p.m.

Bayshore Discovery Center, Bivalve, NJ

'Flagship: Monument on the Move' ]On November 1, the Bayshore Center and the Monuments to Migration and Labor (NJMML) project hosted Flagship: Monument on the Move, the first of three events that NJMML Monument Artist Immanuel Oni is organizing in the South Jersey project region. The event focused on exploring the migration histories of African Americans who came to the Port Norris area from the Chesapeake Bay region, to work in the oyster industry.'

For two or three years, I worked as a tour guide at the Bayshore Discovery Project. If you haven't been there ist is the re juvenated and reanimated ghost town of the former multimillion dollar oyster industry. There are so many things to see "down South" and I strongly recommend you go exploring from Greenwich on the Cohansey to Bivalve, Shelpile on the Bay. There are a couple of nearby boat marinas if you go to Greenwich and one has a nice restaurant though you need to check because I am not certain of the days, hours or seasons.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, the WPA recorded live interviews with people who were trucked from down South to work in the oyster canning industry. The Museum at the Bayshore Discovery Project has audio versions of those interiwws, as wel as the standing stations used by the shuckers who could wield their oyster lnives like ninjas. These trucked in season workers were housed in dormatory style bunk houses at Shell Pile, named for the reekin mountains of shells under the blanket of screaming seagulls. These mountains of shells were ground into gravel for roads and powder for fertilizer.

There is so much to learn about this once thriing industry in both New Jersey and New York. There is also a wonderful raised trail into the marshlands for bird lovers.

Happy trails through New Jersey's deep and fascinating history wrightj45@yahoo.com

Germany 1969 and 70 - a fragment for Marilyn

I was talking with my friend, Marilyn Quinn, today about our years in Germany when we were 21 and 22 and we discussed writing our memories. She had been a student in Munich and I had been an army wife in Heilbronn am Neckar. I have books worth of memories but I will put only a fragment or two here and send the link to Marilyn.

My landlady's name was Frau Froeschle and she ran a butcher shop as well as several rental properties in a kind of atrium style modern architectural houseing complex The buildings were concrete and two stories tall. Our apartment faced a paved courtyard in the front and a cooperative garden courtyard in the back. our apartment, which we were able to rent because it was the Vietnam war and the army post, Wharton Barracks, was full of soldiers either going to Vietnam or getting put together to go home from Vietnam, so officers had the option of living "on the economy" which meant an apartment in the village, rather than on the army post. It was a remarkably clean little town and all the windows had window boxes with red geraniums in them.

Our apartment had a small back bedroom with one plump bed and a red down duvet, a slanted ceiling and a window with a view of the back garden where each morning I could see half a dozen stout housewives in cotton dresses, aprons, head scarves and laced up construction boots hoeing and raking and working on their vegetable patches.

There was a small central room off of which was a tiny living room, furnished with contemporary modern German "mobel" (furniture) a small slim wooden frame sofa, matching chair and a coffee table. My favorite piece of furniture was in the kitchen which faced the concrete courtyard; it was a creamy yellow cabinet with a door behind which there was a built in sifter for flour, and a pull out tray for rolling out dough. There was a small table and chair set, a kitchen sink and gas range. The bathroom was also small and had a 'new to me' fixture, a tiny backpack sized tank that held the hot water - that was it - no more hot water when that was used up!

Below us lived an interesting array of temporary neighbors. At first there was an American couple from New England but my first lieutenant husband told me I couldn't fraternize because her husband was a lower rank and it compromised his position as an officer. The Boston wife told me the landlady's butcher shop specialized in horse meat and they had bought some and made hamburgers and it was good. I was horrified. I don't think she and I would have been friends anyhow, but they moved back to the states and were replaced by a group of Middle Eastern, maybe Turkish, foreign workers. We only ever saw the women, about three or four of them, draped head to toe in long swaths of colorful fabrics.

The landlady, Frau Froeschle, was a strangely malevolent person who wore a phony smile below remarkably hostile eyes, they fairly gittered with some kind of malice. I remember coming out of the bedroom one morning and finding her standing behind the full glass door of our apartment like a character from a horror movie. It wssn't easy to ascertain her purpose other than to check on my housekeeping because she spoke little to no English (allegedly) and I spoke little to no German at the time. Soon, however I was enrolled in a language class on the post.

Frequently Frau Froeschle got drunk and raged out her kitchen window, also second story (over her butcher shop) and facing my kitchen window. She would hang out the window in a black satin slip with a bottle of wine in her hand and scream curses at me, or at our apartment, hard to say which. In all our other encounteres she was coldly polite.

One of the few major incidents we encountered was the day the draped women in the apartment below left their apartment with the door open and a toddler inside. He closed the door on them and there was something cooking which was soon burning and smoke was coming out from under their door. They were screaming in their language, speaking no German or English, and I came down to see what was causing the commotion.

By tht time, I knew at least these a few words: "Feuer" und "Hilfe, bitte hilfe!" which I shouted at Frau Froeschle's grandson who was working in the paved courtyeard. He was a surly and hostile youth of about 16 or 17, who usuallyignored my greetings but he put aside his dislike long enough to come see what was the matter. A stout, muscular youth, he put his shoulder to the women's apartment door and smashed it open. They ran in and grabbed the todder; he opened the windows, and then they all left as quickly as they had arrived. The women went into their apartment immediately and closed the broken door the best they could, all leaving me in the hallway without a word or nod of thanks.

We never managed to cross the cultural barrier and whenever they saw me they covered their faces and fled as though I were a plague carrier.

The only friend I made those years was a German bar girl named Trudy who also lived across the couryard next to Frau Froeschle's apartment. A beautiful platinum blonde in her early 30's who spoke fairly good English, She was supported by a succession of young American soldiers, as a sort of wife. That made it possible for the soldiers to spend free time off base in a home and family type setting. She often joked to me about her boyfriends and how she would trick them into buying her new furniture or other expensive items by telling them she was pregnant and needed to get an abortion. She had three small children already. That is a story for another time.

In those years, I was so young, only 21 and 22, I really never gave much thought to Frau Froeschle or her personal history, and it is embarrassing to me now to think how little I thought of anything like history or the war which had only been over for 25 years at that time. Many of the storekeepers as well as Frau Froeschle would have been alive during the war and enemies of the Americans. We were occupying their country. Next time I write, I will tell about what I learned about the history of Heilbronn am Neckar and how I found out about it.

Auf wiedersehen, wrightj45#yahoo.com

My posts for the next few days will be devoted to my upcoming 80th Birthday

Turning 80 years old. Begun October 30, 2025

Friends my age are surpised that we have gotten old. Each of us has faced it in a different way. Many cling to what I think of as a kind of disguise: they color their hair, wear make-up, and some have cosmetic surgery, face lifts, injections and so on. I choose to dig into the reality of this moment. To me, increasingly, it feels like an accomplishment to have survived for 80 years. Each day I read reports in my e-mail news feed about people half my age dying from cancers, drug overdoses, murder, automobile accidents. And heaven knows there have been plenty of oppportunities for the death dealer to call in my note: traveling in dangerous places with my ex-husband in Europe (Morocco, Turkey) even just riding with him on some of the dangerous highways we traveled. And of course the classic death notice for women - domestic violence, childbirth! I survived plagues - polio, the Corona Virus Epidemic, (the influenza epidemic after WW1 killed my biological grandmother) and a cardiac event a few years back plus a severe Diverticuitis hospitalization - so many ways to die and yet, here I am two weeks away from my 80th birthday.

So with Marcel Proust in mind, I decided to slip around into the past and also, in the very modern way, to kind of document the two weeks leading to my 80th birthday - my favorite form, the JOURNAL. Along with the blog posts, I will be doing this in a paper book format; I have a very nice hard bound Art Journal that will be perfect for this, but I will also do it here.

The mental onstruction of this literary project really begins with lunch on Thursday with two friends, Nancy and Barbara. We ate at Maritsa's in Maple Shade which is a good place to start because it is located in Maple Shade, where I lived my teen years, on Roland Avenue in the 1950's.

The more I contemplate my life, the life of an ordinary woman, the more I see the significance of it. Perhaps because I studied journals in college and saw history from the eyes of real people living ordinary lives in what is perhaps NEVER ordinary times! Interesting to read the journal of a Hessian soldier in an army rented by his German overlord to the British to fight in the American colonies during the Revolution, and two or three journals of American colonists during the Revolution; Joseph Plum Martin's being the most famous. Also a young man from Greenwich on the Cohansey River who died in service from a camp disease, and a middle aged wife evicted from her home because her husband in Philadelphia was a loyalist. He fled to Britain and she was forced to take refuge in spare rooms from kind friends throughout the City of Philadelphia.

My life begins on November 13, 1945, the year World War 2 ended, and spans the last 50 years of the 20th Century and the beginning 25 years of the 21st. Talk about interesting times! I made a scrapbook during my scrapbooking period about my life from 1945 to the age of 70. To my disappointment, my friends for my birthday lunch on Thursday had no interest in looking at it, though their lives spanned the same period and it was, after all, a decorative illustrated scrapbook! During the scrapbooking period, I made one for my sister's 50th and my daughter's 30th, but I think I may have been the only person interested. I made one for myself at 70. I loved doing it because it blended collage, autobiography, history and a contemporary art form the scrapbook.

It was a dark and rainy day that we met for lunch on Thursday, October 30th, so the pictures on the sidebars are cloudy and gloomy looking. When I go to Maritsa's I always drive to my old homes, our last family home on Linwood Avenue, our first family home in New Jersey on Roland Avenue, the Pennsauken Creek which bordered our development and our cul de sac, Roland Avenue. On the way home, I pass my old high school which isn't even a high school anymore.

On that subject, so many of my schools are defunct: Merchantville High School, Mary Ethel Costello School in Gloucester City where I taught for over 25 years, the University of Arts in Philadelphia where I also taught for about 25 years, first in the Saturday Lab School and later in the graduate seminar as an adjunct professor. I was very proud of that and here is the reason: I was a grade school misfit - I was a tramatized, eotionally disturbed pants wetter, selectively mute, and when I did speak it was crazy nonsense of a panic stricken child. For example one incident I remember was that I raised my hand to go to the lavatory, but when the teacher called on me I was so ashamed and embarrassed I told a crazy tale of having a 'butterfly collection' which she then invited me to bring to school for 'show and tell.' Then I wet my pants in my seat. To go to the bathroom, you had to raise your hand, go sit on a bench in the front of the room facing the 40 or so overcrowded post World War 2 baby boom class, and wait for the paddle to come back. I just couldn't do it. After all, children in my age group were punished severely for 'accidents' and bed wetting so we were intensely indoctrinated with the shame of going to the bathroom.

Grade School was a nightmare in a brick factory school followed by our move to Maple Shade, NJ and a pretty, new school on a side street off the main street. One thing I remember from that time in the new school was a boy pulling up a root ; and telling me to smell it because it was 'root beer' - sassafras! It was deliciously fragrant. Another thing I remember was a bad boy named Cody who would grab my chest on the way to the pencil sharpener and stab the cactus on the window sill beside me on his way back to his seat. The best and most wonderful memory however is planting trees on Arbor Day and singing out the open window "Poems are made by fools like me but only God acan make a tree." Those trees we planted still stand in red and gold leafed spendor outside that little school. I had a kind teacher there, Miss Heal. And she did heal with her soft voice and her kind and dignified demeanor. She played piano for us and we sang. Sadly, Miss Heal was murdered many years later in her old age by a mentally ill man who robbed and beat her and threw her body down the cellar steps.

My chronic truancy in Philadelphia became sporadic truancy in middle school, so suffice to say I was a school failure.

Things didn't improve much in High School although I began to recover emotionally and I was able to clear the cobwebs from my eyes and see something of a path forward. I did poorly and was tracked into the business career path, which was actually quite beneficial because it prepared me for work and money to get out of the house and become independent. I became a truant with a good excuse, hepititis which I got from swimming t=in the polluted Pennsauken Creek and contracting the disease from the sewage dumped into the water. I was out of school ost of a year and bedridden on home bound instruction after months in the hospital at Lady of Lourdes.

This segment seems to be devoted to the early years, so I think I will stop here. There comes Dating, My first job and apartments, Marriage, and Europe in my 20's. Home, college, Divorce, Single Motherhood, College again, Career, Retirment, Volunteering and the History World, then the present moment. >p/> Like my historic joural writing friends, I don't imagine anyone will care about this record of an ordinary life, but like them, I feel compelled to write it.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

It is Halloween 2025 at my house

Just adding this as a post script but in the front of the blog post instead of at the end. Please use my e-mail to contact me as the comments section of the blog is polluted by spam. The moderators do their best to trash the spam but it is a pplluted river, sadly. But you can reach me by e-mail at wrightj45@yahoo.com (cut and paste the e-mail as the link doesn't seem to work either)

Along with being Haloween, it is also 'clocks back" and two weeks until my 80th birthsay! Many of my friends in this age group say they can't believe they are 80 or 79. I do have to add that it is somewhat shocking to find myself 80 year old. That is OLD! But in my has grown a different sense of awe, that in this world of many dangers, I have been so fortunate to have lived this long and made it to this monument - age 80!

On a different subject - the anonymity of this blog is interesting to me. Since the comments section has been completely poisoned or I should say 'polluted' by spammers, no one really uses it which is why I put my e-mail on my closing. This week I had an e-mail from the deep past - the 1970's to be correct. When I was married, my ex-husband and I often visited and stayed with his best friend, Tom Nicholas. They had been friends since their youth. Tom was an interesting and talented man. He was an artist and went to Philadelphia College of Art. He was also a poet and he built at least three beautiful woodland cabins on land in the woods outside of Plattsburgh, New York. Tom's sister was a fellow high school student at Merchantville High School with me and her husband was in my class - 1963 graduates. So we had a couple of additional connections. At one of the period when we visited Tom was living with a lovely, warm, kind and intelligent young woman named Sheila. She worked as a counselor in a group home for young women called The Robin's Nest. I am the kind of persona who makes connections, so I always wondered about Sheila, after I got divorced and she and Tom split up, we never were in contact again.

Tom was a couple of years older than I am so I supposed he was 80 when he died. Apparently, according to his sister, he must have had a heart attack while driving his truck in the woods and his truck slowly drifted to the side of the road and came to a stop against a tree. Sadly his poor dog was in the car with him. Someone found them and the police took his dog to the shelter. Sad it is was, I couldn't help but think that the woodsman that he was, Tom wouldn't have wanted to die in a hospital or a nursing home, and would probably have wanted that kind of death, in his truck in the woods.

Anyhow, I wrote something for this blog about Tom and his death and it even prompted me to contact my ex with whom I had little or no contact in the nearly 50 years since we separated but I didn't know if anyone would know how to reach him to let him know his best friend had died. We had a brief flurry of e-mails and that was that.

Apparently, however, Sheila had come across my blog post about TomNicholas and she reached out to me. She is fine, she had moved to Florida and married and had a child and she had just found out about Tom's death. It was really wonderful to hear from Sheila. I can't help wondering about the people shose paths crossed with mine through my life. Unfortunately, too often when I looke them up on google, I find that they have died, as was the case with Salmon Harris the Canadian Artists, as well as my maternal Aunt, Susan Atmore, and some of the men I knew from the Edward Payson Weston 6 day Marathon, Wesley Emmons, and a man I once was going to marry, Rob Sweetgall.

In my death wishes letter, I should write a postscript and ask my daughter to make a last post on my blog to tell anyone who randomly runs into me here, that I have gone on to the "Spirit in the Sky."

eanwhile, though, I am here and celebrating my life and the seasons - gotta run to get ready to have Happy Halloween lunch with Debby Longo and Eleanor Hoffbauer, two neibhbor/friends of mine. We are going to the little Train Station Cafe in Woodbury today for lunch.

I plan to do somekind of record of the 14 days up to my 80th birthday, and maybe this is the beginning!

Happy Halloween everyone! wrightj45@yahoo.com

My 80th birthday is coming up!

Each day, it has become more and more important to me that I am turning 80 on November 13th. I never was big on making a fuss about birthdays and generally lunch with friends and a personal project would suffice. For example on my 70th, I made a scrapbook about my life. Each birthday I would buy myself something I really wanted, often, something like an outfit from L. L. Bean where I don't normally shop becaue their prices are extravagant. This year, I have several lunches lined up beginning today. Today I am meeting Babara Solem and Nancy Thomas at Mritsa's in Maple Shade which is where I spent my teen age years. I have written before about the milestones in my life that happened in Maple Shade, my first bank account, my first serious boyfriend whom I later married. There I spent my high schoolyears. Today, I will pass all those places.

Yesterday, whiledriving around running errands with my sister, a friend texted her that Pierre Robert had jsut died, a radio person in this area. He was friends with a radio personality that Iknew, Michael Tearson. Michael Tearson had an encyclopedic knowlege of rock and roll bigoraphical and recording information. He also had a magical nighttime voice! I loved to listen to him on the radio - WMMR was the station. One thing I reember about him was that he hated The DArk Side of the Moon which he said was the most requested bit of usic and he was tired of it. It is very long, that's true, but I alwyss loved that song, especially the lone female voice singing wordlessly at the end, her soaring voice, so full of emotion, deep, not sentimental but full of feeling.The days of great radio.

Eighty years is a long time. So many of the friends and boyfriends I knew are dead and every day more contemporaries from the world of culture who are around my age are reported as having died. So many of my family, the whole fabric of my childhood have gone, vanished into the grave or smoke and ashes. My ex-husband is still alive. And thankfuly all my siblings still live. So many pets have died. Since I jsut had another pet medical emergency this week to the tune of #600, dogs were on my mind and my sister and I counted up 6 dogs who have lived in this house over the 40 years that I have lived here. This year is the 40th anniversary of this house as well - half of my life has been lived in this house.

Aside from all the personal milestones in a life, marriage, childbirth, college graduation, buying a house, there is the wider world of history that circles around a life. I was born the year World War 2 ended! Ilived through the scacity left over from the epression and the world war, then blossomed into the post war years of bouty - the 1950's. The winds of war swirled around me from the Korean conflict to Vietnam, which was the one that had the closest ipact since my brother was in the US Marines and served there which prompted me to get active in the politics of protest to end the war.

Through all those years, College was a thread that ran like a major color in my plaid From graduation in 1963 through to my 60's, I was always in college. Since I didn't do the usual 4 year route but went part-time most of the time, the college years spanned all my years including my childbearing years. My first degree was in 1974 from Glassboro State College which is now Rowan University, and my second was in the 1980s from Rutger's the State University in Camden, then even in my 60's due to the benefit of my job as a Lab teacher at the University of the Arts, I was able to get my Masters! The University of the Arts is now gone. I wonder where their records went. The Academy of Fine Arts is gone now too. I wonder where their collection went.

There are 350 hours betwen now and my birthday, almost the amount of day in a year. I guess I will be writing about it a lot since I feel it is such a major milestone. There are 15 days betwen this one and my birthday. Maybe I will hafe 15 entries in this blog and perhaps I will do a 15 page piece in my handwritten journal as well or in my Art Journal - a good place for such a thing! Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

World War 2 History, up close and personal

Before I get into the reason for sharing this address, let me get this information set up for you: The topic is World War 2 Memorabilia and Honoring the memory of the sacrifices of the everyday men and women who served our nation in its time of great danger. The address below is a museum being set up for that purpose.

Townsend C. Young VFW Post

27 Burlington St., Gloucester City, NJ 08030

856-456-7135

856-456-3412

Ed Whalens

Recently a relative and friend of my Godfather, George Neal Schmidt, known to me as Uncle Neal, got in touch and offered me some personal mementos of his. He had passed away a few years ago. I was happy to have the mementos and to revisit my memories of this most beloved Godfather.

Uncle Neal was an extraordinarily kind, patient, calm and polite man. He was very clean and always wore freshly starched and ironed shirts and Old Spice aftershave. I remember telling him that I wished I could grow up faster so I could marry him. But time isn't so flexible. I grew up and moved away and he moved away and got old.

Neal was my father's best friend and a boyhood through Navy pal. After they came home from WW2, they stayed close in touch and Neal joined us for weekends in our new home in the suburbs of Maple Shade, NJ.

Neal suffered a horrendous tragedy. Both my father and Neal were engaged to be married, and my father married my mother, but the week before Neal's wedding, his fiancee' Mary Cook and her family were killed in a catastrophic accident with a trolley car. They were buried on the day that should have been the wedding. Neal never really recovered from this tragedy and he never dated or got engaged or married again. He seemed to retreat into a quiet, solitary world of records and memories.

A year or two before his death, my father tasked my youngest sister and me with locating Neal and visiting him. He had moved in with the family of his lost fiancee, somewhere out near Shomong, and he was in his last days in a Catholic nursing home called St. Marys. We visited him there. He was his old shy, quiet and kindly self, but very frail. He died not much longer after that visit as did my father.

My sister and I went to Neal's funeral and that is how the distant relative/friend of Neal's, Mary Cravels, came to have the memorabilia she was offering me.

A large brown envelope arrived with photos and postcards and a phto copy of the article about the accident. I ordered a scrapbook style photo book to put the items and and then I began to think about what to do with this in the future.

Soon, in 3 weeks I will be 80 and like my friends, I often ponder what will happen to the family heirlooms and photo albums I have become the repository for. I have my Grandmother Mabel's diary in which she recounts the suicide of her twin, Ella, who suffered from dementia. I have her mother's 100 year old sewing machine and my Grandfather's deck chair from his years as a Merchant seaman. And now, I have Neal's discharge and his carefully saved postcards and cards from his loved fiancee and his wartime buddies.

There have been plenty of articles about "You kids don't want your old stuff" and Swedish Death Cleaning. But I am a history buff and these things tell the story of the lives of ordinary people, and they are irreplaceable historical artifacts. Increasingly, however, our culture is moving away from history and reverence and respect for it. The destruction of the entire East Wing of the White House this week is a perfect example of that, as was the destruction of the historic Rose Garden of the White HOuse.

Antique shops are going out of business. One of my favorite, rather large second hand book stores went under recently, Murphy's Book Loft, and a treasure trove of magazines from the 20th century went with it.

The world is moving into a transient future where everything is trash and easy to replace quickly, so nothing has much value. People lead electronic lives now.

With this in mind, and remembering the fascinating scrapbook kept by Marie Southwick, a member of a Seniors Group that I had founded and run for 7 years, I started looking around for a place that would house and care for WW 2 memorabilia.

Marie Southwick's album was kept by her mother-in-law and it was filled with ration cards, coupons, news articles, photographs and all sorts of evocative items of daily life during the 1940's. She too had wondered what would happen to the scrapbook when she was gone.

My search of google turned up the VFW Post listed above, and I hope to visit there one day soon. There was a news article in the Courier Post about the VFW Post and Museum and I recognized the name of the man I had met at the Gloucester City Historical Society which had at one point been located on Kings St. in Gloucester City and may still be there. I know they fell on hard times. It isn't easy to get volunteers, as I can attest after spending my retirement up until my disability prevented it, in volunteering at half a dozen local historical sites.

I hope to visit if I can find someone to go with me and I hope they can provide a home for Marie's scrapbook and my album. I will let you know what I find out.

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

The Witches Bazaar - a spooky fun event for Halloween

The Witches Bazaar

October 18th | 4 PM - 9 PM

Mill Race Village Shops

Feeling witchy? Then join an evening for adults at the Witches Bazaar in Mill Race Village-Mount Holly from 4-9 PM. No broom required but come prepared to be joined by all kinds of witches and other creatures for the fun. Music, dancing, tarot card readers, food vendors will be on hand too! Don’t forget to enter the costume contest and show your amazing spirt!

I love the Mill Race section of Mt. Holly and one of my favorite restaurants is there - The Robin's Nest. I wonder if the original wooden Travellers Caravan is still parked there. Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Reminder 18th Century Field Day at Red Bank Battlefield National Park

18th Century Field Day/Fall Festival

2025 Schedule of Events

10am-Levram the Great Magic Show-Performance Tent

10:30am-Ned Hector-African Americans in the Revolution-Performance Tent

11:00pm-Levram the Great Magic Show-Performance Tent

11:30pm- Battle of Red Bank Reenactment-Battlefield

12:00pm-Ned Hector-African Americans in the Revolution-Performance Tent

12:00pm-Solidiers Life-Battlefield

12:30pm-Battlefield Tour-meet at the Whitall House

1:00pm-SAR Memorial Service-near FT Mercer Flag

1:30pm-Hessian Discovery Tour-meet at Whitall House

2:00pm-Officers Duel-Battlefield area

2:30pm-Battle of Red Bank Reenactment-Battlefield

Ongoing Activities-

Colonial Demonstrations-Glass blowing, Pottery, Spinning/Weaving, Hearth Cooking, Solider Encampments Kid’s Activities-Games, Crafts, Strawbale Maze, Balloon Creations, Farm Animals

Food Trucks

Whitall House Tours

Craft Vendors

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happiness and the daily details of a humble life

There is a play called OUR TOWN, written by Thornton Wilder, and one of the themes is the immense magic and joy in the most ordinary details of daily life and how people go through them blind and unaware. That play had a huge impact on me from the first time I read it and all the times I saw it acted including the modern version which I think was called The Fantastics.

It has made me aware of those small, humble, ordinary things and moments that stay with us forever and for which we sometimes long. I think so so very often of the mornings in my mother's dining room on Roland Ave. when the other kids were at school and I was somehow home (playing sick perhaps) and the moms, Mary Armstrong, Pat Gilbreath, (the regulars) and one or two others would gather in their housedresses and slippers, menthol cigarettes in their pockets, and drink coffee made in my mother's cheerfully perking away tall gleaming rocket ship of a percolator. Steve the breadman brought the donuts, white powdered, chocolate covered, and the women sat around the coffee table and talked to one another. I can't remember their conversations, and, to be honest, it was the ambiance, the setting, that returns to me now, and I can smell the coffee aroma mixed with the menthol cigarette smoke, and I can feel the off-duty, relaxed freedom that the women friends were enjoying - the magic of it.

There are many such similar settings that I remember in a glow of magic, just like the one I mentioned in a previous post about my brother and I sitting on the carpet in the living room waiting for the magic and mystery of the Shock Theater with Roland on a dark, late night well beyond our bedtime.

And there are more recent moments of magic that I can draw up and smell the fragrance of that brief time, and feel the sense of happiness, the Pakim Pond trail in the pine woods! And I want to go there and feel it again. But I can't. The past is over, despite what FAulkner said about the past never being past. We can't go back, we can only dip into the magic of the current moment.

This morning I did the routine homely things, rinsed and re-filled the pets water bowls, made my coffee, and an egg sandwich for breakfast. I put the final flea treatment of the year on the pets - a task I hate and they hate. I hate to put poison on them, but the fleas are bad this year and they were tormented by them, so we had to do it one more month, but this should be the last time for this year and we only had to do 3 treatments this year. The fleas were so bad, I had them in the sofa and they were biting me! Once I put the Advantage flea treatment on them, within a 24 hour period or two days, the fleas are gone.

Anyhow, to get back to cozy, , my house is puposefully cozy. I am decorated for autumn with lights on the bannister and across the kitchen doorway, hand painted decorative DAy of the Dead skulls are on the bannister for Halloween, and a big grinning pumpkin is on the door of the cabinet facing the sofa. I have a scented candle ready to light and I am drinking a hot chocolate! I LOVE my house, as I have written many times in this blog. It is small, humble, with all the old wood on the door frames and the old windows, and we are embraced by the trees. Snoozing pets fill the atmosphere with their sleep and the moment has magic. I am happy.

Roland 1957

When I was around 12 years old and my brother was around 10, on Friday nights beginning in October of 1957, we would beg beg beg our parents to let us stay up past our bedrime so we could watch Roland and the scary movie show. The theme music was Monster Mash, a number one hit at the time. The movies weren't all that scary, most of them were black and white movies such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, or Lon Cheyney in The Wolfman. Also there was Bella Lugosi as Dracula.

It is funny how such as brief period, the show only lasted from October 1957 to September 1958 could make such an impression but it was absolutely scintillating to me! I had such intense desire to see that show. What an impression it made on me. All these years later and I can still remember sitting on the carpet in the parlor raptly watching Roland and waiting for the movie of the night.

For most of my life since that time, at Halloween, I would watch those old movies again in a fright film festival using video tapes, then dvd's. For the past couple of Halloweens, though, I watched the whole series of Harry Potter films. It isn't the same, but it can never be the same because nothing is as intense as anything from that age - the desire for a specific toy, the impression of a particular film, your first albums, that you played over and over again on your first record player, and the emotions evoked! I guess that is one of the things we mourn and feel nostalgia for as we get old, that feeling of anticipation. Roland was portrayed by John Zacharle. It was a pioneering show! Do you remember it?

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com "The Shock Theatre" was a hosted horror movie show with John Zacherle as "Roland" presenting movies on WCAU-TV Channel 10, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; from 7 October 1957 to 13 September 1958.

The world of nature makes us healthier 12/12/25 Sunday

Yesterday I read an e-mail item that said spending just 20 minutes a day outdoors in nature can make a significant impact on our health both physical and emotional. I believe this. Fortunately, my dog assures me of 30 minutes a day outdoors and we frequent a lovely little park called Martin's Lake off Johnson Blvd. in Glouceter City, NJ.

For many years during my teaching career at Mary Ethel Costello School, in Gloucester City, the computer teacher, the librarian and I used our combined prep periods and lunc periods to walk around the jogging trail on Johnson Blvd. My guess would be that it is about 2/3 of a mile. We generally ent around twice and it really helped us to get through the day.

All of my life, I have been an avid walker and a passionate lover of the outdoors. My love affair began when my family moved from the concrete and brick canyons of South Philadelphia to the green and leafy suburb of Maple Shade with a corn field on the north, a wild meadown on the east, the Pennsauken Creek on the south, and a small post world war 2 housing development on the west.

Our street in Philadelphia had one tree in a small 3 foot by 3 foot square of dirt in the cement sidewalk. I feel sorry for that tree. I feel sorry for the children, who like me are raised in concrete and brick and never know the feeling of fresh new grass on their feet, or the knee high creackle and smoky fragrance of thick fallen leaves.

Every thing in the nature I discovered when we moved to New Jersey amazed me. The giant hard bulb of the thick elephant eared swamp pants that grew alongside the thick gravy like Pennsauken Creek, the thick fog that enveloped the road we drove to Ocean City to visit my Grandmother on Sundays, the forests we drove through that are now gone, turned into shopping malls and housing developments.

But I am not going to spoil this ramble through nature by dwelling on what is gone because so much is still here - the red gems of the cranberry bogs fenced in by the white sand roads at Whitesbog! You have got to go there before the harvest and see the cranberries floating atop the flooded bogs against an impossibly blue sky! Go now in October befoe it is too late!

And go to my great love, Pakim Pond. Pakim Pond was once a part of a cranberry bog operation but is now part of the Brandan T. Byrne State Forest. You will be richly rewarded EVERY season by wonders, pitcher plants on the banks of the pond, mushrooms galore in early fall, falling leaves in autumn and the fragrance of sunshine on the pine needles as your foot presses down on the ehm on the Cranberry trail.

Back in my long ago youth, you could swim at Pakim Pond. You can't swim there any longer but it is a joy to walk the trail around the edge of the pond, and to imagine living in the cabins (they can be rented and winter is best!) that you pass as your complete the circuit around the pond and back to the parking lot.

There are so many wonderful trails and woods to hike in South Jersey, and even small places nearby like Saddler's Woods which will be lovely right now. Soon I think they have their pumpkin hike. Check out the Saddler's Woods Conservation website for more info. on that.

If you are less woodsy and more asphalt path oriented, you may want to walk around Cooper River - 4 miles. Or you may like the Audubon Lake Haddon Park series of ponds, about a mile each pond adn a total of 3 to 4 miles around from Station Ave. in Haddon Heights around to Audubon. And there is Newton Creek in Collingswood and thelovely Knight's Park as well, a great assortment of beautiful trees there and a wonderful picnic shelter where you can enjoy a quiet lunch and a meditation on the seasons.

Happy Trails, my friends, where ever your trails may be - Get Outside - this is the perfect weather for it! Find a buddy, human or canine, and get going! By the way, the picture on my blog is Whitesbog in September.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Genealogical Society of Salem County - Revolutionary War & Civil War research

The Genealogical Society of Salem County will host a presentation entitled “Researching Revolutionary and Civil War NJ Soldiers” presented by Regina Fitzpatrick on Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 7:00 pm in the Friends Village Auditorium, 1 Friends Drive, Woodstown, NJ.

There is a wealth of military service records especially for those interested in Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers. Regina Fitzpatrick, Genealogy Librarian at the New Jersey State Library will eplain useful resources related to these conflicts from the National Archives, the New Jersey State Archives, and the New Jersey State Library. This program is free and open to the public. For more information about the program, please visit www.gsscnj.org, email genealogicalsocietysalemcounty@gmail.com, or call 609-670-0407.

Gloucester County Historical Society has some spooky events coming this month, October 2025

On the evening of October 10th at 6:00 p.m. Edgar Allen Poe (Is it really him?) will be reciting his eerie tales and poems at the Woodbury Friends Meeting House on Broad Street in Woodbury NJ . The Woodbury Friends Meeting House is over 300 years old and worth a visit in itself. For more information and tickets please contact Gloucester County Historical Society

gchsnj.org

Civil War reenactor Vince DeCicco looks back at the war's haunted sites, eerie encounters, and tales of apparitions in battlefields and other historic locations

Friday, Oct. 17, 6:30 PM >p/> at the Gloucester County Historical Society Museum

See Full Details, Directions, and Buy Ticket online ($10)

Red Bank Battlefield Field Day

Schedule of Events on October 19th 2025

Am Levram the Great Magic Show - Performance Tent

10:30 Ned Heckter - African Americans in the Revolution - Performance Tent

Chidren's Muster Drill Battlefield

11:00 Levram - the Great Magic Show

11:30 Battle Reenactment - battlefield

12:00 Ned Hector

12:00 A Soldier's Life - battlefield

12:30 Battlefield Tour - Whitall House

1:00 S.A.R. Memorial Service - near Fort flag

1:30 - Hessian Discovery tour - Whitall House

2:00 Officer's Duel

2:30 - Reenactment repeated

Crafts, vendors, walk around and enjoy all the wonderful offerings on this special and spectacular day!

Happy Trails - back through time to the magnificent beginning of our Democratic Republic of the United States of America! Down with Tyrants and Kings - Long Live the Revolution! wrightj45@yahoo.com

El Sidon Cave, Spain and The Social Contract

The twilight of theNeanderthals - Studying the many relatives in the human family tree never gets old. Constantly new finds are yielding new information about our earliest ancestors and our near cousins. Several stories recently hav revealed that there was cannibalism among Neanderthals. We had already been advised that although our near relatives, the Neanderthals, had become extinct, we all (North of sub-saharan Africa) share some of their dna, about 3 to 5 percent. People in the Phillippines share a small percentage of the dna of the other group of humans existing at the same time that we were moving across the earth, the Denisovans. The Neanderthals were throughout Europe while the Denisovans were mostly in Asia and Mongolia regions.

The finidings from the fossils of the last groups of Neanderthals that have been discovered in the El Sidon Cave in Spain is that they both interbred closely causing inbreeding genetic deformaties, and they had been killed and butchered and eaten by a rival band of Neanderthals. So Neanderthals wer practicing cannibalism. They weren't he only ones, however.

Lately several groups of fossilized remains in England and other places in Europe have revealed human fossil bones that show marks of butchering "Cut marks" and bone crushing to extract marrow, as well as the marks of teeth.

This all makes me think about htat most essential philosophical idea of civilization - the Social Contract! The beginning of laws, restraints on behavior agreed upon by all for the better of all. Hence we believe it is wrong to eat our own kind, and we also believe it is wrong to interbreed in our families, among many other taboos or laws.

NOVA (pbs) has a new series on Human origins which is well worth your time. There have been two episodes so far, the first on homo-sapiens migration out of Africa and the second on Neanderthal interactions.

By the way, a not unconnected idea about the evolution of systems is the theme of a fascinating program, also available via pbs "Particles of Thought." We are all familia with the Darwinian idea of evolution through natural selection of biological forms best adapted for their environments. The idea on the latest Particles of Thought program is about the second Arrow of Time,the evolution of systems in response to the funcitonality of the system. Societies, languages, and a variety of other systems may well exist or disappear according to the external pressures exerted on them as desribed in the latest discussion. I strongly recommend this episode!

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

"Quoth the Raven, Nevermore"

The Gloucester County Historical Society features an October 10 performance by retired U.S. National Park Poe House Interpretive Ranger Helen McKenna-Uff in character as Edgar Allen Poe, bringing his macabre tales to life and sharing insights into his fascinating life.

McKenna-Uff was a Park Ranger long assigned to the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia. She has been studying the author’s tortured life and gruesome works since her acting classes in high school, where she became “Poe-sessed” after memorizing “The Raven.”

A professional actress, she’s been performing the author’s spine-tingling tales on stage, radio and television since 1999.

The Oct. 10 Historical Society event will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the Woodbury Friends Meetinghouse at 124 North Broad Street in Woodbury. Light refreshments will be provided.

The massive, 310-year-old log-beam Friends Meeting House is a destination attraction in itself.

PUMPKIN WALK TICKET SALE INFO!

MEMBERS PRE-SALE:Friday 9/26 (by noon)

PUBLIC SALES:Monday 9/29 (by noon)

EVENT DATE:Saturday 10/25

4pm - 6:30pm

(tickets sold in half hour slots, event ends by 8pm) Members will receive an email invitation to purchase tickets in advance. To purchase tickets visit: https://www.saddlerswoods.org/pumpkin-walk

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Funds raised will help restore trails, purchase a new sign, restore the habitat, bring back the goats in 2026 and SO MUCH MORE!

Thank you to our initial sponsors: SwiftKick Web, JGJ Charitable Enterprises, Sheehan Veterinary Clinic, Impact Solar and The Dunn Family. To become a sponsor email Steve@saddlerswoods.org. Sponsor deadline is October 9th to allow for design and printing of shirts and signs.

Next Clean Up: 10/11 9 - 12pm

Volunteers are needed for our Fall Stewardship Day event on October 11th! We will be pick up litter, prepare the trails for the pumpkin walk, and remove invasive plants. This is a great event for environmental clubs and students looking for community service hours. Tools and gloves provided. Please bring your own water and snacks. Limit 30. To register email janet@saddlerswoods.org by 10/8.

Second Sunday Hikes with Naturalist Jeff Calhoun:

10/12 10am - 12pm

11/9 10am - 12pm

Join naturalist educator Jeff Calhoun for a 2-hour tour of our local treasure. We’ll take a closer look at the old-growth trees, wet meadow, and early successional woodland all contained in this 25-acre urban forest surrounded by suburbia. Participants will gain an understanding of the ecology, native biodiversity, environmental challenges, and SWCA’s conservation effort. Children ages 12+ are welcome with a responsible adult. Fee: $15 donation per person, per session. Registration is required. Attendance limited to 20. Link to register: https://forms.gle/ekH5PPzgwvHEfSLS6

Meeting Location: Welcome area of 250 MacArthur Blvd. Haddon Township, NJ 08108 ( meet by the Saddler’s Woods sign.)

TO HELP FUND SWCA PROGRAMS PLEASE DONATE TODAY! Venmo @SADDLERS-WOODS

Paypal PayPal.me/saddlerswoods

Visit www.saddlerswoods.org/donations

Mail checks payable to Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association PO Box189 Oaklyn, NJ 08107

Happy fall, -Janet Goehner-Jacobs

Executive Director, Saddler's Woods Conservation Association

The Redcoats are Coming!

The Redcoats are Coming! to the Conference Room of the Cherry Hill Library on Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. A British Solcier will be portrayed and troop movements in our are aduring the crucial days of the American Revolution will be discussed. Upcoming is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and there are many many ways emerging in which we can celebrate this momentous event. for more information:

www.chnj.gov/redcoats

Those of you who have read my blog know that I was once a volunteer at both The Indian King Tavern and Red Bank Battlefield and informaiton regarding the American Revolution has always held a special attraction to me. As this particular event is after dark, I will probably be unable to attend, however, if I can find a ride, you may see me there! Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Estrangement

In my newsfeed this morning from The Atlantic Magazine, September 20, 2025, here is a paragraph from an article by a psychologist who specializes in family estrangement. Most families I know have experienced this in one way or another.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

Updated at 4:51 p.m. ET on July 28, 2022

"Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”

I have experienced several kinds of estrangement in my family, first my aunts, who were close and were my age and with whom I grew up. We stayed fairly close until my mother died and then we drifted apart. I searched for them on-line last year and found one had died and one was in a memory care unit in Texas.

Of course there is the estrangement of divorce, my ex-husband is still alive, in Colorado. We kind of grew up together since we were high school sweethearts and married when he was drafted in 1965 or so. We were together from my age of 16 to 35, and from his 18 to 38. The company where he was employed moved to Colorado just as we were separated, and we basically never spoke again although we had a divorce decree which I signed and a couple of e-mail communications when his best friend died.

One of my sisters is estranged from the family over a dispute regarding my father's bequest of 'living rights' to his house in W.Va. to our brother. She had a house of her own and he was homeless but she wanted Dad's house too and felt she should have had it, so she has been cut off from all her siblings ever since my father died in 2011. I still send her cards but we don't speak on the phone as she is perpetually angry and embittered.

Then, the most recent estrangement is my daughter. We have had no quarrel but I assume that I am somehow emotionally disturbing to her. At some point, her communication was reduced to one or two word cordialities and answers, such as "busy, working" and "glad you are well." I ran across an article about "gray rocking" relatives that you feel are emotionally challenging/damaging and I realized that was the answer to the mystery of the extraordinary brevity and vagueness of her communications with me. I examined my own communication and realized I always said too much, shared too much, expected too much attention, and that in my own mild way, I am eccentric and spread my emotional state to others. Also, I had been told by my daughter often that I am not a good listener and I do understand I tended to make things about me. Personality is a hard habit to break and I didn't succeed in it in time to save our relationship. So, it is, in fact, my fault. Also there is the "Alice Adams" situation. My daughter is moving up the social ladder and I am permanently planted in our working class past along with my working class siblings who have varieties of addictions and behavior problems. Social class, even in America, is a hard sedimentary level to move from. I became a working class intellectual, lots of college degrees, and proper manners and diction, even a respectable career as a college professor, but inextricably tied up with my working class roots - an over sharer. My daughter was far more comfortable with her father's and step-mother's social and economic class and since they had a child and gave her a sister, that was a more palatable and organic relationship to nurture and hold on to.

One thing love losses teach you in a life as long and filled with love as mine, is how to let go. I have lost my parents, and my best friends to death, my lovers to both death and divorce, and so many meaningful personal attributes like my beauty, my agility, my eyesight to aging, that most greedy and clawing thief of all, that learning how to let go is both a survival necessity and a continuing practice.

My daughter is a city girl, a New York City Manhattenite, a film producer, a young beauty and a career woman. She is indeed busy. And I am a factor of the past without, really, anything to contribute to her future. Also, I am not in need. If I were, I feel certain I could call on her and I have, once when I was in the hospital and when I needed to buy a car. Also, I have a sister who lives not too far away, and she is my mainstay. She has needed me and I have helped her and I need her and she helps me. I pay her to clean and to halp me with errands and we are friends, so our work days are also companionable. My daughter has the comfortable knowledge that I am not alone.

a line from a Catherine Davis poem: "After a time all losses are the same and we go out stripped the way we came."

It dishonors their memory to have not even mentioned all the animal companions I have loved and lost and whose portraits I have painted. They stare at me now and say, what about us? We loved you with our whole hearts! And, it is true, I have learned to deal with those losses as well. I have loved them too. From my earliest childhood these animal companions have been the safest and most devoted of love relationships. They do love with their whole hearts and I am never alone or lonely with their warm company.

Well there is plenty left after the losses, new animals in my home and heart, new friends, and the everpresent gift of the changing seasons. This August and September was the most beautiful pair of months I remember. Every week was filled with cool sunshine days with just enough rain, mostly in the evenings to keep the green world happy! The leaves are just beginning to turn and I have beautiful, peaceful places close by, as close as my own yard, in which to walk and contemplate my life and times. The larger world outside may be in turmoil, but my little world is at peace and it is beautiful!

There is no time for rancor or self recrimination, or resentment. There is only time for love and appreciation and enjoyment of the precious miracle of existence in this dimension. It isn't about what I have lost or what I don't have, not at all. It is all about what I HAVE and what is bountiful around me in the present.

It is certainly true, as the family psychologist explains in his article on estrangement, that the American family has changed and families have become disengaged, but the world has always changed and every family in my history, once lost a homeland, a home, a family, a personal history. It is what happens. What remains is what we need to focus on.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Cul de Sac, Roland Avenue 1957

When I awakened this morning, this post was writing itself in my mind. This often happens. It seems that perhaps my early years as a book worm have trained my mind into a prose narrative habit. Also, my brother is up here in New Jersey visiting from W.Va. for his 77th birthday and that was on my mind.

We spent our teen years on Roland Avenue in Maple Shade in a brand new hosuing development, so new that several of the two dozen or so houses were still unfinished. Our street was a cul de sac, shaped like a tear drop, one road in. On the South we were bordered by the Pennsauken Creek, and on the North we were bordered by what was left of the orginal farm. Our house was on the outer rim of the wheel and behind us was a tall berm, like a hillside and atop it was a corn field. Our brand new house was two stories with two bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs, a bathroom upstairs and one downstairs, a living room, dining room and kitchen with a washer and dryer in one corner. It was a comfortable house. My parents were enthralled with the fertility of the grounds after living in a brick row home in the brick row canyons of South Philadelphia and they immediately began to garden. My mother had a Rock garden, and then my father had a vast truck garden.

Dad built a large pantry under the staircase to the second floor. Every harvest season, my father and mother stood sweating in the steaming kitchen boiling the jars and lids for the canning process. They made stewed tomatoes, pickles from cucumbers, preserved corn and peas, and even root beer! Dad stored the rootbeer in the small side attic upstairs and one summer the heat caused it to all explode!

We had no basement in this house on Roland Avenue. But my father was a master craftsman and built a substantial garage with a woodworking area.

I remember some of our early furniture, a redwood picnic table in the kitchen before my parents could afford a dining room set. We had an orange vinyl sofa that eventually went into the tv room which was the 2nd bedroom on the ground floor.

It was in this house that my parents began the second round of offspring. When we first moved to Roland Avenue, there was just me (in the big upstairs bedroom) and Joe (in the little downstairs bedroom,) and my parents bedroom beside his. Then, after a miscarriage, my mother successfuly brought into the world my brother Neal, my sister MaryAnn, and finally my little sister Susan. By the time Susan was born in 1965, I was gone.

I had been about 12 when we moved to New Jersey, and I was a book and reading obsessed introvert. My early childhood had left a lot of emotional damage and books were my escape in an infinite variety of ways.

At the graduation from my unsuccessful high school experience, but successful in that I did graduate and got a business education and a job from it, I went to work at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company in Philadelphia, at age 17.

But that veers off from what my mind was writing this morning. I was back in the kitchen on Roland Avenue, age 12, hovering as my mother's neighbors and lady friends drank coffee and talked about their pregnancies, their husbands, their homes, their shopping, their ailments and all sorts of topics. They ate donuts from Steve the Bond Breadman and drank coffee from my mother's party sized percolator. They wore housecoats (kind of bathrobes) and slippers and their hair was in curlers, and they smoked - all of them! There were ashtrays alongside the luncheon plates for the donuts, and the coffee cups and saucers. The women had modern problems for istance, our neighbor across the street, Mary, her husband left her for another man. He drove up in a white sports ar with his boyfriend who looked like Johnny Mathis. There she was with her two children and her house in the development and no career and no husband. She did eventually marry again and had a happy life.

All the women in the "Circle" as Roland Avenue called itself, were housewives. At that time, most women we knew didn't work. It was only ten years post World War II and the men had come home and got their jobs back and the women happily retreated to the domestic sphere and got busy repopulating the country. Most of the women in the Circle had at least three children. All the husbands were invisible figures to me. The only time I saw the fathers was on weekends when they coud be seen mowing the lawns. Fathers then loved the role of lawn mowing on Saturday, or leaf raking.

In the early years of our move to New Jersey, which was "the country" to us city folks, our old neighbors came from Philadelphia on weekends in the summer to enjoy the Jersey tomatoes, burgers and hot dogs on the eaborate brick grill my father built in the back yard and cases of beer. They all got hiariously drunk and threw one another into our three foot kiddy pool.

I don't remember what we children got up to. We are invisible to my memory but I do remember the grown ups in large vivid color, Pat and Tommy Taggart, Ella Reily and her husband whose name I have lost, and a couple of other World War II era friends. Later, my father's brothers Bill and Clyde, their wives Marge and Edna, the grandmothers on lawn chairs on the front lawn and sometimes my mother's family from 10th Street in Philadelphia would come for the picnic in the backyard.

Another thing I remember vividly from those times is the relentless domestic labor of my mother. In summer she hung the clothes to dry on the cothes lines in the backyard. She ironed everything! She ironed the sheets, the pillowcases. Things that were hung on the line to dry were very stiff and wringled. After the babies began to arrive there were endless cauldrons of boiling baby bottles being steriized and filled, endless reeking diaper pails of dirty diapers to be washed and bleached, hung out to dry and folded and put away. The youngest three came so close together, two years apart 1960, 1963, 1965, and by then I was in my teens and a sulky malcontent unwilling to lend a hand in the household or help with the childcare. It was then that I decided I did NOT want to become a mother and a housewife.

It must be said however, that my mother loved her sphere and was happy. She loved being a mother, cooking, decorating, and developing her home making skills such as upholstery, curtains and drapery. Every day just about the time I came home from school, mom began to prepare the evening meal. In those days, it meant cooking some large piece of meat, a ham or a big piece of beef, a turkey or chicken, paring and dicing carrots, potatoes, celery, and using some of those preserves. Every meal from breakfast to dinner was a real meal. Breakfast meant hot cereal such as oatmeal, or creamed rice, eggs, bacon, sausages, or Taylor's pork roll. Dinner was always some kind of meat or fish such as turkey, baked and sliced down, two vegetables and a starch. If not potatoes, baked, boiled, scalloped or mashed, then macaroni and cheese baked in the oven. Pot pie was real, made with real pastry dough, fresh carrots, peas, celery, onions, potatoes and diced chicken. We actually shelled peas! Mom had boxes of salted cod which she would soak and then make cod cakes. She had a hand cranked meat grinder that screwed onto the side of the sink drainboard, and into it went all the left over bits of turkey or chicken or ham to make croquets which we all loved with gravy. There were some terrible quarrels around that table however, battles of will between my brother Joe and I and our parents when we were served something we didn't want to eat. In my case it was salmon. I hated it, the hidden bones, the uncooked nature of it. For my brother it was scrambled eggs. He hated the texture. Parents who had grown up in the Depression and survived the World War had no patience for ungrateful children turning their noses up at valuable food! Once my brother kept scrambled eggs in his mouth all the way to Ocean City. He only disgorged them when He got out of the car to pee alongside the roadway. Mainly the tactic was that we would be forced to sit at the table until our plates were empty. We sat there all evening. It was a stand-0ff. My parents were united on this issue of food being wasted and chidren not eating what they were given

It is true and an item of regret to me now that I was indeed an ungrateful child in so many ways. I have to stop now to go to my brother's birthday lunch! I will come back and conclude this evening.

I think my dream and awakening mind narrative was inspired by my brother's visit from West Virginia for his 77th birthday this weekend. Today was his birthday. He, however, wasn't interested very much in talking about Roland Avenue and our childhood, he wanted to watch an action movie on my sister's large tv.

Everything changes and everything ends. First I moved out of Roland Avenue when I was 18 and got my first apartment, then my family bought a beautiful and historic house that had been burned out inside by a fire and my father began the devoted restoration of 19 East inwood Avenue in Maple Shade which took several years. I never lived in that house but all my brothers, Neal and Joe, and my sisters, Susan and Maryann did. My Grandmother Mabel lived with them for a time as well, but when my father retired at age 62, sometime in 1983, he moved to West Virginia and built the retirement home where my brother lives now. The family split up. Mom and Dad and MaryAnn to West Virginia, Neal and Joe to Philadelphia, me to Europe and then to Philadelphia, and then back to New Jersey. My sister Sue lives in Clarksboro, NJ.

People who lived on "the Circle" Roland Avenue still meet and have reuions on facebook and in person. All the young people I grew up with on Roland AVenue have died: Joe McGuigan, Butch Grimes, Diane Judge, Chris Gilbreath, the kids I played basketball with, and board games, and even some of the kids who found us and hung around with us like Art Borget, who was my boyfriend first and later married my best friend Chris. They are all gone.

I used to drive down to Roland Avenue and look at our old house every time I met my friends for lunch at Maritsa's on Main Street, but I don't do that anymore. I would look at our house and the garage my father built and the Pennsauken Creek where we swam, and the houses of those kids I knew who are all dead. After all, I decided not to do that anymore because it makes me sad and I don't want to be sad in these my last years. It is hard enough to stay buoyant under the weight of the degradations of age as I approach my own 80th birthday in a couple months I don't need to invite the ghosts of the past to haunt me. So I say goodbye to Roland Avenue, the "Circle" and turn my mind to the present and to my efforts at strengthening myself for the struggle - tomorrow the GYM and our walk around Martin's Lake!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com