TREES

Just a few minutes ago, I stood at my back door with tears in my eyes watching the sliding sun leave a rosy blush on the trees across my back fence. The teers were because I was remembering the first summer I lived in my house, when this was a fantasy come true, a dream I almost didn't believe would be realized. What I wanted most in the world was a safe little house where I could raise my little daughter. She was three at the time. I wanted a backyard for her to play in, grass, not concrete. This house had everything, a big yard that spanned five other backyards across the back of the lot. It is a pie shaped property, so in the front, my yard is only the width of ten or twelve sidewalk squares, but it fans out gloriously across the back with, now, dozens of trees, both deciduous and evergreen.

The ones that made me cry were the spindly West Virginia cedars. I brought them home from my father and mother's hilltop ten acres in Maysville, W.Va. Do you remember the popular coffee cups that had a hard plastic holder and paper cone cups that went inside? Well four little cedars came here in those cups, tiny hopeful little things. They didn't thrive at first. In fact one of them didn't make it. But the other three hung on and adapted to their new environment and although the bottom ten feet or so of their trunks are bare, lovely shaped teepees of cedar branches live at the top. I remember the day my father and I planted those little trees. It was my wish then to have trees along the entire perimeter of that back fences and it has almost been realized both by my efforts and the natural growth of some tourist trees that came to stay.

There are a few Christmas trees from the eyars my daughte and I bought root ball Christmas trees and planted them after Christmas. Some years the ground froze and we made cloth hearts to decorate the Christmas trees in the living room until the spring thaw then we planted the trees in the yard. There is a tree from Williamsburg, Virginia froma family vacation to Disneyland, and that tree also came home in a paper cone cup, that's how small they were those trees. That ttree is now far taller than the rooftops of my house or my neighbors. The trees are like kindly neighbors to me, quiet, unassuming, only periodically troublesome through no fault of their own when violent winds rip off a branch or two and fling them down on us.

From the first year I moved in here, dire predictions were made by many that a tree would fall on my house. Of course they never did. It was one of the things people said as they cut down their trees up and down the block. Mostly they didn't want to be bothered with the leaves in the fall. I LOVE the leaves, the quiet red and gold snow fall of leaves drifting and sailing to the ground to form the aromatic carpet. I have favorite views of trees from every window in this house. Every room in this little cube of a house has two windows overlooking trees and every wall has outside of it a large maple tree about two feet from the roof line. The trees embrace me.

The cats and I enjoy watching the wild and crazy squirrels race up and down the trunks like Gran Prix race car drivers, making mad aerial circus leaps from branch to branch. When I sit on the porch in spring and autumn befoe and after the mosquitos, birds come to visit me, mostly wrens, but sometimes a cardinal. Mp/> To me there is no fragrance that can compare to the scent of sunlight on pine needles in the pine woods in the summer. I miss the forest, where in younger, fitter days I liked to hike, almost every week, but fortunaely I have prepared for my old age by bringing some forest into my life and my yard. I have maples, oaks, arborvitae, Norfolk Pine, some kind of ordinary evergreens, the Christmas trees, the aforementioned West Virginia cedars, lots of holly trees, and several kinds of trees I have never learned to name.

My Meetig is starting a oook club in mid February and our selection is IN SEARCH OF THE MOTHER TREE. Often, I don't read books about trees because they have too much about logging and de-forestation and it makes me deeply sad. I have, however read a lot of tree books that simply discuss affectionately, the lives of trees, a German forester, Wohleben, has written one such book, but I can't remember the title. And I read a book once that talked about the medicinal forests of Japan where specific trees have been known to effect healing for certain diseases and people afflicted with these diseases go there to walk. The treess are healing, even the yeard trees, and often when I have taken my troubled soul to the porch, just sitting with the trees has healed me.

We never, thought, my father and I, the day we planted those little cedars, that a day would come when I would be an old gray haired woman and he would be dead. I couldn't have imagined anyone with the vitality and strength of my father getting old and dying. I can't imagine it for myself!

One of my first artistic experiences, of which I have written many times before, was in the Dickensian overcrowded brick factory public school I attneded as a small depressed child in the concrete canyons of South Philadelphia. We took leaves from trees, each block had one tree imprisoned in a square of earth surrounded by concrete blocks, if the tree hadn't already died. Our was alive and even housed birds. It was a maple and I can still see the red hand shaped leaves I brought to school. We brought old toothbrushes from home as well, and we dipped the toothrushes into tempera paint and brushed them across small wood framed screens over the leaves laid on construction paper, making a silhouette of the leaves amidst the speckled snow of paint. It was a miraculous event and made me into the artist I became.

That is what it means to live in a place for a long time, to get to know the trees and plants, to watch the trees you plant mature, to have memories connected to them. You built, like a nest, your little environment. It evolves around you.

When the snow is gone and spring comes, why not plant a tree in your yard and watch it grow?

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

Opinion: It May Seem Like a Small Thing

A friend recently sent me a phone picture of a Before and After mocking article about Bridget Fonda. It ignited a long smoldering ground fire in me that was kindled some years ago when I was in line at the supermarket and a now defunct tabloid newspaper blared out some headline about the cellulite on Keeley Shay's backside in a beach photo. My first reaction was "Who Cares?" But it made me think because it was by no means a single abberrant cover story. It was part of an ongoing propaganda about women's bodies. All sorts of celebrities were being spied upon as they swam in pools or walked on beaches and the state of their thighs and buttocks were used to mock and shame them. Apparently I wasn't the only one who saw this as sexist because a year or several months later I ran across a full page spread showing various male celebrities caught unawares in their bathing suits with their stomach fat lounging over the waistband of their speedos (Rod Stewwart), and love handles hanging over the back bumper, skinny shanks and chicken legs propping up the melting ice cream cone of the aging former body builder Arnold Schwartzenegger. Hah, I thought, "How do you like it!"

But in recent years there have been many essays on "Body Shaming" mainly in regard to the body shaming of women. And I began to see the Bridget Fonda episode in a larger context. The friend who sent it to me had been shown it by her husband, a man given to criticism and insult in their relationship. And I saw something sinister in this. He was warning her of the kind of mockery and shame that occurs when you grow older and softer and lose your girlish figure. Has anyone EVER seen such a thing in regard to male celebrities? Has there ever been a sneak photo of Jack Nicholson in a bathing suit when he thought he was safe and could relax? Has any of the nany balding heads and protruding paunches of aging male stars been put up on a wanted poster for the public to mock and riducule? Of course not. Money and power protect these men and their privacy. In fact, Bridget Fonda stopped acting 20 years ago, she shouldn't even be seen as a celebrity in open season anymore.

The whole thing made me annoyed enough that I kept at it with my friend until she saw the point. Her first response to my ire was defensive and that she only showed it because she was surprised at how much Bridget Fonda has changed over the years. Well, twenty years is a long time and we have ALL changed a lot over that time, and we should be allowed to! I had to go on about how value has been tied to our outward appearance rather than our abilities, our intelligence, character, and accomplishments. We have to fight back against this insidious propaganda.

I hate social media so much that I deleted my facebook page TWICE! The stream of stupidity was like a polluted creek of advertising dross, crushed beer cans of sexist drivel, empty cigarette packsof poisonous racism, styrofoam burger boxes of unfounded rumors and lies. I couldn't stand to look at it anymore, and the rare gems of communication from old friends or former students weren't worth the trashy, fake sentiment crap about Vietnam Vets I had to wade through to find them. If people feel sad about the plight of Vietnam Vets, they should do something not be satisfied to signify their patriotic feeling by hitting a send key.

Another recent manifestation of the poison of patriarchal propaganda that I have found myself taking a stand against is in the general casual conversational use of the word "Balls" to signify courage. At first I just ignored it the same way I ignored the overuse of the word "Fuck" as a modifier for everything. I wanted to shout "The English language is jam packed with excellent descriptive modifiers to denote intensity of feeling, drop the fuck and work a little harder!" But I didn't because I was an English teacher and I didn't want to be that particular type of bore. But with 'Balls' I had to make my stand. Each time someone said it, I would gently remind them that courage doesn't reside in testicles, which women don't have, (unless you count ovaries, which were never being mentioned), but in the HEART. I wanted to send out my own waves of push back over the testosterone take-over of courage. The physical signifiers of nobility have always been - The Heart for courage, the Backbone for character, and the Brain for intelligence!

These may seem like insignificant details, minor and nit-picking, but words have power. We all know that. So let's give them some attention and respect. Let's call them out when they are being used to intimidate us or mock us or take away from us! Keep your eyes and ears open and take a stand!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann

Winter Weather January 29, 2022 noon

Connecting with my previous post about ways to pull yourself out of the ditch of despair: Twenty years ago, when I was injured in a fall, and in a depression over family matters, I joined a gym. I had a couple of goals in mind. For one thing, I wanted to get in shape, get fit. For decades, I had devoted myself to my work and my parenthood, and now I was free and wanted to find myself lost under the fat of a sedentary lifestyle. Also, I thought I would look for a romantic partner. Actually I wrote a funny story about this whole endeavor called FIT. I have written dozens of short stories over the years, but only two of them were humorous and Fit was one. Did it work? Well, yes and no. I did get fit, and I was so healthy and strong that I joined a club I had read about in the Courier Post section on entertainment and activities - The Outdoor Club of South Jersey. At that time, but no longer, they had a dating group, an Outdoor Singles group. My story was built around my first hike with the Outdoor Club on the coldest day of the year when it was 10 degrees and going down and there were all kinds of warnings about the cheeks on your face freezing off if you went outside. I went to a sports outfitter and got Hiking boots, Under Armour and lots of advice from a store clerk who correctly saw me as someone like his old mom and didn't want me to get lost in the forest or have my cheeks frozen off.

To this day, when I look back on that first hike, I am astonished at my audacity! I drove into the pine woods on a pitch black night when the moon had not yet arisen, and down meanandering roads until I saw a man putting up a sign in the dirt for hikers to park. He was a character out of a horror movie in his own right, an intiidating Blkans type, like a surly castle servant for Count Vlad. All was well, however, a half dozen other hikers showed up and we hiked in the silvery moonlight in the frozen forest and had a campfire and shared the food we brought. Earlier when I had phoned, the hike leader had mentioned how variable the weather was in the pines and I came to hear that warning many times over the next ten years when I hiked with the group. The warning was to not be deterred by rain forecasts or snow predictions because you could have flooding in one area and light showers in another, and the same for snow.

Today is a perfect example of that phenomena. Here in my little town about a mile from the Delaware River, we had only two inches of snow whereas in the Villas, where my cousin lives, about 60 miles from here, they had over a foot and her front door is snowed in. My friend in the pines, in Shamong had nearly a foot, as did my sister in Clarksboro, about 20 minutes drive south of here. We do have quite a blow going on, however. The wind is rattling the windows and pitching great handfuls of snow at the house while gusts of wind shake the burdened branches of all my evergreens and fling great cakes and pies of snow off onto the ground.

If we haven't met before, so you wouldn't know this but my little humble bungalow is in a grove of more than two dozen trees, half of them deciduous and more than 50 years old, and the other half evergreen. For many years, my daughter and I bought Christmas trees with root balls and planted them in the yard after Christmas. They all mostly survived so we have those, plus one we brought home in a coffee cup from a vacation in Williamsburg, Va., which is now three stories tall and there is a Norfolk Pine that I adopted when it was knee high which is now also towering about three or four storries tall. As my neighbors cut down their trees and turned our town into a shadeless desert, my little yard became more and more of a sanctuary to the evacuated squirrels and birds. I have so many evergreens that the views out of most of my windows are still green in mid winter. Although the view out my north facing bedroom corner window is into the bare beseeching branches of an old oak. Through those branches every night, go sailing diamond and ruby studded bits of jewelry which are what the airplanes look like on their way to Philadelphia's International Airport, as I am in their flight path. It is as though someone had a treasure box of bejewed costume jewelry and was stone skipping them through the sky, one every fifteen minutes.

That brings me to my UFO sighting. In the middle of the week, when I was looking out the window as I do every night when I put down my book and turn out the lights, I saw a large round glowing light in the high sky, above the flight path of the airplanes. It was the size of a full moon but it wasn't in the right place for the moon. I went into the living room and looked on my laptop to see if we had a special moon, and saw we had a waning crescent moon night, not a full moon, yet there was the large glowing orb which seemed to be cut in half as though half a circle with a reflection of itself beneath it. Well, whatever it was, I was tired and I went to sleep.

Whether or not we have been visited by other entities from other planets is an open question to me. I have watched lots of UFO shows and find them inevitably a bit "conspiracy nutty" a kind of willful belief like a child's belief in Santa Claus or a religious zealot's belief in God and the bible. Nonetheless, I find it improbable that in the vast universe we should be the only planet with life forms, and also that there should be no other life forms that are more advanced than we are. I didn't know until recently that the majority of alleged UFO visitations such as Roswell, have been over nuclear weapons facilities, and a recent show made the presumption that they may be watching our nuclear weapons development to make sure we don't become interstellar destructive. Just as a neighbor might watch another neighbor who devolves from gun collector into gun range creator and armed militia leader.

It all seems plausible to me. I am afraid of our penchant for developing weapons of mass destruction that can go far distances as well. Every day, we see on the news the massing of forces and weapons along the border with Ukraine by the Russians and it frightens me with its siilaries to the situation just before World War II, but just as history may repeat itself somewhat, things are never exactly the same, and it may be that this time, we can use refined forms of negotiation and balances of power to resolve this aggression without starting another global catastrophe. How crazy and greedy is Putin?

Oh well, that is far far away from the other theme, the snow falling upon our world, the white visitors from heaven called snowflakes. Snow crystals are worthy of a blog post all on their own, but I am not well informed enough and also too tired of typing to tackle it.

Happy Winter to all those of you who, like me, enjoy the winter and the snow! Jo Ann

TOUGH TIMES TOOLBOX Jan. 24, 2022

We have all experienced tough times, the garden variety: divorce, broken hearts, grief over loss of loved ones, house burning down, trouble with kids, and so many more. Those were just the kind that my friends and I have faced over the years, oh yes and there is ill health and aging. Recently the topic came up of what tools to use to overcome getting stuck in the trough of despond when tough times lay us low. I was on a mission yesterday with a couple of friends to deliver winter clothes to a volunteer who distributes them to homeless people. We were talking about what we have done to pull ourselves out of despair. At present, all three of us are in pretty good condition although one of us has had a loss to death and one had several serious falls and injuries to contend with a couple of years back. We came up with some ideas that I wrote down and then I talked or, actually texted with a few other friends, one of whom in December lost her best friend to auto-immune disease.

There are some things these two friends and I do regularly, WE WALK! The two friends still hike in the woods, but as I have had some knee problems over the past couple of years, I only walk two miles EVERY DAY with my dog. By the way, adopting my dog was somethng I did to pull mysself out of grief over losing first my father, then his dog whom I had adopted. The dog I recently adopted was a problem dog, an overactive, large Husky/Lab mix with no manners from an abusive and exploitive home who had been abandoned after she was used to breed puppies for sale. Let me tell you, she was a tough project. She was so difficult that I was in tears and in fear for my safety when I walked her as she had some awful and unexpected bad habits like rising up on her hind legs and diving to get away to fight other dogs we passed. She knocked me down a few times. I was forced to hire not one dog trainer, but, after that expense and effort, yet another dog trainer. I can fast forward to the end of that story right now and tell you that although she isn't 100 percent yet, she is well on her way and I LOVE her! Friends had advised me to get rid of her, Take Her Back!, but I said I had made a vow to give her a home forever, and I would stick through the struggle. She may not have been the dog I needed but she definitely needed me. It has worked and she is a grateful and loving companion now. She is dozing beside me on the sofa as I type.

Fifty years ago my first efforts at saving myself took me towards Zen Buddhism. Having realized, fortunately, at a relatively early age that most trouble was in my thinking not in the outside world, I looked for ways to adjust my thinking. I remember pondering the notion that we make the world with our thoughts. Surely, I thought, there is an objective world out there that is not composed of our thoughts, so how can that be true? But over time I read many books on Buddhism starting with Alan Watts and then Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Suzuki. The one I still have and have bought over and over is Baba Ram Dass' book Be Here Now. That one literally saved me and every day at some point that mantra lights up on the front of my mind like a neon sign and a radio advertising voice booms out "Be Here Now" and stops me from meandering down negative and unproductive lanes.

My best guru, however, is Pema Chodrin, a monk who is now head of a monasery in New Brunswick and I have read every book she has ever written, and most of them more than once. They have titles that get right to the point, like "When Things Fall Apart." I found Pema Chodrin in a very painful period of anxiety in my life when my daughter, age 18, had quit college and run off to California. I was devastated. A college education had been the biggest solution/gift/lifeboat in my own life and I was devoted to the idea of providing that for her so I wouuld know she would be okay in the future. Also, there she was going off to California to be a movie star!! It was the route to exploitation in so many narratives of disaster. I couldn't sleep. I was a boiling cauldron of anxiety every day. I burst into tears. I was assailed by hideous fantasies of serial killers kidnapping my naive daughter and her disappearing and me never knowing what happened to her. To save myself, I bought a dozen Pema Chodrin meditation CDs and since I had a five cd changer player, I put on five at a time when I went to bed at night and listened to them until I fell asleep and after I fell asleep, hopefully, they were still working on my unconscious mind. They saved me.

In my fifties, After a set of disabling accidents, I was feeling old and broken and facing a future of crippled solitude. I decided to pick myself up by joining The Outdoor Club of New Jersey. I bought winter hiking clothes and got into the woods. Also at that time, three other teachers and I decided to try to fix our weak and failing bodies by joining a gym together. The gym offered a group discount. I took to it and lost 50 pounds and became stronger and fitter than I have ever been at any age. It also strengthened and healed my mind.

So, yesterday, my two friends and I took our bags of sweaters and hats and scarves, gloves and socks and coats to the home of the helper who is assisting Mr. Piscitelli who distributes these items to the homeless in the tent encampments in Camden City NS Kensington. We felt good about that and decided that Helping Others was definitely on the tool list.

1. Get outside - go walking, in the park, in the woods, in the neighborhood.

2. Rescue a dog who needs a home and will go walking with you but oly if you will are for the dog. They need a lot of love and attention.

3. Help others. Be a volunteer or just donate whatever you can spare.

4. Change your thinking patterns: Read Zen Buddhism, or listen to cd's, A great magazine is Shambala, which you can buy at Barnes and Noble. A great guru who speaks to our everyday lives is Pema Chodrin. Some people have found help in Eckart Tolle. Others love Thich Nhat Hahn.

5. Join a gym - Planet Fitness has a ten dollar a month membership and Golden Sneakers lets you go for free! Sometimes when you strengthen your body, you strengthen your mind.

6. Distraction: Read a really good series of mysteries - I recommend Anne Cleeves' Vera and Shetland series, Louise Penny's Three Pines series, and recently I am working my way through the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.

7. Meditation: Learn to meditate, use meditation tapes or cd's or apps on your phone or just practice sitting quietly letting your mind clear.

8. Science has shown through m.r.i. that practicing the gratitudes can change your brain. Every day counter negative thoughts by reciting five things for which you are grateful.

9. Creative Journaling: For fifty years, I have kept journals. Tell your troubles to your journal, list your accomplishments, write your gratitudes, cut and paste from magazines - it is your book! Draw in it, let it evolve.

10. Reading - Self Help Books actually can help. All kinds of reading can help. Reading for distraction, reading for solutions.

11. When you can't read because you are too down in the dumps-listen. You can get a free library app called Hoopla. At the library a young woman behind the counter put the app on my phone and showed me how to use it. You can borrow several books or cd's a month. I listen to audio-books when I can't sleep and I listen to cd music at the gym.

Personally, I beieve that physical maintenance and emotional maintenance are as or more important than household maintenance and automobile maintenance. Just as you wouldn't allow laundry to pile up, or dishes in the sink, it is a good idea to sort out the piles gathered in your mind and straighten it out. It goes without saying that as with serious illness, thinking and will power are not enough if you have serious mental or emotional disability in which case you need to see a professional and possibly get medication, but all the tools in the toolbox are useful as well and for most of us, they can keep things rolling in a healthful and satisfying way!

Happy Trails!

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Netflix film: MUNICH-At the Edge of War

Often, I reflect upon my childhood in the sunny post War boom years; I was born in November of 1945 and grew up in the 1950's during the Uion years when working men made comfortable wages and women who wanted to could stay home and raise their children. So my brother who is two years younger than I am, and I, had a very warm and comfortable childhood, except for our father's drinking and violence. What I mean is we had material comfort and a two parent home. My mother made oatmeal in the morning, and we ate dinner around a dining room table all togetehr in the evening - a full home cooked meal. My mother alwys said that my father worked hard in the cold outdoors and needed a hearty meal. It was true.

The war was over for us, in America, not so much for the people in Europe, the broken, raped, starving and persecuted women, children, and released POWs in Europe who had no place to go home to and no one to go home to. Their leaders had led them like the Pied Piper into fiery destruction. A mad man had come to rule over the German people, and hopeless adn helpless, they followed him into the fiery regions of hell. ,p/> We often forget, if we ever knew that not all the Germans supported the madman Hitler, but the peace loving, rational ones who saw him for what he was became increasingly powerless against the violent and domination crrazed mob, much like in America today. When we looked back a couple of weeks ago, on the January 6th insurrection, we saw the faces of the violence drunk racist and ignorant populace that puts men like Hitler into power.

Frequently, I gloss over the news of the world with only a cursory attention, but last night, I watched a very fine Netflix film which may have played in the theaters, called MUNICH: At the Edge of War. Mostly the plot was built around Neville Chamberlain's meetings adn treaties with Hitler. There is a sub plot about an official who comes into docuents from a meeting between Hitler and his generals that details his true aims, to lie and stall as long as possible while he picks off one weak neighbor after another to gain the "Living Room" his empire (his insane ego) needs. Like many another history buff whith a vague notion of World War II, I had contempt for Chamberlain's capitulation and naievite' and never realized that he had two aims, one to appease a peope weary after losing a generation of men to World War I, and the other to buy time because Britain was in no way ready for another war. He was buying time with other people's land.

But what struck me this time was the similarities with what is going on right now in Europe with Ruggia and Ukraine. Right after the movie I had watched the pbs newshour with Judy Woodruff, and a report on Russia massing troops and armaments at the border of Ukraine, where they have already seized Crimea. NATO has warned Russia but with all the refugee disasters of the wars in Syria and Afhghanistan, Europe doesn't want a war, and after just removing our troups from a ten year debacle in Afghanistan, we don't want a war to Putin has the perfect window to invade and get away with it.

Interestingly, to me, my sister, who works as a waiter, crosses paths with a great number of refugee workers and she works with a small group of Russian/Ukrainian men. Like Ireland with its Northern British/Irish citizenry, and its Republica of Ireland southern citizens, Ukraine has a sizeable population of Russians who dream of Russia returning to its (in their fantasy) Pre-Gorbachev EMPIRE days. They want to see all the Blakan repblics returned to Russian control. It surprises me that with all the economic deprivations and infrastructure woes of the current Russia, Putin would look elsewhere for trouble, but war has always been a good machine for driving industrial production and reducing the surplus poulation plus uniting the poulation and taking their attention away from current internal failures.

On top of that, I feel a "disturbance in the force" to use Star Wars terminology, a kind of masculine tumescence in the world at large, as though suddenly men are becoming more and more belligerant, and warlike. The masculine/domination culture of the Middle East seems to have spread like the corona virus, and men all over are growing beards as masculinity displays, driving big loud trucks in a kind of militaristic display, and forming militias and brotherhoods. It feels as though they are getting ready for something that is coming, another cataclysmic eruption in the human species. Maybe nature, having failed in reducing the cancer of humanity by virus has turned towards war. I am filled with foreboding and a sense that there is nowhere to run, no safe place, no safe future. I will have to do some meditation today to rid myself of this feeling. But like the peaceful German men in the movie MUNICH, I feel as though we are facing a tidal wave and I can't do anything to stop it. I did vote for Biden. In one scene in the movie, a good German has the chance to assassinate Hitler, but being a good man, he cannot summon the murderous impulse to pull the trigger and he knows he has missed his chance to rid the world of a madman and a global disaster by his very humanity. <[/> Things may look the same, but they are always different and this is a different world from the one in the 1930's so chances are just as good that there will be a different outcome this time around, and maybe a better one. Maybe the NATO group plus US, will be a strong enough force to persuade Russia to abandon, even in temporarily, its aggressive plans to invade Ukraine. Let's hope so.

Hopeful Trails (my real Motot is Hope for the Best and Cope with the Rest) Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Leaving Your Burdens Down By The River Jan. 23, 2022

Recently, I was speaking with some friends about that hardest of emotional tasks, overcoming anger, bitterness, grievance over having been wronged. We were talking about tools, or skills. It made me think about the tools I have used. As I said at the time, by my age of 76, most of us have had a dose of the most common emotional travails, heartbreak, abandonment, rejection, disappointment, betrayal and so on, from all the usual sources, work, family, romance. It reminded me of a Buddhist tale:

Three monks were on a pilgramage. Their order forbade talking or touching especially touching women. The three monks approached a fast running but shallow river and began to wade across. Halfway, they encountered a frail, ancient woman with a bundle of firewood on her back. She couldn't go any farther. She was stuck. One of the monks bowed before her and said, "Climb on my back and I will carry you across." Gratefully, the old woman wrapped her arms around his neck and he ferried her and her firewood to the other side of the river. He put her down and joined his brotehrs on their way. After hours in silence, one monk couldn't contain it any longer and he cried out, "You broke your vows and talked to and touched a woman!" The other monkreplied, "Are you still carrying her? I left her back by the river!"

So, to me, the question is, how can you leave your burdens back at the river, the river of flowing time and flowing life. There are many tools in my toolbox for that task. There are the words of wisdom saved from peope I admired, such as this one from my mother: "Bitterness is a poison; it corrodes the vessel that carries it." And I alsways refer back to Winston Churchill; "Be Calm and Carry on." Then of course there are the many Buddhist tales and words of wisdom I have gathered over the years such as the reminder from Baba Ram Dass to "Be Here Now!" That one is emblazoned across the ftont of my mind like a neon sign and I use it almost daily to spare myself getting stuck in the bog of ongoing imagined arguments, painful memories, painful knowledge.

The tool that I have used most reliably throughout my life both as a tool box and a tool has been creative journaling and writing in general. Last year, I wrote a book called TRUE ROMANCE about the three most sigificant romances of my life, all of which ended in disappointment and painful sorrow, but one of which also gave me the greatest gift of my life, my daughter. Writing that book was a way for me to exorcise the demons of disappointment, to get my story down on paper once and for all and then close the book.

Every day in working on the always energetic dementors of past suffering or unresolved conflict, I turn to my creative journal. For fifty years this trusty friend has helped me resolve issues and settle scores and to express my feelings through prose, poetry, drawings, and pasted clippings with good advice on them. This might not work for everyone but in my 20's I decided to adopt this habit and it has worked wonders for me, incuding the recently adopted and scientifically approved habit of the daily gratitudes! Today, I am grateful for my tools and my toolbox. I am grateful to have friends. I am grateful to live in America, in my little house in my little town, with my peaceful animal companions! I am grateful to be alive and well. They say doing the gratitudes can change your brain and I believe it!

Happy Trails - through both the outer world and the inner world.

Jo Ann As always, the comments feature on my blog is polluted and destroyed by robo spam, so if you want to reach me use my e-mail

wrightj45@yahoo.com

My Red Sweaters and Clothes for the Homeless

A week ago, I got an e-mail news blurb about a local man who used to volnteer giving food at the Cathedral Kitchen in Camden and turned to collecting warm clothes and blankets for the homeless in that city. There is a very large homeless tent encampment there which my sister has seen on her travels to and from Philadelphia, where she works.

There have been many reports and documentaries on the homeless and the apparently nresolvable problem of homelessness in America where there are no more cheap ooarding houses and rents are sky high and affordable housing nonextistent.

Let me digress here and apologize for typos - I can't see very well and have not successfully found the way to enlarge the type on the blog since they changed the software from open source a few years ago. So if there is a typo please forgive and ignore! Thanks!

To get back to homelessness and my red sweaters, I was so moved by the essay about the man, Mr. Piscatelli, colecting and delivering winter things to the homeless that I went into my attic where I still store several tubs of clothes and household goods I don't need but have not to date been able to divest myself of. This time I brought down, at great esxpense of effort maneuvering the tubs down the attic steps with my bad joints and poor eyesight, two tubs of clohtes that survive all the past purges. In them were two of my lifelong favorite red sweaters, a mock turtle neck and a button front cardigan, in just that heather tweedy mix embeded in tomato soup red, of which I am so fond. The sweaters are too small, and despite a few successful attempts at losing weight, I think it is safe to assume that won't happen again in the probable ten yeears I have left on earth to wear winter clothes, so it is time for some cold homeless person to wear those cheery red sweaters. They shouldn't languish in the attic benefiting no one.

Also, it occrred to me before writing this, that I no longer sear sweaters. My lifestyle has changeed and like many of my fellow Americans, I live in sweat suits which are warm, wrinkle free, comfortable in every way, and my sweatshirt tops have hoods which hold down my wiwnter hat when I walk the dog. Also, I can use the same sweatsuits for pajamas as well as for day wear clothing. No need any longer for two sets of clothes! At present I am wearing a cranberry sweat suit with a lighter shade of cranberry cotton long sleeve under shirt. And I am getting on my shoes to walk the dog.

Mr. Piscatelli's number is 609-332-9484 and his helper Ms. Hunter, lives at 413 Cranford Rd., Cherry Hill, NJ. She collects and sorts and then he delivers. They asked for ONLY winter things, and sneakers, socks, underwear, blankets, hats, scarves, gloves - and all of these are in the tubs I am taking over on Monday. I am meeting a friend for lunch at Maritsa in Maple Shade and she has cleaned out her closets and has bags of winter clothes for the homeless as well.

Tomorrow, I will again be attending Meeting at Woodbury Friends. Las week made me very happy. I had forgotten how the combination of spiritual meditation that is silent worship and the redolence of three hundred years of spiritual contemplation embedded in the walks of a sacred pace such as Woodbury Meeting could produce an almost magical sense of peace and light. Because this is the time of COVID, there was a zoom meeting and there was only one other live person at the meeting, but that suited me just fine. The solitude was aiding in my contemplation. It heped reduce distraction.

By the way, in an upcoming blog post I would like to talk about an article I read on congnitive decline with aging and how helpfl meditation is.

Happy Trails - Jo Ann and again, please em-ail and don't bother with comments option

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Family History and Woodbury Friends Meting 1/10/22

Recently I watched a very interesting video on the structure of the Woodbury Friends Meeting House. which at the time the video was made, in 2015 was 300 years old. I had actually taken a tour of the Woodbury Friends Meeting House some years before when the young and brilliant Megan Giordano was curator at the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield, National Park. I was then, and have joined again, as a volunteer at the Whitall House. though the house is closed now during the winter season.

Woodbury Friends Meeting was of inteest to me not only because of the Whitall connection; James and Ann were members there and are buried there, but also because I was once a member of the Philadelphia Friends Meeting on Cherry Street, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. At the time, I was working full time teaching Art in public school in New Jersey, and I was teaching part-time at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Saturday from 9 to 4 in the graduate education program. I had taken my Masters at UArts and because I was experienced as an actual teacher, I was teaching a course on classroom management called The Practicum Seminar. My graduate students were assisting full time public school teachers who were teaching in the Saturday Arts Lab School. I had begun to attend the Philadelphia meeting because my daughter was old enogh to understand and I wanted her to have a religious education as had I. My mother had been Sunday School Teacher at the Gloria Dei, Old Swede's Episcopal Church on Front Street in Philadelphia when I was a child. I thought it was important to have an understanding of religion, but to keep a free mind and the Society of Friends offered that kind of approach to spirituality. At the time, I joined, my daughter and I lived in Philadelphia and could walk over from our apartment on 8th and Pine, to the meeting on Cherry Street, but after we moved to New Jersey and I bought a house, we had to take the bus to the city on Sunday, not convenient. Also, after several years of teaching all week and on Saturday, I found myself teaching the First Day School (Sunday School) at Meeting on Sunday as well. I literally never had a day off, so I quit.

Still, I had taken Quaker 101 before I had joined and I admired and felt at home in the Society of Friends approach to a spiritual life, basically that there is that of "God" or whatever you wish to call it (a higher power), in ALL of us, the LIGHT within, and that you don't need intercessors such as priests or even the bible to speak to you, you can meditate and open your heart and feel the light withinn on your own. Also they had a pastoral relationship as a community and a sense of responsibility for their fellow man and the world at large, a kind of right action. The rejection of force even force of will was part of the relationship between Friends, allowing personal freedom to seek. The peace testimony and the action of speaking truth to power was interesting to me.

At the time that I attended, I had the privilege of knowing the Willoughby family, George and Lillian. They were staunch Friends and activists and the most truly good people. They have since passed, sadly, because the world needs people like them. Lately I had been feeling that now that I am retired and have more time, it would be helpful to once again nourish the spiritual side of my life, so I looked up the Woodbury Friends and found the video about the history of the building. As I said earlier I had once toured the building because the Whitall family had been members. What I learned from the video was the John Cooper had designed the building. Back in the days when Megan was Curator at Whitall HOuse, she had wondered aloud what the relatiohnship might be between the Coopers of Camden and the Whitall family because Ann Whitall's maiden name was Cooper.

At the time, I was also a volunteer at the Camden County HIstorical Society and at the Gloucester County Historical Society Where they have a phenomenal large Cooper family tree framed and on display.I was able to create a sketch of a family tree for Megan showing how Anne Cooper Whitall was related to the Camden Coopers who had founded the city of Camden. One of the Coopers was also a member of the Revolutionary Committees of Correspondence and his house had been occupied by a British General when the British occupied Philadelphia. In fact, the Woodbury Meeting had been confiscated to house the wounded British soldiers during the Battle of Red Bank in October of 1777.

It is a regret of mine that I have run out of time and energy because someone should write a book on the history of the Quakers in South Jersey. Their meeting houses dot the road from Burlington to Salem, the old Salem Road now called the Kings Highway (which is where I live in a different small town) and their mark is everywhere on the history of South Jersey from the first founders, such as the Fenwicks in Salem to the South and the Coopers in Camden, and they have been instruments of righteousness through all the struggles of our state and country such as through the Underground Railroad (Abigail Godwin) and Abolition to Women's Suffrage.

Next Sunday, known as First Day, at 10:00 a.m., I will be attending meeting in that fine and welcoming old building. I will let you know how it goes. By the way, John Cooper designed the Friend's Meeting and a Wood family member donated the land and the resources to build it. A copper cooking pot belonging to the Wood family from when they came here from Woodbury, England, sits on the hearth of the front room at Whitall HOuse. There are many Friends' Meeting houses still welcoming worshippers and also visitorrs and I attended a lecture at the Woodstown FRiends just before the pandemic. If you are driving around eploring, you can find them all along the route from Brulington to Salem and if I were you, I would keep on going and head down through Millville, Bridgeton, and on to Greenwich where there are two particularly fine and interesting Meeting Houses. It wa down to Salem that a descendent of John Cooper, founder of Camden City moved after he married a blacksmith's daughter and from which union sprange the South Jersey Cooper family and Anne Cooper Whitall.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com (Please don't bother with the comments function on the blog - it is corrupted by robospam. If you wish to contact me, use my e-mail.)

Prehistory Museum at Greenwich and a 2021 Discovery 1/8/21

Some years back in the vigorous days of my early retirement, I made many many visits to the Prehistory Museum in Greenwich, New Jersey. I strongly urge anyone who has the time to go there and visit! I went there so many times over a long period that a couple of the men I spoke with have already died, but, the day I remember most was the day a local fisherman brought in the molar of a wooly mammoth. What a day! To get to hold so ancient and fantastic an object in my hands! Somewhere back in my photos on this site is a picture of it. The fisherman wanted to sell it to the men at the museum but the exhibits of the museum were entirely donated and they had no budget for purchasing things. The small amounts they raised from donations and so on barely covered the electric bills and I don't know how they covered the taxes but probably tax exempt status and maybe grants. Anyhow I loved that museum so much that I actually went fossil hunting with a man I met there who knew a place along the Delaware and bay where many fossils had been found. We didn't find any that day and now I can't even remember his name. He was a volunteer at the museum also.

The way the rich sediment of experience layers itself with acquired knowledge from reading - Today I was reading a favorite magazine DISCOVER, and there were three articles of interest to me on DNA. One was about wooly mammoth dna found in Siberia. Another was dna found in the dirt sidement layers in feces in caves inhabited by Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens. This new level of technological ability, to extract dna from fossil feces opens a whole new field of studies because ancient cave dirt is far more easy to find than bones!

It occurred to me when I was reading these articles that my youth is from the days BEFORE dna was discovered!!! My youth was before so many things we take for granted today - cell phones, internet, computers, cable tv, dna and genetic testing, satelites! And I am sure if I thought about it long enough I would think of even more - in my youth most cars were still stick shift!

Although we officially designaate 2003 as the eyar the human genome was sequenced after more than a decade of painstaking work, about 8% was still not able to be sequenced by the technology of that time. TLast year, 2021, the job was finally completed thanks to the work of a consortium of scienties Telomere to Telomere or T2T.

The other article I read was about the use of dna and fmily history sites such as GED and ancestry.com and 23 and Me in solving crimes by using dna from murder scenes and dna in thee family hisotry web sites. There is a controversa raging over whether this constitutes an invasion of privacy. I am for open source. The only ones that I can see who have had anything to lose from this blend of efforts are killers and rapists. Do they have a lobby?

Happy Trails! and Happy New Year! Jo Ann

Sorry - it was a mastodon molar not at mammoth!

Alcoholism and family history January 2022

Alcoholism runs in my family. It is probably safe to say that suicide also runs in my family that is, if a suicide in each of three previous generations counts. Mostly, my family alcoholics were functional alcoholics; that means, they worked, married, had children, bought homes (some of them) and didn't die early from liver disease.

My father was a high functioning 'binge drinker' which means he kept his drinking to lunch during the week and drank a case of beer over the weekend. It was, in a way, part of his job. He was a cost estimator for a big company and one of his strategies was to befriend and go to lunch with other cost estimators (they were in on the strategy too) and they would all drink and try to trick information out of each other on what jobs were being bid on and what the bids were. If estimator A could get estimator B to divulge the bid, he could, of course, underbid within the profit margin and win the job!

The smell of alcohol and industry is fixed forever in my memory of my father coming in from the cold after work. He worked outdoors for the early years of his career, as an ironworker. He came home ruddy faced and wreathed with cold winter air exhaling whiskey, and his clothes permeated by various motor oil and metal odors. I loved my father, but he wasn't ever, and easy man. He had spent his entire adult life in the traditionally male sphere, the Conservation Corps, the Merchant Marines (like his father) and the navy, followed by Ironwork and Structural Steel. He built damms, skyscrapers, bridges, and moved impossibly heavy and large items from place to place - the kind of things that require roads to be built to accommodate them, and bridges over wet terrain. He had an interesting job and he loved it! Even when it almost killed him. In my memory, two ironworkers suffered the same industrial accident, my father and my brother's best friend. An unsecured crame (a crane not bolted to a stable base) carrying a heavy load of lumber, tipped over and hit my father on the side on the way down, shattering most of his bones and causing him to be laid up for nearly a year. He had, among the broken pones, pierced lung from a rib being shoved into it. He was a brave, stoic and resilient man, because he recovered and never complained about aches and pains. He was like a new man. And the company showed its appreciation by promoting him and promoting him. It goes without saying, he wouldn't have been promoted had he not also been highly intelligent, immensely knowledgeable in his field, and a man's man capable of holding his own with other men in his field.

my father grew up poor in the city. His father, the merchant marine, had been killed under mysterious circumstances in a hit and run incident after arriving in port. My grandmother was left to face the depression with no education and four children, her three sons, and a niece she had taken in and was raising. Shrtly after her mother suffered a catastrophic stroke, my grandmother moved to Ocean City to take care of her and my father, at 16, was left to fend for himself. I don't know all the details about that, why he didn't go with her for example. No one in my family EVER talked about anything related to family history and in contrast I would say they were all remarkably tight lipped and secretive about most things.

For example, it tookk me decades to get even a clue about what happened to my own mother's biological mther, after I found out that the woman I always thought was her mother was actually her aunt. No one ever talked about that. And I was told, when I asked, one lie after another. Like a detective, I had to piece it together through ancestry.com research and the few breadcrumb clues I could pick up here and there, vague memories, hints, possible names and so on.

Among the aforementioned ancestral alcoholics, however, to get back to topic, was my father's maternal grandfather. He had been a well educated man with gambling and alcohol addictions who left the family penniless. I believe he may also have been one of the suicides as was my mother's maternal grandfather, also an alcoholic and suicide. He shot himself. My mother remembered him coming to visit her when she was in the "Friendless Childrens' Home" in Camden, NJ, after her mother died leaving three little girls and their father put them into the orphanage. I don't know much about him except that he was from a Quaker farm family, and he was a ne'er-do-well. My mother's aunt, the one who raised her, hated him, presumably one of the reasons she refused to tell me anything about him, including his name, when I plied her with questions so many times over the years. Before she died, my mother's estranged sister told me about knowing him before he died and that he was not a good man; he was a 'drinker.'

From growing up with my father's functional alcohoism, I became familiar with what I called the three phases: sociability, followed by contrary argumentativeness, capped off by aggression and belligerance. I believe this pattern can be observed pretty readily in any bar and often concludes with the infamous bar fights.

How did I elude the family curse? For one thing, I was a born reader, and I read the classics filled with terrifying adversaries such as pirates and kidnappers, and diseases like the Black Plague. For another thing, I didn't inherit alcoholism, but I did inherit intelligence and the cost estimator's tendency to size people up and observe. My father was an ever present danger due to his drinking. He was an ofte violent man, not so much to my mother who early on established that she would brook no such assaults, but to us children. When he got incensed, he beat us, with his hand as in what is too generously described as spankings, which is more open hand beatings on legs and buttocks, and at times with the belt. When we moved from our city home, finding that the big china cabinet in the dining room wasn't coming with us, my brother and I scraped a hole through the plaster and dropped 'the belt' into the wall.

To me alcohold was never something you looked at as a reward or a treat, as my father did. To me it was a brown bottle with a large poison label across it. It still is! Two of my siblings are functioning alcoholics, both of them graduated to three DUI status. My brother eluded jail time only because his lawner convinced the judge he needed to have home arrest so he could take care of his elderly father who lived in a remote and rural place. My father actually took care of my brother in real life. My brother had been a homeless drug addict and my father and mother gave him shelter until he became clean and sober. My mother died and my brother stayed on and looked after my father until he died. My brother who had been in Vietnam, had a lot of trauma in his life so it isn't surprising that he drinks, and also that he smokes pot to help him sleep, since he has had recurring nightmares since Vietnam. After his 3rd DUI, however, he stopped drinking at the VFW or the American Legion or the local bars and only drinks at home and doesn't EVER drive after drinking. My sister is now learning that lesson. Because of her, I am reading "NO MORE LETTING GO; The spirituality of taking action against Alcoholism and Drug Addiction by Debra Jay. I read through a LOT of book reviews before I bought the three books I have purchased to help me navigate thie latest stormy sea, and this is the one I am starting with because I am not able to go the old route of shunning the miscreant, cutting them off, distancing myself and letting them "hit bottom."

There is a saying I like "Revise your Priors!" And it means don't get stuck in old ideas that don't work any more. Newer approaches to coping with family members with addictions is to find ways to intervene and possible spare them and yourself the decades of despair and destruction before they reach "the bottom." So that is what I am going to try. I will keep you informed about my progress in the book and in the strategies in case you have someone you love who has a problem.

I have never believed that secrecy is particularly helpful to anyone. I was a teacher, and I am a scholar, an intellectual, and a communicator, a writer and an artist. I am committed to sharing our stories and from them, deriving wisdom or at least comfort!

Happy Trails!

Jo Ann

Sunday New York Times Book Review Dec.26, 2021

This left over book review from 2021 is my goodbye to the year gone by. I am always a week or so behind in reading the Book Review because there is always so much of interest in it, and because it has such competition with glossier and more colorful reading material - the magazines that are always coming to my mailbox: Discover, Harpers, The Atlantic, The Week, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair. Anyhow, as is so often the dangerous consequence of reading the Bk Rev. I ended up buying two more books from amazon. I bought PERIL by Bob Woodward about the last chaotic and unsatable days of the Trump Regime, and The HEROINE OF 1001 FACES by Maria Tatar. Tatar's book review begins with her asking Joseph Campbell about the missing women in his long career in the archetypes of folklore and fairytales - the Hero's Journey. He responds that women are the mothers, the protectoresses, and the prizes in the men's stories. So Maria Tator writes her own book. The critic was hard on her and said she was unfocused and seemed to be in search of a narrative although she is credited wither "erudite" research. My feeling is that in excavating our own female history and mythology, some female scholar must always begin somewhere and like a female Johnny Appleseed, she provides the seed stock for following scholars, artists and writers. We are collaborative. No woman is an island.

In my life, because I have been that increasingly rare creature, an avid reader from earliest childhood, there has always been a dialogue between the past and the pressent. So when I read in the book review on the Tatar book that so uch is to be found in fairy tales of women's different kind of heroic escapes and journeys, I instantly have an image in my memory of the Orange Fairy Book and the Blue Fairy Book and I am reminded of some of the illustrations such as they one of the woman who opened her mouth and out sprang toads and snakes and other slimy creatures. Stories like this were mentioned in the review when it was observed that in many ancient tales women were silenced, forced to keep the secrets of men. The Greek tale where the woman had her tongue cut out (which still happens in the world when women TELL). Women telling their own stories or the stories of others gets denigrated as 'gossip.' The movements in modern feminism that relate to telling your own story such as the women who signed up for Ms. Magazine to publish their experiences having abortions, or the recent #MeToo movement where women relate the sexual harrassment they have endured are prime examples,so is the recent trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, pimp for Jeffrey Eppstein. She has be tried and found guilty of procurement but has not yet been sentenced. The girls came forward and told their stories in particular one named Giuffre, about a dozen came forward although the true number of victims must be near a hundred over the many years this transpired.

Because I was a teacher, I get a special discount rate on my weekly Sunday New York Times and the Book Review, my most enjoyed section. Yers ago, I used to plead with an old friend of mine to save the BK Review for me, but his friendship, for unknown reasons, always had a thread of spite and malice woven into it and so often he let them accumulate into a musty pile and then put them in recycle instead. Perhaps that thread of malice was simply in his personality and not particular to me.

I often think back on and have often written about the book case in my Grandmother Lyon's basement, my first introduction to a private library when I was far too young to get to a library on my own. There I found THE OUTDOOR GIRLS ON A HIKE, my first true literary LOVE, but also Dickens and Twain, and the Great European Classics. Why this treasure was relegated to the basement is beyond me, but I suppose my grandmother came to see it as clutter and she was a meticulous and compulsive cleanrer. She brooked no clutter and had so few ornaments that I can remember them, a china lidded candy dish with shaped three dimensional porcelain flowers on the lid. There was a slim china cabinet with her blue chocolate pot, which is now mine. She had few pieces of furniture, only what was needed, and I think this simplicity and uncluttered aspect to her home helped her to maintain a calm of mind in the storm of her natural anxiety. I don't remember a book case in my other grandmother's house at all but her son, my father, was an avid reader and constantly self taught. History was his interest and particularly World War II. My mother always bought me books, the children's classics like Treasure Island and The Silver Skates and Little Women (the modern one - I had the original from my grandmother Lyon's bookcase along with Anne of Green Gables). She traded green stamps at the supermarket for the Childrens' Encyclopedia Illustrated! (Oh those wonderful illustrations. I loved those pictures.

Well, the sun has come out and I must reward my patient dog who gave up on lobbying me for her walk and is quietly snoozing on the sofa. We must make hay while the sunshines, but I hope these book recommendations and book thoughts have insprired yours! And I hope you can get to the Sunday New York Times Book Review at your local library.

By the way, my first serious familiarity with a library was in Maple Shade in the late 1950's when my family moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey. It was located behind the police station on Main Street, and the first book I borrowed there was the Trilogy that contained MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, MEN AGAINST THE SEA, and PITCAIRN'S ISLAND. It had a cobalt blue cloth hardbinding with gold lettering. I remember my thrill at being able to borrow it and the anticipation of such a grand benefit for the future.

Jo Ann

If you wish to, you can reach me at wrightj45yahoo.com

(don't bother with the comments function on this blog as it is entirely corrupted by robot junk and I rarely visit it as it is so dispiriting to see all the scams and pronography robo programs have cluttered it up with.)

Happy New Year 2022

Last night I watched the PBS Newshour online, You can get a re-run of their shows, athough you have to buy a membership to get many, many others are free. You just go to www.pbs.org, then click on 'shows' and there it is. I really like the look back at the year that has just ended. I like that every year.

Needless to say, the headline news was the pandemic returning via Delta and Omicron variants. And of course there were the huge destructive and deadly fires from the drought across the west and southwest. The latest news was the death of beloved actress Betty White, just short of her 100th birthday.

Two things they omitted, in my opinion were the rash of school shootings and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Also, as American news becomes increasingly single minded and local, they neglected the vast flooding that consumed villages and towns in Germany due to the rising of the rivers.

In the line of my most recent repeat thought, you never know when it is the last of something. We never knew there would come a time when a deadly virus would run our lives. Not that such things haven't been part of our human history. We have had deadly viral and bacterial infections on the epidemic scale throughout human history, just to mention one - the Black Plague. It struck me that when I went to high school, and I graduated in 1963 at age 17, high schools were safe. That isn't to say that there wasn't social cruely on a minor scale, but no one got shot. We didn't have gun proliferation either. Nobody had guns and nobody wanted or needed them.

I was just speaking on the phone to my brother and I mentioned how we had free and easy television when we were young - no cable, no subcriptions no passwords. You just plugged the tv into the wall and voila! Even a child could do it. We got up off the sofa and turned a dial to change the channels (it was before remote controls) and as my brother reminded me, we had only half a dozen channels: 3, 6, 10, 12, eventually 17, 23, 48. Now, increasingly you pay a fee for each individual channel after you are lured into a provider such as HBO or if you stream, as I do, HULU or amazon. But with each complication and expense, of course there comes a benefit or we wouldn't shift over. As I am suffering from an age related eye disease which causes gradually increasingly inability to see, blurryness and foggyness and double vision, like bad 3d glasses, I can turn to the new devices to help me. I can see and hear watching my laptop which I cannot do on even the larger screen tvs. That particular distance from sofa to tv, is the distance where I have immediate trouble. Adding to that, shows are increasingly made with murky light, and the actors mumble and turn their heads away from the viewers. My father used to complain about that and if you want to see how true it is, watch White Christmas, which I can see and hear on tv perfectly because the colors are crisp and the camera work is clear and defined and the people, like stage actors, face us when they speak with clear diction and perfect volume.

The segments that I most enjoyed on PBS Newshour were the year in Photographs when they interviewed photojournalists and featured some of their most interesting or icon photographs: The wildfires in California and Colorado The Insurrection, one year ago, when crazed and deluded Trumpsters tried to forcibly invade and take over the Capitol and stage a coup The removal of troups from Afghanistan, the take-over by the Taliban, a group of evil men if ever there was one - like the gestapo or the Nazis. As I said, they missed the Black Lives Matter movement in their photographs, but they did a segment on a big and beautiful Quilt Exhibition and one of the quilters, a former football player turned artist had done a quilt to commemorate George Floyd with large ochre letters stiched across it BLACK MAN. The Quilt segment was my top favorite since I have loved quilts my whole life thanks to my Grandother Mabel being a traditional quilter and giving all her grandchildren quilts. I made quilts for my daughter, not traditional style. I made mine on the sewing machine and I made landscapes and cityscapes. One cityscape quilt I made for her had pockets around the border and a small toy in each pocket. I had it hung above her cabinet bunk bed so that when she awakened, she could reach up and take toys out of the pockets. I love so much about quilts, the patters, the history, the portability, the texture, the simplicity of tools, the meditative nature of traditional hand sewn quilting, the old tradition of recycling old fabrics into something new, the utility of them.

Well my theme was that you never know when it is the last of something, and increasingly the experts are warning us that we will never be 'over' the Corona virus and that it will simply continue to mutate and we will continue to struggle to vaccinate and adapt to the mutations. Kids may never be free of gun violence in schools and that era of stability that we knew in the years after World War II is a distant dream.

Nonetheless, I have tried to make a mind habit of the Zen Buddhist advice to "Be Here Now." And in my personal here and now, things are good at present, I am well, and all my loved ones are well and we all phoned to wish each other a Happy New Year which is what I wish you if you have dropped by for this conversation! Happy New Year - and heaven only knows what 2022 will bring!

Jo Ann