This Weekend - Starting off December

Holiday Parade! Friday Dec. 2nd Stop in at the STATION for a taste of their variety of hot chocolate drinks and stay for the opening:

Our current show:

Works by the The Studio 18 Collective Is running form November 4th - December 31st

Meet the artists: December 2nd from 6-9pm…

DECEMBER 3rd, Woodbury Meeting members will be enjoying the candleight tour of the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield! We will be there at 6:00 p.m. Check their web site or facebook page for more information.

Happy Trails and Happy Holidays - Jo Ann

Christmas Fun, Train Show in Deptford, NJ

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ

Hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday

10 am to 3 pm

Admission - Adult $4.00 Child $3.00

138 Andaloro Way,  Deptford, NJ 08093-1627

phone - 856-812- 1121 

email- sjmuseum@aol.com

The 20th Annual Antique Toy Train Show

November 25th, 2022 thru January 29th, 2023

December Fun Event in the Pines - BATSTO VILLAGE

Get in the holiday spirit at Batsto Village!

Sunday, December 11th

12:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Come join us for…

Hot cider and cookies in the Post Office Museum! A fun children’s craft activity on the porch of the General Store! Mansion tours!

Having your holiday mail hand cancelled at the Post Office (with no zip code!) Taking holiday pictures! (with a sleigh?)

Listening to the St. Nicholas Aurora Carolers as they stroll through the village! A visit to the Nature Center!

Taking a wagon ride!

*There is a charge of $10 / rider for the 20 -minute ride to help us offset the cost of providing this activity

Woodbury Friends Meeting - Soup and Bread Day

Although most people call this day, the day after Thanksgiving 'Black Friday' to the Woodbury Friends Meeting in South Jersey, it is Soup and Bread Day. We celelbrate a tradition where the day after Thanksgiving we get together to eat soup and bread and we bring canned goods to donate to local charities. This year, we honor the Indigenous people of South Jersey, the Lenni Lenape, by using two American Native recipes: Three Sisters Soup, and Acorn Bread. I am making the soup and it is basic and easy and I learned about it from an Aetna Heart Healthy brochure I recieved in the mail. It is simply canned pmpkin (not pie filling) and beans and corn. Also, the recipe calls for diced onion and celery which I don't know for sure were ingredients available to Indigenous Americans before the colonialists arrived. You can find the recipe on-line.

We had our Thanksgiving feast last Sunday after meeting and it was vegan and vegetarian. One member brought a Gardein roast (delicious) and I brought green beans in mushroom sauce, another member brought acorn squash with maple syrup and another brought a spiced cranbury/apple punch. Some brought corn bread and a variety of other treats were contributed by other members, too many to list them all. Also at that time, many brought canned goods. This year we have chosen a Womens' Shelter to donate to as well as Senior Citizens United of Camden County whcih runs both a food pantry and home delivery of bags of groceries to income based elderly.

In case you haven't ever heard of or visited Woodbury Friends Meeting, it is more than 300 year old historic Meeting House on a small hill as you enter the business section of the main street of Woodbury, Broad Street. There is an old cemetery ground and many very old and beautiful trees on the site.

The Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers (think of Quaker Oats) is a religious sect that arose during the Reformation in England, in the mid 1600's. A prophet named George Fox had a revelation of a simpler, more basic and peaceful form of Christian worship. He believed in simplicity, peace, equality, community and a more Christ-like less political and corrupt church. His followers were persecuted by the King who tried to force his own religion upon the people, so many of them fled to the 'new world' and most of South Jersey was settled by early Friends who lived mostly in peace and harmony with the native Lenni Lenape. Most people are familiar with probably the most famous Friend, William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania as a Quaker settlement.

Most South Jersey towns, especially along the old Salem/Kings Highway from Burlington to Greenwich have old and still used Friends Meeting Houses somewhere on their main streets, as for example in Woodbury, Mickleton, Mullica Hill, Woodstown, Salem and so on, all the way to Greenwich where there are two historic Meeting houses on Ye Greate Street. Quaker Meetings are open to those who wish to join for Silent Worship on Sundays, generally around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. Friends have no official pastors or ministers because we believe there is that of "God" what we call "The Light Within" in everyone and none of us need intercessors to speak directly to the divine. Most Friends view the Bible as a record of the religious experience of early Christians. Often people ask if Quakers are Christian and, yes, we are. You can find out more about Quakers by listening to our podcasts or on YouTube and by finding resources via google. Our book is called Faith and Practice and there are three Meetings in Philadelphia, the Yearly Meeting, the most active is just off Broad Street on Cherry Street. There are also Society of Friends Schools, in Philadelphia, and Moorestown, and Mullica Hill. Also there are Friends Meetings all over the United States, I was just focused on South Jersey.

I have been an attender at Philadelphia and am a member at Woodbury. Our building is very interesting and I believe you can access a video tour on-line.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Thanksgiving 2022 - Adapting to change

My Thanksgiving Feast of Bounty was celebrated at Woodbury Friends Meeting last Sunday, and today I will enjoy left-overs from that feast - a vegan Gardein roast, green beans in mushroom gravy, and I bought a pumpkin pie at Shop Rite. Earlier today I set off with intention: I wanted to get the celery I need for the soup I am making for Soup and Bread day at Meeting tomorrow and money for Bob the Yard Guy to do some more lighting work in the yard for Christmas, and I intended to stop in Wawa and get a flavored coffee to give me the boost to get started on my Christmas decorating. I am too sensitive to caffeine to be able to enjoy coffee any more, but I can have it for a treat once in awhile, and since I don't drink it often, when I do have some, it gives me a big boost of energy which I need to tackle those Christmas tubs in the back room.

First treat of the day wqs the day itself - cool but warm, upper 50's, sunny and a light friendly breeze. Second bit of good fourtune, the ShopRite wasn't crowded and I was second in line in my counter. Third good luck was I took my old Wawa mug, 20 oz. size for the coffee boost, and it was FREE! I got gas in the car while I was out.

I was hoping to get home in time for the annual radio play of Alice's Restaurant, the Arlo Guthrie song of my youth about how his misdeamenor trash arrest saved him from the Vietnam War draft. It brought back so many memories. I remember all the young men I knew waiting in dread for their number to be called and for their freedom to be taken from them and for them to be tortured in basic training and then sent to kill or die in a foreign hell hole far from home and anyone who cared for them. My brother went, my then boyfriend was called up, but he was sent to Germany and I went with him. For me it was the adventure of a lifetime, for that part of my life anyway. My brother survived and survives and I just spoke with him on the phone. He had walked the dog, put his wood burning stove together and was peeling potatoes to cook a meal. He is 75 and I am 77 and we are both well and fairly vigorous.

My chore of the day, my intention is to get started on the inside Christmas decorations. I would like to get the bannister done, and the tree, and perhaps find the trains for a display at Friends Meeting. They said I could put up my trains there this year for Christmas and my little German village.

If I got all that done today, it would be a huge success.

Biggest treat of all was a great phone call from my daughter who is working on a film project in Colorado. It was wonderful to hear from her and I am so thrilled at this step in her career. She will make so many contacts and she will learn so much, what an adventure.

We have reached a good place in our relationship mainly because I have made a great effort to adjust and to fix myself. Adaptation: A huge step in any parent/child relationship is to let them go, and let them be themselves and make their own lives. I learned from mistakes people I knew had made with their children, that you cannot try to make them be your best friend or solve your problems or assauge your loneliness. You have to fix all that yourself, make new rituals, find new family, find new friends and give them the space they need. Also it has been a struggle for me to learn not to keep trying to teach my daughter stuff or use my experiences to alter her perspective. She is done, our work is done and she is now the successful and accomplished adult. She doesn't need or want that from me anymore. Her world is so different from mine, I couldn't really be an guidance anyhow. I need to use my energy to find my way through the foreign territory that is my own new adventure - OLD AGE.

So, I had intented to get home in time for the full play on the radio of Alice's Restaurant, but I walked the dog instead and missed it. I haad the radio on for a time to help me get a rhythm, but I turned it off to do this blog and take my phone call. Now it is time to get busy and get the decorations up.

Instead of an old family Thanksgiving, I have a new Friends Meeting Thanksgiving, and my new tradition for the day will be to listen to the radio and put up the decorations!

And what am I thankful for today, this day of gratitude: 1. My independent, resourceful, intelligent and accomplished daughter, 2. My cozy bungalow on the dog's leg of Green Avenue in the bounteous democracy of America, 3.My healthy and life and the health and life of my family, 4.The glorious benevolent weather of New Jersey today and this whole autumn, 5.The great good fortune that has shone upon my existence throughout my life! I need to add 6.the warm and loving companionship of my cats and dog!

Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

An Homage to Cat Companions

This autumn one of my cat companions died. He was a marvelous fellow, confident, friendly, trusting and loving to a remarkable degree. He was rescued from New Cathedral Cemetery in Philadlphia, where he lived outdoors several years ago when I was visiting that cemetery while doing family history. My German relatives are buried there, the Sandman and Young (Jung) families, my maternal grandmother's ancestors. I named this cat after my great Uncle Yock, who looked kind of like a big cat himself, the same watchful and mischievious eyes.

j One of the things I find so endearing and sorrowful about cats, as about all the vulnerable ones, is their trusting, hopeful, and confident natures. Little Yock came right up to me, innocent as an animal in the garden of Eden, innocent of the evil of people. The cemetery worker told me the cat would lead us to the family grave site, and he did! I am sure it must have been his favorite place because there was a tree there and he may have liked lying there in the shade or climbing the tree. He came back to the car with us, too, my sister Sue was with me. The keeper said "You can take him if you want, when I am not here he has no water or food!" So I told the cat, "If you come with me, I will give you a home." He let me pick him up and put him in the car so I took him to my vet straight away and he lived with me from that time forward, about 8 years.

He was a commanding cat and he immediately established himself as the top cat in the household. He was bigger and stronger and had some kind of indescribable charisma as well as cat behaviors invisible to me, that demanded respect from the other cats and even the dog. He was fearless. All the cats are different just like we are. I have had cats for companions my whole life. Most of them were rescued during my childhood in the city or actually, chose us to live with.

Presently I have 6 cats, all of them interesting, all of them with their own little stories. But Yock was bigger than a 'little story' and he had so much presence, he was as big as a remarkable person.

The thing that is mysterious to me is how cats live in this human dominated world, both in our houses and at large in the neighborhoods. Both of these places have such limitations but the natural world no longer exists for them as it no longer exists for us. They must accept the limitations of the indoor world as we do, and it is better, I think, than the challenges and sufferings of the outdoor world, especially in winter. Like homeless people, homeless cats must scavenge for a living and they are at the mercy of the killers, whether human or animal. I have tried to give my cats a bit of the outdoor world by having constructed a "CATIO" which is something I saw on an animal show on tv. It is a 6 foot tall chain link enclosure, much like a dog run, about 12 feet long and 8 feet wide, with a cat door installed in a window so they can go out and in as they please. This is a compromise that allows them outside time but doesn't put the birds at risk. I once saw an old cat of mine, long deceased now, eating a blue jay out in the yard, but some cats cannot be kept in. Little Yock had to go out and he was a master at escape. Because he was about 3 or 4 when I took him in, he had spent his formative years in the outdoors. When I was home, he loved to be in the house, by my side on the sofa, or at my feet in bed, but each day he went out on patrol, usually when I went out to walk the dog. And when he was out and I came home, he rushed to greet me and the dog and he rubbed up against our legs purring loudly in his joy to have us back home again. He rushed to the car when I came home from the store with similar joy at my return. I don't think anyone was ever so glad to see me before or since.

My cats curl up with me whereever I am, on the sofa or in bed, and they purr and they sometimes lick my hand, tiny little cat kisses. And when I pet them, I can feel my blood pressure going down and my body relaxing. It is true that they are expensive and take a lot of care. I have to scoop the six kitty litter boxes pretty much every day, and one of my cats, the oldest, Black Honey, has recently cost me a total of about $400 in veterinary bills. She got thinner and thinner and was constantly screaming to be fed. I would feed her wet canned food and tuna and chicken, and she would gobble it ravenously and then scream for more. No matter how much she ate, about a can or two a day with 6 or so feedings daily, she still wasted away. The vet told me she had a hyperthyroid condition due to her age, which is about 17 years old. Fortunately, the medication is efective and fairly easy. Each morning with her breakfast, and at night with her bedtime snack, I put on a rubber glove and a drop of medication cream on a finger tip and rub it in her ear. She is gaining weight again and doesn't scream in pain and alarm all the time as she did before. Becaue I have had her for so many years living with me and becasue she is a link with so many parts of my life, and because I, too, am an old lady now, she has a special kind of poignancy for me. She can't make the jump from the floor to the kitchen table anymore. She doesn't have the control over her back legs that she used to have, they are wobbly and a bit shaky now and don't provide the push she needs to make the jumps she formerly made effortlessly. She eats on the kitchen table because the other cats and the dog will take her food. The dog steals it from the kitchen table too.

I suppose Black Honey will die within a year or two, much like Little Yock died this past autumn. One evening, he gave a loud cry, then came down from the attic, panting, and went into the hall and keeled over, dead. probably heart attack. He hadn't been sick at all and he had been eating and drinking and behaving as always. It was heartbreaking to lose him, to put him in a box and bury him in the back yard, all his beauty and personality reduced to that.

All the expense and the work is worth it because they bring such joy and delight into my daily life, and love and affection. It is an honor and a wonder to share my existence with people of a different species, to watch their interactions, to eperience them growing from kittenhood to adulthood, to enjoy their warmth by my side on the sofa as I read or watch a tv program on my laptop, to feel their little warm bodies curled up beside me in my bed at night. From the earliest years when I sat in the alleyway of our South Philadelphia row home, and visited with the free ranging cats, they have been my freinds in every sense of the word.

It alarms me When I read the ocassional articles making war on cats. There was an article in the Smithsonian about Australia being over run by cats and the rangers were killing them. Shortly after their war on cats they were overrun by mice. It seems like Austrailia is always off balance with some kind of animals they want to kill. Also in Outdoor Magaine there was an article about killing the cats in Hawaia becaue they were a danger to indigenous birds. We all know there are better ways to control populations than wholesale and wanton slaughter, but men seem to need to kill. I canceled that subscription in protest. Lately in a sicience magazine there was an article about cats being an "invasive" species and destroying birds. We are all invasive species depending on where on the migration clock you turn the dial. Aside from birds, cats also keep down the rodent population and they have been guardians of the grain larder for thousands of years.

Well whatever the articles may say, cats are here to stay. Every friend of mine has two or more cat friends living with them. I can put aside my worry about the way they are treated by donating to cat rescues like The Alley Cat Allies and by looking at my cats, well fed, well loved and well cared for in every way and knowing I do my part and have always done my part for the cat friends.

Tp celebrate his life and beauty, I made a painting of Little Yock and my sister and brother bought me a cat statue for his grave. If there is an ocean of consciousness where ours returns after our corporeal body disintigrates, I may meet up with all my former friends in the cat world some day! Until then, I wish the cats the dogs, all the other creatures and all of us -

Happy Trails, Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Model Trains -

Hi Everyone!

It's time again for the Annual Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ! Starting November 25th, 2022 and running thru January 29th, 2023, 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.

I am attaching a flyer for you. Please feel free to share! Hope to see you soon at the Museum!

Jeffrey Norcross

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ 138 Andaloro Way Deptford, NJ 08093 856-812-1121 sjmuseum@aol.com

A Walk around Town - Happiness and Contentment

November 18, 2022, noon temperature 44 and sunny with a brisk little breeze. My dog Uma and I have just come back from our morning walk around town, about 4000 steps or 2 miles. I have to credit her with this good new habit because when I would malinger, she will not let me off the hook! And I have grown to really love this slow ramble through the town and the seasons and the years. Some of the things I have seen are the change over of the lawn ornaments with the seasons, all the Halloween stuff is down and only the pumpkins remain for Thanksgiving. There are even two early birds who have put their Christmas lawn ornaments up and I don't blame them one bit. It is freezing cold after Thanksgiving but relatively mild just now and more friendly to hands and face and feet to do the outdoor decor now. My favorites are the 3 dimensional snow men and lit up reindeer. My least favorites are the new popular air pump fabric ones which tend to wilt into what looks like laundry on the lawn.

Each day we pass the school yard and I marvel at the screaming that goes on, high pitched squeals and blood curdling screams. I always think I should record it, I don't know why, just because it is an auditory marvel. They just let go, the kids, and sound out in unself-conscious shrieks. I don't think I ever have, myself.

It is also interesting to see the seasons change the row of 60 to 70 Cherry trees that line the railroad tracks on Station Ave from Kings Highway down to Northmont. In spring they are blushing in pink blossoms, verdent green in summer, fiery red and orange in late autumn and bare until snow comes along to give them lace collars and cuffs. And speaking of trees, there is my favorite the giant Willow Oak that faces the Cherry Trees. It has long slim blades for leaves in summer, large bulging knuckles of roots popping up from the ground covered with iridescent green mold in damp weather and a surprising array of fungi growing in its folds in season. The huge trunk rises in a spiral like coiled rope up up over the rooftops. I have done many paintings of this tree!

It is always amazing to see the things people throw away on Friday, trash day. I have been the beneficiary of this cast off largesse on various occasions: a perfectly nice polite windsor chair that needed only a bit of wood glue on a rung that had sprung loose from its mooring and which now sits in my kitchen, repaired and comfortable in its new home and grateful to have been spared the land fill grave. There is a humble and practical little table with a drawer, a shelf, and wing arms, that can be raised or lowered, that sits in front of my sofa, offering its gratitude for the rescue that saved it from the land fill as well. I have rescued a serviceable book case, a nice wooden desk chair, a small garden table and once, an entire set of garden chairs of the type that had the picket fence post backs. That garden set, sadly, is long gone. Many coats of oxblood red paint kept it serviceable until wood rot finally defeated us.

Most recently I rescued a pine cone Christmas wreath, painted red, which I hope to re-home at the Woodbury Friends Meeting on the back door. If they don't want it, my porch will accept this refugee from a family move. Somehow, I anthropomorphise objets until they almost speak to me; "Save Me" they cry from the curb. Over the summer I rescued a beautiful old weathered wicker basket with an unraveled wicker handle that only needed the wicker parts of the handle removed to reveal a nice solid bent-wood handle beneath. It is on my patio with a plant in it, happy to have a new home and a new life.

It is rare for me to pick up anything these days, however, because I am in the paring down phase of my life. I have everything I need and far more than I want. Trash day offers a cornucopia of astonishing items however, which I am sure the scavengers retrieve before it is too late and the metal teeth of the trash machine grind and swallow them. I have seen entire dining room sets, many many kinds of perfectly useable tables, and even sad little tableaux of what I assume to be the possessions of recently deceased grandmothers and grandfathers, such as a white wicker chair I once saw with a matching white wicker basket filled with colored skeins of yarn and knitting needles. A couple of chintz pillows indented by someone's back and posterior sat forlornly waiting for the person who used to sit and knit to return.

There are flower beds I enjoy visiting as well; around the corner is Mark's joyful half block long bed of seasonal flowers, yellow daisies, purple spears, red roses, all sorts of flowers whose names I don't know. It is a special treat to visit this little garden border every day. There are other trees I like to visit too, three lovely tall young pines, fifteen years old, fragrant and dropping pine cones in season.

I have my favorite houses, too, to visit. and sometimes a neighbor is out. We have watched a neighbor on Northmont for MONTHS, rebuilding the woooden dam that holds his raised lawn. The old wooden frame had rotted and he took it out, sunk new posts in cement, dug out the dirt, installed wooden sheets to hold the dirt back ntil the cement could harden, and I presume he will fill it in again before the snow, but who knows? He built new steps in the meantime.This neighbor has a dog who looks identical to mine, probably another yellow Lab mix. Mine is a husky lab mix of a creamy white that darkens to a pale caramel on her back and ears. She has enormous brown eyes and a large pinkish nose and huge snow shoe paws. We visit other dogs on our way, too, a nice shepherd on Green, and we had two favorite little Boston Terriers we visited daily but they moved this summer.

Happiness really does lie in your own backyard. I try to make it a point to take note of when I feel happy, and I always feel happy after Uma and I have taken our neighborhood walk each day. In fact, before I injured my knee early this week, we had taken to doing two walks a day, our usual morning one when we greet the postal carrier and the trash collectors, and an afternoon walk. As soon as I am recovered completely I plan to go back to two walks a day again. I hope this little ramble inspires you to go out and walk around your town!

Happy Trails, Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Cheating

Among the many evils made into norms by Donald Trump, one of the worst is the acceptance of cheating as a way to win, a viable strategy. I often think about the "social contract," the way we keep large groups of people in a stable and orderly society, it is by agreeing to the rules of the game.

Once, when I was in West Virginia visiting my parents, this time with a man I was dating, my sister, father and nephew were playing monopoloy This being the age when grandparents didn't have internet or X-box, we all played games together regularly, Monopoly, checkers, scrabble. As my intelligence and skill set are mostly derived from art and reading, I am not particulary good at games and I often misunderstand the parameters. I stopped doing crossword puzzles when they began to allow words stuck together and anagrams and abbreviations. Squeezing through the cracks of the rules by allowing the use of cheat apps and, for example, allowing obscure and unheard of words to make scrabble has undermined my plesure in playing any of those games. I deplore cheating. My sister caught the man I was dating cheating at the monopoly game which only added further proof to what I had begun to see as a growing case against him in regard to values. He was all about winning and getting what he wanted by whatever means. This to me was akin to cowardice or other signs of weakness. You should be able to win by true ability not by rigging the game.

Donald Trump supported the concept of cheating as a way to win with his entire career and rise to power. He committed fraud throughout his business life, cheated throughout his marriages, cheated his employees at his business and promoted the attitude that playing fair was for suckers and winners should do anything to get the power they craved.

Herschel Walker is a prime example of a Trumpian cheat and deceit platform. He promoted a 'no choice' policy for abortion to win over Fundamentalists votes in Georgia, then lied and denied when he was exposed as having paid two different women for their abortions while in relationships with them. He is tied with the Democratic candidate, Warnock and we won't know, perhaps until December who will win.

Throughout our relationship with the Indigenous people of North America, our local and federal governments have used the same deceitful and fraudulent strategies in robbing them of their homelands, much the same kind of behavior cheated African Americans of their lands in the South, which was exposed in the news some time back in regard to the state taking over the homesteads of poor Black people who died because there were gaps in their paperwork, leaving their descendents robbed and cheated of their family inheritance.

It's George Bailey versus Potter all over again. And this time around, the Potter is Trump, and DeSantis and all the Republican toadies who have adopted his cheating and ceceitful strategies to win no matter what.

In this sports obsessed country, I have to wonder what would happen if the same kind of strategies began to take over football and baseball?

Yesterday I voted, in person, as always because I love to see the same poll workers each year and to celebrate the joy of the vote because I know how hard fought the battle for that right was for women, and how so many women suffered to bring it to vicotry!

Fortunately, I live in a Democratic state.

One of the things I took from the Hannah Freeman story in the book "A Lenape Among the Quakers" by Dawn Marsh, was to be wary of becoming a 'ward of the state' or of anyone for that matter, because that is how you lose your freedom. There are so many ways elderly people get cheated through health care as well as their financial lives when they become weakened.

As for our country, I don't know how we are going to climb out of this pit of cheating and deceitfulness that has claimed so many in government and so many citizens. I hope at some point they see the connection in regard to the sports they love and once again begin to be aware of the essential component of fairness in our dealings with one another in the world.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Pandora's Seed and The Last of the Mohicans

Our book relationship takes some interesting turns at Woodbury Meeting. Sometimes we are all reading a chosen book at the same time, and sometimes one person brings a book and we pass it along. The most recent book was of the latter process, Pandora's Seed.The unforseen Cost of Civilization, by Spencer Wells. This fascinating wide ranging look at human civilizatinn begins with the hunter gatherers and the rise of agriculture, to ponder all the many consequences from the effects on our health of a less diverse diet and less active life, to the growth of population and the effect of these consequences on the environment, among many other considerations. Many of his strands of thought wove into philosophical roads I have traveled over my life, such as population control. From the 1960's, when birth control became more widely available, I have been a big believer in limited population growth for a couple of reasons: 1-Women who can control their onset of motherhood, can get an education, a career and become more capable of independent survival if they can put off childbearing past their late teens and early twenties, and 2-Our planet has been stressed to the breaking point to supply the resources needed to sustain unregulated population growth.

It has long been a visible process how population growth leads to deforestation for agriculture, and eventually desertification due to the loss of the forest component of moisture retention in the soil and in the air as well as the cover the canopy provides to protect the soil, especially during drought. As we speak, the amazon jungle, known as the "lungs of the planet" is being destroyed for mining and lumbering profiteering and the last of the hunter gatherers are being murdered by these exploitive forces.

Obviously we cannot go back. We can't return to Eden and become hunter gatherers again, too much has already been destroyed and we are not fit for that world any more, nor would we want to. My thoughts in regard to wilderness survival is always, "What happens when you have appendicities? Or a compound fracture from a fall?"

But there are things we can do to slow or halt the destruction, and to conserve what we have left and to use our great big brains to find a more sustainable way to live so there is a future for planet earth other than to leave it a dry, dead, dusty ball like the moon.

It ocurred to me recently when I was trying to find a way to watch my annual Thanksgiving film, The Last of the Mohickans, that it was only a couple hundred of years ago that the people who populated North America were living exactly that balanced hunter gatherer lifestyle that left a balance in the natural world. Thinking that way gives such a different slant to the arrival of the Mayflower to the continent.

I have been making some paintings in celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday, one of Chief Tamenand who make the disastrous land deal with William Penn's family, and one of a man and woman of the Wampanoag Tribe of the village of Patuxet who were wiped out by a smallpox plague brought by Dutch traders (it must be noted that for the most part this was accidental as in the 1600's no one really understood how diseases spread.) A fact I only recently discovered was that one of the items taken from the 'New World' by Dutch traders were kidnapped Native people who were sold into slavery back in Europe. They were lured onto the ships for trading purposes and became trade items themselves. A few of the Wampanoag were kidnapped and one, Tisquanto, known as Squanto, spent nine years in England and then returned to Patuxet to find his village a ghost town. He stayed on to help the pilgrims by showing them how to farm and how to harvest other edibles in order to survive. He was the 'Last of' his branch of the Wampanoag tribe.

A note on literature. An 'exotic' child for my time and place, I was raised on the dense forest of late 1800's and early 1900's classic popular literature. I was exotic because I was a devout and obsessive reader in a red brick row house neighborhood where you would have been hard pressed to find other children with such as strange predilection. My access to this literatue was via the basement of my grandmother's house where the left over library of some previous ancestors sat dusty and forlorn on bookshelves taken down to the basement to unclutter the living area. I was given free reign to these books, a treasure trove of Dickens, Twain, classic American literature such as Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohickans as well as European Literature that had been purchased as a set in a dark blue clothcovered hard back binding; Emile Zola, Guy dePaupassant, Bocaccio. I bravely beat my way through the jungle of the prose of that era like a possessed explorer hacking her way through an impenetrable tract of mysterious terrain.

When my daughter and I, on a girl scout trip many many decades after my childhood, visited Plymouth Plantation, I couldn't help but be struck by the dearth of reading material, not that there would have been time for such a luxury as reading, nor adequate lighting for reading in the time available after the work of food growing and production was complete. That time, anyhow, would have had to be given over to spinning and weaving and knitting and preserving.

Replacement Theory: One of the driving forces in the rise of the RightWing political movement is the fear of the European White Christian population being replaced by foreigners, brown and black skinned, uneducated masses. It isn't new, it is just newly invigorated. It existed when I was growing up in South Philadelphiad in the last five years of th 1940's and the decade of the Baby Boon 50's. The AngloSaxon and Irish remnants of early waves of immigration were fleeing the onslaught of the Sothern Meditteranean immigrants. Our neighborhood resonated with the sound of the Romance Language and the smells of Meditteranean cooking. The Irish pubs were slowly being replaced by pizzerias and Italian restaurants. There was an uneasy friction between these groups as slowly but surely, love precipitated an intermingling of these European groups, and the huybrid Italian/Irish families then prospered and moved to the suburbs or across the river to New Jersey. My family was the result of an earlier melding of the older German inhabitants of that area of Philadelphia, with the new Irish arrivals. Even amidst these disparate ethnic groups there were frictions and tribal factions. The Irish were riven into Protestant and Catholic factions, representated by my Episcopalian Irish-American Grandmother married to my Catholic Irish-American Grandfather. Her immigrant Irish-American mother had married into an earlier English settler family along the Timber Creek in New Jersey. And so the slow blending evolved. The children of the Irish-American grandparents married Italians. A friend recently bemoaned that educated white women weren't reproducing enough because they were pursuing education and careers and so the 'dumbing down' of the population was happening. But I reminded him that the majority of the great thinkers, writers and artist of the world came from humble origins and not from upper class educated white mothers, as for example Charles Dickens, born in a workhouse and raised in poverty. A whole list of such success stories could be provided, the old rags to riches tale. The intelligent and enquiring mind will arise, it doesn't require a hot-house. And I believe the world needs more and more educated women without the constraints of motherhood, to take over roles of leadership in this far too patriarchal world.

Well, that's it for today. It is time for me to get out and vote! Happy Trails my fellow mixed breeds! Hope you all have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving! Jo Ann

Gratitude is GREAT but don't forget SHARING at this time of the year - Thanksgiving!

This morning, I took a little rest after walking my dog and searched for some authentic imagery for a painting I want to do for a display at Woodbury Meeting for November. Although I am well aware of the benefits of gratitude and I practice the five gratitudes every day, this month, I am thinking how that can sometimes be a little self-congratulatory and is missing a vital component - SHARING! Often I meet someone, or read a piece in the news and my eyes are opened to something that has always been right there, in a new way. In a local news item, a couple of years ago. I read about a man and some volunteers who help him collect and distribute clothing to the homeless. That first year, three of my friends were closet cleaning and we took half a dozen bags plus some purchased items (peautbutter crackers and hand sanitizer) to the home of one of the volunteers to help them.

This week, I have been gathering more things of my own to take to Jim Piscitelli, who lives in Haddon Heights. You can find more information about him and his work by looking up his name and the word "Homeless" and you will be brought to the original article which appeared in the Sun.

For years, before I retired, another teacher and I used to run a canned goods collection for animals! I had a huge billboard and I would allow students to post pictures of their pets if they brought in canned food for for our collection. The other teacher would take the collected items to various shelters. We also collected other items such as cat carriers, dog collars and leashes, and water bowels. The stories that went with the donated items touched my heart.

So, this year, to begin with, I am going to make a painting of the Lenni Lenape ancestral inhabitants of the lands where we, in South Jersey, now live. I want to honor their memory and the tragic consequences of their interactions with the British colonizers of these lands. (full disclosure, I am definitely a descendant of those colonizers and immigrants from other European nations as well.) Secondly, the painting will be part of a display to inspire members of my Quaker Meeting in Woodbury to contribute to: 1-canned goods for food banks, and 2-clothing, blankets and supplies to help the homeless. After all the first colonials from Britain were saved from starvation by the sharing of food and planting tips from the Wampanoag people

Along with being grateful for all you have achieved and all you own, maybe you might want to expand that gratitude to sharing some of your bounty with others less fortunate, and I say fortunate because so much of what we have achieved and own is to some degree the result of our good fortune as well as our hard work. I know for myself, along with my good choices. hard work and plentiful education, there was the original gift of a sound body and mind - a gift! Not something I earned. So many homeless are victims of their unfortunate brain chemistry, addictions, tragic experiences which have left them traumatized (as with our many homeless and struggling veterans, as well as the survivors of domestic abuse who just cannot earn enough to support their children) as well as physical disabilities which leave people unable to earn enough to support themselves in this time of high rent and higher home costs.

Local Post Offices as well as Municipalities often run canned good donation drives to make it even easier, as do most churches, ask around or google for more information. If I find more information, I will add it in another post.

Have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving! Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com p/> For more information on the Lenni Lenape and original settlers see: >p/> Philadelphia's Forgotten Forebears: How Pennsylvania Erased the Lenape From Local History hiddencityphila.org Philadelphia's Forgotten Forebears: How Pennsylvania Erased the Lenape From Local HistoryHow Pennsylvania Erased the Lenape From ... hiddencityphila.org