PUMPKIN WALK TICKET SALE INFO!

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

PUBLIC SALES:Monday 9/29 (by noon)

EVENT DATE:Saturday 10/25

4pm - 6:30pm

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

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

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

Next Clean Up: 10/11 9 - 12pm

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

Second Sunday Hikes with Naturalist Jeff Calhoun:

10/12 10am - 12pm

11/9 10am - 12pm

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

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

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

Paypal PayPal.me/saddlerswoods

Visit www.saddlerswoods.org/donations

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

Happy fall, -Janet Goehner-Jacobs

Executive Director, Saddler's Woods Conservation Association

The Redcoats are Coming!

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

www.chnj.gov/redcoats

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

Estrangement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Cul de Sac, Roland Avenue 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Simple Easy ways to boost your energy and your moodFrom t

From the August/September issue of AARP magazine, page 21

1. Drink a glass of water (even a little dehydration can sap your energy)

2. Step Outside for a break (connecting with nature and getting some fresh air)

3. Walk (for every 30 minutes of sitting take a 3 minute walk)

4. Cold Water (the article mentions taking a cold shower, but even a face wash and hand wash in cold water helps)

5. Take a sniff of a fresh fragrance like peppermint or citrus The main article is entitled "Reclaiming your Spark" and they mention talking to someone. Especially for us seniors, it is easy to slip into a kind of solitude beause we don't go to work, often we live alone, and these days neighbors don't get out on the porch or the steps much anymore. My special and most excellent solution to al of the above is what I did this morning - an old friend from my now disbanded Seniors group got in touch recently and we are going to the gym together 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We work out for half an hour and then walk my dog around a little local park for half an hour. It gives us a chance to socialize along with the incredible healthy benefits of the gym and the outdoors!

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

"Woke" and values war in USA today

The recent shooting of the
conservative " youth leader Charlie Kirk brought to my mind a lot o questions. I wasn't aware of this particular "rising star" of conserfativism and I wondered what exactly he stood for. It turned out to be difficult to find an actual break-down of his points beyond general terms such as conservative.

The terms conservative and woke have changed, even turned upside down in the past ten years or so. As it turns out the Charlie Kirk version of conservativism in summary seemed to be against:

Feminism (equal rights for women)

Civil Rights for African Americans or citizens in the LGBTQ sector

Education that included analysis of the effects of slavery on our society

Birth Control available to women

Freedom of thought for college professors

Ecolongy and environmental protection

limitations on gun ownership

And Woke, was interesting because the term was co-opted by the right wing from a term used by African Americans in the 1930's to mean to be awake to racism, bigotry, and danger

To the new version of conservatists to be "woke" means to be in favor of all the things they are against incouding civil rihts, limitation of gun ownership, birth control, and rampant capitalism.

It is ironic or perhaps predictable that someone who was a fervent supportor of the National Rifle Association and widespread freedom to own and use guns was a victim of gun violence. The rhetoric that promotes a tribal passion against the 'enemy' tribe, or politiacl party, incites the mentally unstable to seek what their unbalanced minds feel to be a heroic action in taking down the bad guy, though often later we learn they arent' even sure who the bad guy is. The previous mentally unstable shooters appeared to lurch from right to left and from tribe to tribe and their enemies seemed to arise and disappear like the visions in a computer game.

We live in a sad and troubled time. Recently I was wathing program set in the 1960's and the background music was filled with early Beatles songs. It prompted me to looke up the shooter who killed John Lennon. John Lennon was a lover, not a hater. He was a brilliant, gentle, funny and kind man. His dreams in song like "Imagine" were beacons of hope to those of us who wish for peace. His killer, whose name I will not type here, stil lives and has been denied parole 14 times. In his pleas for parole he spoke of his motive for killing Lennon. he said he killed him because he sought fame through killing someone who was famous, an icon. He said he was jealous of John Lennons success, and his fame and lifestyle so he chose him to kill.

I would have to say that it is self evident that this killer was mentally unstable. The problem is that guns are so readily available that the mentally unstable no longer are forced to hide in the darkness nursing their rage, they can buy a gun and go out and kill someone. Number one problem - gun availability. Number two prolem the lack of availabiity for help for the mentally ill. That topic is too big for this blog, but I knew a mentally ill man who is able to ead a satisfactory life because of family intervention, psychotherapeutic support in the form of medication and psychotherapy, and supported section 8 housing.

We can do better. We cannot return to the fantasy wild west of the immature mentality of the far right where African Americans are returned to slavery, women are returned to economic dependence through lack of control over reproduction, and gas is cheap and low skill facotry jobs are pentiful. Strive thought they may, outside of a television series, they cannot make this happen and the old men cannot make themselves young studs via the proliferation of testerone supplements, they can only cause their own deminse via prostate cancer.

That version of the past is over and gone - the 1950's will not return. The benie cannot be put back in the bottle.

The proliferation of guns will continue to erupt in a harvest of massacres from school to supermarket to college campus. Perhaps we cannot return to a time of gun control either and this is our new reality where madmen roam the streets wearching for a target to somehow ease the pain of their torturned minds.

Meanwhile, I can practice medicattion on my shady porch and be grateful for my small town of peace and stability, the good fortune that brought me here, my good education and good career that made it possible for me to survive in the humble and comfortable living that I enjoy, a woman who practiced birth control, got a good education, worked in a career that benefited my country and my fellow human beings, and had a union that provided the benefits that allow me to live my old age in humble comfort.

Hidden History

hiddencityphila.org

October is more than Halloween, much more and more importantly it is an opportunity to celebrate and to WITNESS to Indigenous history in THE Delaware Valley.

It is true that we can't bring back the dead or give back the land or erase all that has come from the past to the present but we can and we do make the effort to honor the past. I believe with all my heart that it matters to honor those pioneer of righteousness, to honor the truth of the past, not the myths perpetrated by those whose greed propelled them to criminal acts but who have so often controlled the narrative.

For the autumn seasonal celebration, go to hiddencityphila.org for a beautifully written article about the hidden history of the Lenape people in the Delaware Valley. knowing and ackowledging is the least we can do.

I was fascinated to learn about the many tribal people who still live on their ancestral lands in New Jersey, in particular from Rancocas to Greenwich. There are tribes and tribal centers and even plans for creating places where the traditions can be celebrated and preserved.

The POW WOW is an ongoing moving tribal tradition that criss crosses the Americas continually, stopping here and there in reservations to share and celebrate the continued existence of First Peoples in Aerica. Many years ago, I was fortunate enough a pow wow at Rancocas. At the time there was a tribal center there but I have heard it has since closed.

We Quakers have a tradition of "witnessing" which gives us a way to speak truth to power when other means are not feasible. At least knowing the history and recognizing the trauma and the traditions is a way of witnessing. Check out the excellent essay at hiddencityphia.org

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Sending books out onto the river of life: Cormac McCarthy's Library

The latest Smithsonian Magazine Sept/Oct. 2025, has a wonderful essay about the team of vounter scholars of the life and works of Cormac McCarthy, American author, who are spending their free time cataloguing his vast library of over 20,000 books. His books were in boxes, on shelves in heaps on tables and in no order whatsoever, except as they interested him and he bought and rad them. They were also in rental units!

In case you don't know who Cormac McCarthy was/is, he was the author of a dozen highly regarded novels, one of which one a big prize (Pulitzer?) and three of which became movies and made him wealthy: No Country for Old Men, The Road are two of the ones I remember reading about. McCarthy's scholars are devoted to him and are avid about the annotations in the books he read because they show the workings of his apparently unlimited mind. He was literally interested in everything, and in particular, in scienc, and architecture. Interestingly, ne not only voraciously collected books but also, tweed jackets, cowboy boots, and old cars.

I am not a fan of Cormac McCarthy's work although my experience with it is slight. I met him, didn't like him and didn't get to know him any better. I have no aesthetic interest in the bleak dystopian despair of old men, or the soaking up of brutality. Like broken down old cars, cowboy boots and guns, these material artifacts are nof of my world. What we shared was a reverance for books! And a book collector's apetite. Although where we diverged is in his hoarding and my release, these last few years, of my books back into the world. I have no need for boxes of books in storage units.

I do think it is an interesting detective assigment, connecting the annotations and books to the literary works, mining the influences and the branches and connections between the works the author absorbed and the uses he made of the fuel.

"To peer into someone's library, is to peer into their brain, and here, it seemed was a mind that wanted to know everythin." (pg. 128 "There is an intelligence to the universe (of which we are fractal) and that intelligence has a character and that character is benign. Intends well toward all things. How could it not?" McCarthy is known for the bleak, violent, nihilism in many of his novels, so it was a surprise to see him describing the universe as intelligent and well intentioned. (pg. 80)

By the way, they mention in the essay that the McCarthy collection numbers over 20,000 and Hemingway's collection ran to 9,000. I have read a lot abut Hemingway over the years and I never remember any ention of his library or his literary infuences.

Today, I was pondering how to get the Poetry Collection in a bookcase in the attic downstairs and into cartons for my next donation run. I cannot manage those attic steps any more. I was thinking I might put the dog bed at the foot of the attic steps and throw the books down onto it.

Happy Trails, in the woods, in your mind, on the page. wrightj45@yahoo.com

Insight and meditation - a continuous learning experience

This morning while tidying up a room after a massive (more than 300 books) donation to the Free Library Project in Camden, NJ, I came across several of Pema Chodrin's books. Pema Chodrin is abbot of Gumpo Abbey in Nova Scotia and a practitioner/teacher of Buddhist meditation practice). I credit Pema Chodrin with saving my sanity at one or two of the most difficult/painful periods of my life and what I have disovered over the years is that the seeds planted by the teachings from her books and cd's in the early years grow perrennial crops. I read all of Ch9drin's books as of the period of my discovery of her work which was around the time of the millennium, 2000.

My daughter had quit college in her freshman year and flown to California to become an acress. I was paralyzed by anxiety. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't control the "invasive thoughts" based on fear - serial killers, pornographers, all the rabid predaors who prey on the naive young girls who think they are grown-up and know the world.

My first attempt at seeking psychological counseling was a disaster, and I had no one to turn to, but somewhere, maybe Shambala Magazine, I had come across the writing of Pema Codrin, so I bouht a 5 cd player and her cd's and all of her books - at that time about a dozen with titles like WHEN THINGS FALL APART, IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY, and others, all of which seemed to speak to my condition.

Every night I loaded the cd player and listened for the hours when I couldn't sleep and what that did was it displaced the intrusive fear thoughts with soothing medictation prompts and Buddhist teachings.

Over the years, I picked up more books and cd's of Pema Chodrin's works and they were like refreshers. My experience with her and her works changed my life, saved my life.

This morning, I was thinking of the suggestion "look at your thoughts passing by; don't try to get rid of them, or scold yourself for thinking, look at them like clouds passing in the sky, see them, know that they are only thoughts." That may be one of the mosst powerful recuring lessons I have learned from Chodrin. I meditate throughout the day, on the porch after walking the dog, while walking the dog, or at times of idleness, and that practice has helped to tame and soothe an anxiety tortured emotional creature.

My latest addition to this world of wisdom was a book recommended to me by Friends from Providence Friends Meeting, by author Rex Ambler, a pamphlet book from Pendle Hill Publishers and I think the title is the MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF THE EARLY QUAKERS. In the book, the author describes how Quaker silent meditation is paralell, or related to insight meditation as well as various psychological approaches to exploring our thoughts and becoming more adept at recognizing patterns and allowing us to not be controled by emotions generated by thoughts that are unproductive or unhealthy (monkey mind).

When I donated the 30 or more cartons of my library, I kept out a few books here and there, incuding some of Pema Chodrin's and perhaps in a later post, I will list the title of the few I kept. I hope the ones that left bring some comfort to other tortured souls being ravaged by their own uncontrolled thoughts and fears and the unhealthy emotional fallout from them.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Family History Day

Red Bank Battleield, National Park, NJ

September 21st | 12 PM - 4 PM

Red Bank Battlefield Family History Day brings the Revolutionary War to life from 12 PM to 4 PM! Step aboard a colonial naval vessel and see how sailors once defended America’s freedom. At 1:30 PM, join a guided tour that uncovers the dramatic story of the Pennsylvania Navy and its bold stand at the Battle of Red Bank.

Twenty years since Katrina devastated the neighborhoods of New Orleans

One of the opening disasters of the 21st Century and a harbinger of disasters to come, was Katrina the category 5 hurricane that drove 25 feet of water into the neighborhoods of New Orleans and swallowed up the homes of half a million people and drowned and killed nearly 2000. New Orleans had withstood hurricanes before but this one was different, and this one was the opening salvo of the barrage of natural disasters to come: wildfires, mudslides, rising sea levels, drought - the consequences of climate change.

The Documentary KATRINA; COME HELL AND HIGHWATER, on Netflix gives a comprehensive picture of the before, during and after events that unfolded when that hurricane came ashore at New Orleans. This is superb docuemtary art - it blends the individual human experience with the wider media contxext and societial conditions to give a more fully informed view of the catastophe.

FULLY INFORMED - increasingly, the concept of being 'fully informed' has had less currency and 'emotionally driven' is the more operant fuel. Once an acquaintance and I were talking about how to know what is real or true in this age of misinformation, and I said that I use mulitple sources and compare. So, for instance, I get news from abc, New York Times, BBC, PBS, Cnn, and even the Guardian! Also, I subscribe to a news magazine called THE WEEK which surveys different news sources. She was a devotee' of Fox news and that was her only source of news bolstered by 'facebook' which in her life, as in many of others I have known, had become almost an addiction. Facebook was filling the lonely hunger for human interaction in lives where family, friends and neighborhood, had disappeared.

The power of Katrina took out the levees and canals that protected the low lying areas where the mainly Black neighbohoods were located and since they were in what was kind of a geological bowl, their houses were drowned in a25 foot storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. People took refuge in attics and an rooftops, but houses were lifted from their foundations adn floated away tilting and dropping off the roof riders. Houses hit debris piles and tipped over.

The people who evacuated and took refuge at the SuperDome athletic structure were left abandoned, no food or water or medical assisstance. People who were sent to the Convention Center for promised transport out, were also abandoned there without food or water, to die of dehydration, sickness, and lack of basic medicines for their conditions such as insulin for diabetes.

It is no accident that the horror fell mainly on Black families who had lived in those poorer districts, and no surprise that the government that was supposed to protect and save them was nowhere to be found, left in disarray and chaos except to send in troops to stop "Looting" which mainly consisted of people trying to get water and food from stores to bring to their families. Our own troops paid for by our own tax money pointing their guns at their own people during a disaster.

We all remain woebully unprepared for natural disasters which are guaranteed to increase and eventually come to us all as the government is in chaos and those in charge are not only uniformed but willfully ignorant of the impact of global warning. We have seen that at our New Jersey Seashore towns. Willfully ignorant builders are still allowed to put up and sell structures on barrier islands that are vulnerable to hurricanes and that also destroy the natural vegetation that would protect the sand banks without the developments. Like our politicians, these profit seekers place financial gain ahead of everthing else so that they can buy bigger houes, more cars, ostentatious displays of excess wealth.

It is the end of the summer and once again many of us watched the movie JAWS a summer classic and once again we saw the same contest between greed and the safety of people put into contest. This contest between the impulse to greed and hoarding against the impulse toward protection and care for our fellow beings has played out thorughout human history. It appears that currently, Greed and selfishness are in power. Love and care, however, are always to be found and are powerful forces That's where hope comes in.

Note: there are things we can all do - plant trees instead of poisoning your yard to make a perfect lawn which profits no one and poisons our water supply. Think of paying a little more and using bamboo sourced toilet paper and paper towels. Vote down efforts to transport dangerous chemicals through our towns such as the controversy raging over transporting Liquid Natural Gas on our local small town train lines. And even more importanty GET INFORMED AND STAY INFORMED and don't limit yourself to the emotional hook of the propaganda channel Fox (owned by the greedy billionair Murdock). Rich people do not honor the social contract. They don't pay their fair share of taxes and they don't care about their fellow man, they only care about other rich people and their status in regard to them.

Last comment: family, friends and community. One of the things I took from the documentary was how important these three relationships are and in particular in times of trouble. wrightj45@yahoo.com. People banded together to help each other survive, and in the aftermath, to help build new lives. And the most important things lost was the family connection, people were separated from their loed ones and struggled to locate them again after it was over. It reminded me of the lines of dusty foot traffic after the Emancipation in 1863 where people walked from town to town, plantation to plantation to locate their loved ones who had been sold off from them. If there is a moral, it is LOVE - love our earth, love one another, and pay attention to what is going on around you!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yhaoo.com

Broken Hearted Book Lover

Yesterday was Labor Day and also Metereological Autumn. It was also a day when with my sister's help, I let go of over half a dozen books from my vast book collection. I have been a book lover since my earliest days and I even have the first book I ever bought, a begining reader that I bought at Leary's Book Store off Market Street in Philadelphia when I was just old enough to begin reading. Once I began, it was an endless love affair, my longest and most intense.

But like all my love affairs, this one had to come to an end. Each phase of my life was cocooned in a spun collection of books on the subject. Here is one of my early ones: When I was 16, I took my babysitting money to a book store in the Cherry Hill Mall. There was a 'sales' table and for $4.95, I bought an Art book of the lithographic works of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. I fell deeply in love. Neither he nor I could have imagined that twenty years later, I would be in college studying Lithography as my major towards an Art degree. His lithographic posters were the shining city on a hill, the holy grail, the gold paved streets that inspired my journey. I couldn't help wondering, today, how Lautrec would feel to know that a woman in the far - over a hundred years distant future would be studying lithography because of his poster art. I think he would be astonished and pleased.

The reason I am divesting myself of my huge library is that I am losing my vision to Fuch's Dystrophy, a cornea disease. I can still paint and watch tv on my laptop, and drive, but I can't read without such a struggle (necessitating a magnifying glass) that it has no pleasure. My forlorn collections have sat gathering dust for a decade now, which was surely never their purpose in the world, so I decided to set them free.

Another reason I was divesting myself of my library NOW was that I have a connection with the Free Books Project which was originally located at the Newton Friends Meeting House in Camden when I began taking my books there. They give away gooks for free to anyone who wants them. At the time it was a community charitable venture that allowed Newton Friends Meeting to qualify for an archhitectural grant for repairs to the very very old Quaker Meeting House. The grant required that the building be engaged in a beneficial community program, so The Free Books Project was perfect. The Free Books Project is no longer there. Now they operate as pop-up libraries all over the city of Camden, especially in conjunction with other community events.

Knowing my books were going to such a worthy cause, helped me part with them. I liked to think that someone who didn't have the money to buy a book or access to a book store or a library could have a book to read. So many of my passions were between those covers.

Gone With The Wind: The film had such a powerful effect on me for so many reasons it could be an essay on its own. I loved it so much that I read the book many times, then the biography of Margaret Mitchel, then all the sequels written to follow the characters after the ending of the original book. Then I found a very old copy of the Civil War novel that inspired Margaret Mitchell. I can't remember the title now, something with "Drums" in it and if I remember correctly it was written by the granddaughter of a Confederate General, inspired by his memories of his war experience.

My years as a volunteer at Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, inspired an entire shelf in my floor to ceiling and wall to wall bookcase in my bedroom. First I read all the traditional histories, then novels of the battles, then diaries of the veterans like Joseph Plum Martin, and even two or three memoirs by Hessian soldiers, and I was inspired to seek out the three or four burial sites of some of the Hessian soldiers who died on the retreat after the Battle of Red Bank in October of 1777. And the WOMEN! I read the historical accounts of the "Camp Followers" and the memoirs of loyalists who lost everything, and female spies like Patience Wright (maybe she was a relative, maybe not) who was also a renowned sculptor.

For several years after retirement and during my long love affair with history, I gave talks for the Camden County Historical Society on the Underground Railroad. The Civil War and the Underground Railroad filled another 12 foot long shelf with stories of escape and valor, of suffering and success and led me on many hunts to spirit haunted places in my South Jersey landscape, like Saddler's Woods, or Ambury cemetery in Othello, Greewidh, NJ.

All these friends, companions, fire-starters got boxed up into cartons from a local liquor store and carted off to the Free Books Project. Goodbye to Harriet Tubman and Quakers serving in the Union Army, and Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln and her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and Ona Judge who was never caught.

On the way home along Kings Highway from Clarksboro, I had a sudden squall of emotional pain and broke down in tears. But, I had to keep reminding myself, what is the use of keeping all those dusty books on the shelf when I can't read them. Surely that is both greedy and sinful.

S, now, the bottom shelf of all my collection of health books of the type of BLUE ZONES, and books on vegetarian cooking, heart disease, and other ailments like diabetes and kidney disease, are all out on the streets hopefully finding their way into the hands of someone who needs them. Now, all my Revolutionary War books are gone, and my Civil War books. And my Irish Literature books are all gone incuding a really old hard back of the works of Lady Gregory which I hated to part with. It was falling apart and I was afraid no one would understand what a treasure it was. I can still feel the damp, wet fog of the Irish night as the prisoner of one of her majesties torturous prisons makes his escape and cautiously ventures his signal to the dark figure waiting by the river, whom he hopes is the fellow rebel sent to help him. That scene is from one of her plays.

My novels went early and I can't even remember when I boxed and sent them on their way down the river of life. They may have been the second offering.

With foreboding I think there may be a bookcase in my dark and dreaded attic with all my poetry books in it. My Women's History went some years ago to the Alice Paul Institute Library.

The last to go will be my Art book collection in the floor to ceiling shelving unit my father buit into the wall at the foot of the attic steps. Those books I hold onto with the hope that the South Jersey Art Alliance will flourish in the Underwood Building of the Woodbury Friends Meeting grounds and that I can bequeath those books to them.

There are still three full shelves twleve feet long with New Jersey history, and a half shelf in the back room with coffee table books on Scotland and Ireland from my trip there and the following years of fascinating with all things Irish (my mother's people, after all, came from there!)

Well, now that I have gotten that off my chest, I feel a little better. I am reminded OFTEN of the Catherine Davis Poem, "After a time all losses are the same, and we go stripped the way we came."

When I left home at 18, I burned my yearbook in my family's backyard 'trash burning can' which we were allowed to have in those days, and when I left Philadelphia for New Jersey, I left all my college art portfolios and sketch pads. When I got divorced, I lost all my record albums and my entire collection of the books and magazines of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, books like The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch and dozens of one-of-a-kind magazines printed on University presses and early copies of Ms. magazine.

Well, pets have died, romances have faded, and even my daughter has grown and moved far away. Grandparents die, parents die, uncles and aunts and cousins die. Old schools close, I have lost my beauty and my agility, my youthful vigor and my vision, and I am losing my hearing. As I approach the toll gate on the last road before the final big adventure, I suppose it is natural that I leave all these things of the material world behind. It is like a sinking ship; who cares for gold and silver, fine clothes and furnishings when the sea is about to swollow you. Still, it is just as natural to mourn the passing of old friends and my books were old friends, really old lovers, and great companions. I wish them all loving discoverers on their journey into the wider world outside my dusty shelves.

Happy Trails - in ink and on paper.

wrightj45@yahoo.com