Thinking of gardening - memories

This is an excerpt from an e-mail letter I sent to a friend and I am putting it here because it inspired two memories of gardening from my teen years:

How wonderful to grow things: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...." One phrase from my favorite Dylan Thomas poem. That force is what I think of as God - the force of new life, productive living manifestation of expansive energy, the energy of the universe.

I have only one gardening memory: When my family first moved to New Jersey from Philadelphia, my parents were "garden" intoxicated. Like me, they had grown up in the brick canyons of the city and now we had a house with a big yard on a gently sloping hill in the back. Our development had been built on a farmers land and the development ran down to a Creek - a filthy black water mysterious place (to me). So my father got a tiller and tilled the slope behind the house and planted a victory garden - beans, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots - the works! You know New Jersey is known as the Garden State, although now we just grow housing developments where farm fields once were. So all my father's things grew like crazy. I was enthralled by the myriad of peculiar and huge insects that were drawn to the garden - giant fat tomato worms, multicolored gleaming beatles of all kinds. I was deep into reading organic gardening journals and begged my father to go organic and not use pesticide. He agreed and I sent away to CHINA for a preying mantis cocoon to fight nature with nature.

It arrived and we put it in a corner of the garage. One day a small living ladder emerged and the tiny single file army marched out to the garden. What astonishing creatures! Fearless. I loved them! But they weren't enough and I tried to pick off the bad beatles that were eating my father's plants. First I crushed them, then I drowned them and finally I began to have nightmares from the murder. My father had to go back to pesticides. The preying mantises weren't enough.

My mother and father worked like crazy in the hottest end of the summer sterilizing Ball jars and putting up all the produce - pickles from the cucumbers, tomato relish, and my father built a pantry under the 2nd story steps to house the treasure.

I don't know how many years this went on because I was in my teens and already working and had saved enough to leave home and get my own apartment. My mother also had a rock garden on that slope, but that's another story.

Here is the story that goes with the rock garden. My mother, with my father's help, worked tirelessly on her rock garden on the slope behind our new house on Roland Avenue. It was the trend of the decade, the Rock Garden! I don't know exactly where they got the rocks, but I remember one rock we got from the dumps in Philadelphia.

My Grandmother Lavinia Lyons lived on Tenth street at Oregon AVenue in Philadelphia. That pre and post World War 2 neighborhood was built just north of an ancient settlement called Stonehouse Lane. Early in the 1700's and perhaps even before, new immigrants from Germany in particular, had drained the swamp along the Delaware River and created canals. On the land between the canals, they built rough little houses and raised goats, pigs, chickens and cows and on the rich aluvial soil from the Delaware, they grew crops of produce which they then took in horse drawn wagons up to the neighborhoods and sold in the alleyways between the streets. Behind each street, say 10th Street, each house had a small garden lot and between the back garden lots ran an alleyway wide enough for a horse drawn wagon. The hucksters came down the alleys and the housewives came out and picked out their carrots and potatoes and the huckster weighed them in his big hanging metal scale. This memory is so vivid to me because of the horses! As a small city child, I had never seen such creatures - enormous and immpressive with huge heads, large liquid brown eyes and gently chewing velvet lips, gnawing constantly on the bit between their teeth. Whenever I was at my grandmother's I ran out into the alley to see the horses with the hucksters.

Between the declining Stonehouse Lane village which had thrived in the 1800's but was under attack in the 1900's from municipal development, there was a huge dump. Perhaps it arose from a landfill. In those non-ecological days, people threw whatever trash they had into the swamps then covered them and built on them. At this dump there were refrigerators, household items of all kinds, and in season, Christmas trees for sale!

My parents had gone to the dumps on many occasions not only to buy Christmas trees, but also to find usable furnishings - once, a medicine cabinet for the bathroom that was in perfect condition, probably the victim of a bathroom modernization.

On a visit with her mother, my mother decided to take Grandmom, me, and Sue (mother's yougest sister) on a ride to the dump to get a ROCK for her Rock gardent. At the time there was a good bit of construction going on down there, the new airport, a naval shipyard where the old WW2 ships were parked, and highways!

My mother spied the rocks she wanted and in her excitement, she left the car, Grandmom in the front seat me (around 12) and Susan (around 15) in the back seat, but she forgot to put on the emergency brake!

the car began to slowly roll forward. My grandmother called ou tin a panic! We in the back yelled put on the brake! Grandmom who had NO experience with cars whatsoever didn't know one pedal from another and she put her foot on the gas! We drove off into the dump screaming and my mother running vainly after us! The doors were open, I think we were hoping to make a jump escape and th car was careening and bumping over stuff and falling into holes! Grandmom seemed unable to take her foot off the gas, she was in shock. We were saved when the car rose up and mounted a huge tree trunk and became lodged there! My mother caught up to us.

I can't remember now how my mother got to a phone to get us rescued, I only remember my father marveling at this disaster when he came and got us. My Grandmother Lavinia Lyons, always a kind of nervous and frail woman, was traumatized! I remember my mother plaintively trying again and again to explain to my father about the rock she wanted for the rock garden.

note: one of my father's most notable attributes was his loyalty and devotion to my mother and vice versa. His reaction was a mostly benign combination of marvel and humor and prolem solving. It is worth noting that my mother had a car, of her own, at a time when no other women we knew drove or had licenses or cars. My mother had learned to drive during the war as a courier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She had driven a jeep.

Stonehouse lane was eventually obliterated by the latter 1950's and exists only in the essays and memories of historians of Philadelphia and those of us still living who remember the hucksters and the produce and the horses. It has been said that a number of Hessian deserters from the Revolutionary War took refuge amongst their German counterparts in the Stonehouse Lane settlement. It may be true!

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

ODE TO CHRISTOPHER LUDWICK, MASTER BAKER OF THE CONTINENTAL ARMY

Historian Shawn McGhee, PhD, will be the featured speaker at the April 22 Annual Meeting of the Gloucester County Historical Society, where he will detail the life and times of Christopher Ludwick, the baker of George Washington's Continental Army. The event will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the Historical Society Library at 17 Hunter Street, Woodbury. Admission is free.

McGhee, an Adjunct Professor of History at Moore College of Art & Design, is a noted historian of the American Revolution and author of the recently published book, No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776.

Christopher Ludwick was a German-born immigrant, master baker, and patriot whose skills fed the American Revolution in a very literal way. Appointed by George Washington as the first and only Baker General of the Continental Army, Ludwick was responsible for organizing the large-scale production of bread for thousands of soldiers, a critical but often overlooked element of military survival.

More than a supplier, he was also entrusted by Washington with a diplomatic mission to persuade disaffected German mercenaries, known as Hessians, to abandon the British cause.

Remembered for combining practical ingenuity, personal integrity, and deep commitment to the revolutionary cause, Ludwick stands as a remarkable example of how immigrants and ordinary tradesmen helped sustain the fight for American independence.

Organization: Gloucester County Historical Society Museum

Contact: Jordan Orensky

E-mail: museumcoordinator@gchsnj.org

Event Location: Gloucester County Historical Society Library, 17 Hunter Street in Woodbury

Google Map: https://bit.ly/gchs-museum

Geo Coordinates: 39.83967,-75.15195

Historic Cold Cases and CrossBones Burial Ground

I watch a series where a team of experts from multiple fields: DNA, historic document research, forensic reconstruction, and archaeoosteopathy, come together to discovery the identity and story around a skeleton. The one I wanted to write about from last night involved a girl's skeleton found in digging up a section of a very old, closed in 1853 burial ground for the building of a new structure. Several graves had to be moved. In this burial ground for the destitute of the poorest section of London, bodies were buried up to 10 deep in a grave with very little soil, to conserve space.

In summary, the skeleton the researchers studied was of a teenaged girl who died within a few years of the closing of the burial ground, because she was near the top. Her bones, skull and face were ravaged by syphilis lesions which were so old that they had to have been contracted about 10 years before she died, or when she was around 7. She had been a child prostitute in a place and time where people froze to death and starved to death as well as perishing from the innumerabe diseases ravaging the lowest poverty level of people in the poorest neighborhood in London, diseases like cholera nd typhus. At the time syphilus raged through the population at the rate of about 20 percent.

This child, likely would have had to barter sexual exploitation of her body for food to survive. Within a few years, her face would have been covered with syphilis lesions, and her nose was decaying off her face. She was suffering most of her life, and she had rickets from childhood starvation as well.

There were few ways for a woman to make a living in that period in any country. If you were lucky like my grandmother and great-grandmother (who gave birth to 4 sets of twins and two singles and was widowed) you had a trade. Theirs was sewing. From her early teens my GreatGrandmother was listed in the census as a seamstress/dressmaker. Both she and my grandmother took in piece work from the Schulkill Aresenal to make uniforms for the soldiers.

For the very poor such as the girl in the historic cold case, there was no such life raft and few places of refuge. For children and girls there was a constant danger of sexual exploitation by the depraved.

Even should a girl marry a man who had work enough to support them, soon, the expected compliance with the husbands' sexual demands and expecttions as rights would result in pregnancies, one right after the other. It is well documented in the narratives of slum volunteers how women suffered from the continuous pregnancies which brought more and more children into her responsibilty to provide food. Husbands blamed the wives for pregnancy and continued to demand sexual compliance. Even those rare professionals who had discovered rudimentary forms of birth control such as the re-usable 'French envelope' and condum made from animal intestines which could be washed and re-used, were not protected from syphilis or any other of the many forms of venereal disease. >p/> It is no wonder to me that the far right wing wishes to deprive women of forms of birth control as well as forms of self-reliance in the workplace to force women back into economic dependence and hence, enforced sexual compliance.

They reconstructed the face of the girl whose skeleton they had researched. They found her age and her name through cross referencing veneral clinic ward registries and death and burial registries. Her reconstructed face with the syphilis pustules and the variation they constructed without the ravages of the disease were enough to break your heart.

It is a wonder to me that not more is said about the evil of raw lust and lack of self control. And this isn't an old time thing - the recent Jeffrey Eppstein scandals reveal that this evil still persists and flourishes! Young girls caught in economic desperation are exploited by the lure of money and social access to the rich and powerful. They are degraded, discarded, and crushed by the cruelty and reality of the cycle of shame and loss of faith in humanity they found themselves victimized by.

The young girl whose skeleton revealed so much about a place and time, didn't die of syphilis though she was in the final phases of it already. She died of pneumonia and I couldn't help but think how lucky she was to die in the hospital of pneumonia rather than in some foul alley of freezing, starvation and syphilitic decay to be gnawed by rats until her body was found.

Sorry this was such a grim story and such a sad one, but it is the reason for the Women's Movement and for the Birth Control Revolution. We must have education, careers, and reproductive choices. We cannot be dependent upon the mercy or crumbs of the ones with money. We must have our own money.

Most of the Historic Cold Case stories are sad because, of course, they are of people who died! The one before was a little boy, and the one before that was an English knight killed in the battle for Stirling Castle with the Scots. It is an interesting show in how they solve the intricate mystery of identification. One episode at a time is enough, however.

A final note:

Musings on living to be old

7:00 a.m. Monday morning 4/20/2026. What a cold morning. We have returned to a version of winter at 36 degrees, overcast, damp and gloomy. This early hour is a novelty. Twice recently I awoke at 7:00 and in an unusual move, I got up from under my warm electric blanket and three cats. I was bribing myself to run an errand.

I have anxiety, not to an exceptional degree, but a lot. So sometimes things weigh on me enough to make a kind of water pressure that will drive me to action. Today I have two appointments, one for the hairdresser because in the excessive heat of last week, I decided to get my summer hair cut. My hair is thick and when it gets hot, my scalp just feels like it is steaming and I get heat rash, so each summer I get my hair cut short and let it grown so I have some warmth over winter. But this time, the weather turned and it is fairly cold right now - frost warnings and roads slick with frozen rain showers. Still, I will keep the appointment and get it over with. I don't like to do it anymore. It is hard for me to sit in that chair for so long - back and joints ache.

Second, my income tax refund caused me to make an appointment with a handyman, an old friend from my Outdoor Club days, to install another bannister on the back room steps, there are only 3 but I fell once. He put one in on the right side but I find that for safety, I need one on the left as well. He is coming this morning after his doctor appointment so about 10:30. My hair appointment is at 1:30.

I was out of a couple of essentials, so I awoke trying to figure out how to fit it all in along with a shower before the hairdresser. I bribed myself with a Dunkin Donuts latte' which got me over to the ShopRite parking lot and I had the pleasure of buying my few items in a nearly empty store - no one in line ahead of me at all. People don't shop at 7:00 a.m. apparently.

I came home to enjoy my latte' and a corn muffin by 8:00 a.m. Early mornings are such a luxury. Another luxury that I enjoy is my location. I am so lucky to live in a pocket of leafy small town amidst a surburan excess of shopping centers and highways. If I drew radiating lines from my house, in less than half a mile I have two large old grocery stores: Acme shopping center on the Black Horse Pike, and ShopRite on the Kings Highway and Route 130 intersection. I am straight down Market Street to Gloucester City and the Delaware River, Next door to three towns with excellent parks: Audubuon with Newton Creek Park and Collingswood with Knight's Park and their branch of the Newton Creek park system, and Gloucester City with Proprietor's Park and Martin's Lake!

My little bungalow is tucked into a small wooded lot with a large backyard full of old shady trees in a small town of bungalows all well cared for by hard working long time residents. People like it here, so I have neighbors who have been here as long as I have, 40 years. We have convenience stores within a few blocks in every direction and on the corner of my street is an honest and effective car repair shop!

These things come to matter more and more as I get older. My friends and I all evaluate our living conditions for the demands of our 80's. My one friend just moved into an assisted living apartment at Medford Leas, from her 4 bedroom house in the woods of Shamong. There was nothing near her and her house demanded so much - snow removal, leaf removal, immense amounts of yard work and deck repair and maintenance. ANother friend lives in a convenient and lovely home in an over 50 community, but for me, the highways she has to travel to get anywhere are terrifying. She is out in the farmlands of Burlington County, a new development.

My plan is to age in place and my small home should make that feasible with the help of my sister and my neighbors and SenHan transit (for when I can no longer drive).

No matter how realistic a person is, it is still a shock to come to this part of the road of life, old age. We don't, somehow expect to be old and yet here we are.

Hope you are in a good place - Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Saving Myself Each Day

When you know, at least to a small extent, what is going to be after you, you can somewhat prepare yourself. I know my father had melancholy the last ten years of his life and it lurks on the edges of my life as well, but I am not going to let it bleed me like the vampire it is.

Note to doctors: old people live on leaky rafts. You do them no favors when you load more heavy burdens onto their fragile crafts. My eye doctor gave me such a negative and bleak prognosis on Tuesday about my failing vision, that when I got myself safely home binded by all the burning drops they put in my eyes, I cried.

I picked myself up that day by looking at the art I had created lately and remembering that I won a prize in March painting MINIATURES! I looked around my living room, which I could SEE perfectly well, and spent some time reminding myself I am ok.

Nonetheless, that wound he created in my confidence and sense of being ok haunted me - hunted me - so much so that today I awoke at 7:00 in anxiety and couldn't get back to sleep. Maybe the first time that ever happened. Fortunagtely I was able to WANT something - a latte' from Dunkin Donuts, so I got up, hooked up the dog and got my purse and drove to DD and got my latte' then we drove to the park to look at the trees - this is always a stabilizer!

On the way home, I saw the Bakery in Audubon was open and I stopped in and bought some treats for my neighbor across the street who puts out my trash and recycle, and for my sister, whom I will be picking up a little later to give her a ride to work.

That drive, park, and bakery put the rout to the melancholy and I got home in time for my other helping neighbor to get my dog and take her for a nice long walk!

Now I will sit with another cup of coffee and enjoy my almond pastry - which is what I bought for myself - that and a blueberry scone!

That's how I do it! That's how I beat the blues - every day in some small way. Old age is a long game.

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

kApril 14, 2026 noon Attending my old Quaker Meeting in Woodbury

Texting with a Friend from my Quaker Meeting this morning, I was suddenly inspired to write a blog post about attending Woodbury Friends Meeting. First a little about Quakers, or Friends, as we call ourselves. The Religious Society of Friends is a Christian fellowship that grew from the revelations of George Fox, a British religious leader in the mid 1600's. He had the revelation that the Divine Light of God is within us all and that we can contact it directly through quiet meditation, waiting on the inspiration. We don''t need intercessors in the form of priest or ministers, although Friends have never been against those who feel called upon to share their own 'witness' or revelation and some Meetings (our word for church) have pastoral members.

The Bible: I read an article in the Friends Journal a couple of years back on how Friends relate to the bible and to put it in my own simple interpretation: Friends view the bible as the witness of the religious experience of the people of their time. We do Not view it as the gravel literal word of God. We have no ideols including the bible.

Our values can be summed up as Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality and Stewardship of the Earth. The acronymp is SPICES. Therefore our buildings are plain, our clothes are plain, we practice peace and nonviolent resolution to conflict. We also practice honesty and try our best to avoid vanity in the forms of display of opulence. The Stewardship of the Earth is a more recent addition because we are NOT solidified into some rigid orthodoxy. In fact, at one point in our hisory we actually split over that question. Some Friend wanted a more rigid and rule bound form while others wanted a more fluid and revelatory form. The first were the Orthodox and the latter, the Hicksites. There still exist forms of both. My Meeting is a Hicksite Meeting, a more loose and personal revelation steered Meeting.

We are few. We have about 12 Members counting our Attenders, perhaps 15 total. We are a small Meeting. Neighbor Meetings may have 30 to 50 members or more. Larger Meetings exist in Moorestown, Haddonfield, Mickleton, and Mullica Hill and Woodstown. There are smaller Meetings too.

I began to attend Woodbury Friends on a snowy winter morning in January of 2018 a couple of years before the Covid Pandemic. I was having a personal crisis and I needed solace. I had been a member in Philadelphia in the late 1980's but had to leave when I moved away. I had been raised Episcopalian. And like Quaker Meetings, my experience of Episcopalianism is that i can vary quite a lot from church to church. My favorite Episcopalian was Gloria Dei Old Swedes' Church in Philadelphia, my mother's family church It too was a simple, personal form of worship with a truly wise and helpful minister named Dr. Reverand Roak.

The New Jersey Episcopalian Church was a disappointment to me as a teen and I went seeking for a more personally meaningful religious experience which I found in the Congregationalists. There I left it until my daughter was born and I wanted her to at least have the experience of belonging to a faith based group, so I joined Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

One of the many things I love about Woodbry Friends Meeting is that it is small and the 6 or 8 of us who gather on a Sunday for our discussion hour before silent worship, ccan really get to know one another. We gather to discuss a query, a question designed to allow us to explore our spiritual esxperience both with our Quaker heritage but more universally with our souls. After Discussion, we go to the sanctuary area of benches and sit in silent meditation for an hour which allows me to slow down and feel rooted into the eternal once again. It qiets my sould and clears it out.

If someone feels a calling or a leading, they can rise to share it. Often one member wlll feel called to share, also often we sit in peaceful and companionable silence amidst the gentle companionship of the walls and benches and the spirits of the 300 years of Quakers who have come to the Meeting in joy and pain, distress and love, seeking and finding, and seeking and waiting. I feel them when I sit there amidst the old trees and the burial ground.

I may say more later, but I have to sign off for mow as it is time for me to go to my first eye appointmet in 5 years! I am nervous, but I feel I must have this examination with my ongoing vision loss due to Fuch's Dystrophy among other things.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoocom

F D Roosevelt and A D A and Healing Waters

Periodically I get e-mail notifications from pbs passport of interesting shows. ($60 annual ubscription). Recently I was notified of a Ken Burns Documentary about Henry David Thoreau which I watched with great affection and engagement. Next I was notified of two episodes on American Experience about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR is my idea of an American President, so was Barack Obama - men with grace, poise, dignity, education, self-control, wide intellectual attainments and consciousness. Men we could be proud to hav represent us on the world stage.

Although I have followed FDR's biography many times both in books and documentaries and once owned the two folume VCR which I watched many times, one thing that stood out to me this time was how he faced the deepest despair of his life, really at the bottom of the well of despair, when he was struck down with POLIO at age 39. He wass in the full vigor of his youth, the prime of life, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. It was stated that in that period of our cultural history, disabled people were hidden away at home, cared for as invalids in back rooms or sanatoriums. and that would have been FDR's fate had he not discovered Warm Springs, Georgia in his quest for some healing therapy. Nothing could bring back his legs, but Warm Springs, Georgia brought back his will and his inspiration. It was a remnant of the era of healing waters.

Local History - we have the remains of our own place of healing waters in Egg Harbor, NJ, near the Historical Society building. It is a serpentine ditch in which people seeking healing waters would walk up to their shoulders in healing waters. There are, of course, many famous healing water spas in Europe such as Lourdes in France. Most of these date from the Victorian period. Anyhow what FDR found might not have been physically healing but it was emotionally healing. The mostly dilapidated former resort became his mission. He spent a fortune renovating it and turning it into a place of therapy for others, who, like himself, had been struck down by polio.

Saving that place and helping those others saved Franklin Delano Roosevelt and gave him a new lease on life.

Because of the times in which he lived, and served our nation, disabilities were culturally held as shameful. In order to successful re-enter his political career, FDR had to pretend he could walk. How he did that was he developed such upper body strength that with the support of a strong arm on one side and a cane on the other, he would swing a leg forward, then the other leg, giving the illusion of walking. He successfully continued this ruse until near his death in April of 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia, of congestive heart failure.

Even in the generation just before mine, disabilities were viewed with some shame as I discovered on a trip to Washington D. C. with an old friend who was outraged that they had put in a statue of FDR in his wheelchair in the memorial sculpture garden. She felt he should only have been portrayed standing. My attitude (I was 12 years younger and the product of the 1970's) was that it was about time the truth was told because what it meant was that someone could be disabled in one way and save the nation in another!

That is exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt did. They saved the nation. First they dug us out of the Depression by establishing the Works Project Administration WPA. They put thousands of people to work planting trees to save our destroyed forests, the FSA (Farm Security Administration) to help farmers and the FHA to make it possible for low income Americans to afford to buy a home. And I am today the grateful recipient of Social Security, meant to help support the elderly after retirment. Eleanor fought vigorously and tirelessly to influence FDR to integrate the armed forces both racially and in gender She also advocated for Child Labor laws and Unions.

FDR saved us from the economic Depression and saved himself from his personal Depression! Together the Roosevelts got us through that disastrous period and the following horror of the second World War. A disabled man with paralyzed legs saved this nation from the two most devastating onslaughts to ever strike us.

I think it is especially interesting to consider how Donald Trump made a public display of ridicule for handicapped people when our nation ahd risen so far above such ignorance as to have made a nationwide effort to include civil rights for Americans with Disabilities. I am personally grateful for this effort every time I use the ranp to enter my Municipal building or the sidewalk corner ramps when I walk around town becaue now, I, too, due to my age, have become an American with disabilities. My wide array of age related disabilities, however, have not kept me from participating in a productive way in a variety of artistic efforts as well as cultural and historic ones.

Happy Trails - whether on foot, on wheels, or by imagination! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Time - a quote from Henry David Thoreau

"Time is but the stream I go a'fishing in. >p/> I drink at it, but when I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away but eternity remains."

Henry David Thoreau

Quick and quirky mysteries series - fun reads!

If you have read earlier posts on my blog, you have read mentions of my beloved childhood novels: The Outdoor Girls On A Hike. I am 80 years old and I remember those novels and the joy and adventure they brought into my life as though it were yesterday. I devoured them - and I collected them! I have about a dozen. They were published in the 1920's and I got them from the also many times mentioned bookcase in my Grandmother Lavinia Lyon's basement. Well for a couple of years now, I have been reading, with a similar enjoyment, the novels of Vicki Delaney, also writing under the pen name of Eva Gates. It was the Lighthouse Library series by Eva Gates that I first discovered, and having been a library worker once myself, I was immediately charmed. Then I discovered that the author, under the name of Vicki Delaney also wrote a series of mysteries set in a Sherlock Holmes bookshop in Cape Cod! I LOVE Sherlock Holmes and I wasn't disappointed. Notes on the author call her work witty and full of twists and turns and engaging characters - all true! And the settings are marvelous. Delaney is a retired computer programmer and systems analyst who has written over 50 novels in a few different series and she has been awarded for her work. She is is a Canadian, born in 1951 and mother of 3 daughters (who says you can't do it all!)

I have mentioned the Lighthouse Library series set in the Outer Banks, and the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, set in Cape Cod. I have found there are also these:

Tea by the Sea, Constable Molly, A Catskill Summer Resort, and Ashley Grant, and a Klondike Mystery, as well as a few others.

I am so glad there are so many because I can't bear to think of reaching the end!

By the way, a series I enjoyed jsut before I discoverd Eva Gates was The three Pines Mysteries which has become a video series on amazon prime. Those were written by Louise Penny. These writers are in the long tradition of great women mystery writers such as the greatest of all - Agatha Chiristie! And there was P. D. James, and Dorothy Sayers.

Currently, watching streaming on my laptop (I had to give up tv when my eyesight got so bad I couldn't really see at that distance) I am re-watching Hercule Poirot on pbs passport. I have also finished watching Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone, and then those with Jeremy Brett on YouTube. Winter brought me into mystery season, and I am hanging out here for a while to come! Mystery readers - I hope I have introduced you to some new books to enjoy - whether in paper book form, or audio book. I am listening to audio books due to my eye sight problem and the reader of the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop novels has a delightful voice and British accent!

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Upcoming exhibit at favorite small museum

I just got this e-mail about an exhibition honoring War/Veterans at one of my favorite little museums. In my earlier wandering years, I would sometimes come across a small museum built from the collections of local enthusiasts, or even of one passionate collector. The two most recent favorites have been the Prehistory Museum in Greenwhich, the beautiful historic town on the Cohansey all the way at the bottom of the state. It houses several collections of the relics of the Indigenous people who once thrived in South Jersey. Collectors have painstakingly pieced together pottery from shards, and collected fossils and thousands of projectile points (arrow heads) and donated them to this museum. It used to be a vaorite destination of mine in my distant driving days.

I have followed the museum at what was once Andaloro Farm from its former location in Glassboro. This museum is mostly the collection of one enthusiast and I have visited it regularly and enjoyed it tremendously. One of my favorite exhibits is the annual model train show. But now there is something new to see -

Hi Everyone,

This year we are really looking forward to a brand new U. S. Military History exhibit. It runs from May 1st through May 31st, 2026...just in time for the Memorial Day holiday. This exhibit, covering World War I through the Iraq War, will be a salute to the American Veteran and our fallen heroes. Among the items to be displayed are weapons, uniforms, posters and civilian paraphernalia, and, of course, we do have some new items on display!

Attached is the U. S. Military History flyer so that you can share with friends and family.

We all hope to see you there!

Barbara Norcross

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ

138 Andaloro Way

Deptford, NJ 08093

856-812-1121

sjmuseum@aol.com >p/>

Easter 2026 and a different kind of re-birth

Saturday, April 4th, 10:00 am. I was sitting on the porch smelling the fragrant hyacinths on the bistro table and feeling the cool and gentle breeze blowing through the still bare branches of my trees. Rarely do I feel nostalgia for my childhood. My father was despotic. He was devoted and jolly but also a bully and a tyrant. I know that this is not a rare occurrence and I have read many memoirs of others, including many men who had this experience with their fathers, for example, Allen Cumming. I forgive my father because he did provide for us, but his temper and his violence were a blight upon my childhood. Truly I can remember thinking to myself with despair that it was going to be years before I would grow up and be able to get away. I loved my father and I feared him. He was unpredictable and dangerous.

Nonetheless one of the spirits abroad in the years after I was born in 1945 was a post war EXHUBERANCE! It was over! The war was over, the husbands, father's, brothers, sons and uncles and all the women serving in the forces were returned home again and there was Prosperity. The economy was bursting to build and supply the new things the unionized and well paid survivors who were working now had money to buy. The austerity of the war years was over - it was abundance that infused the culture now

My mother was pregnant the day she marched in the neighborhood parade celebrating VE Day! She carried a tall flag pole. The death and destruction was ended and now RE-BIRTH! All over the world, people were picking up the pieces and starting anew.

Perhaps few books symbolize this period better than the SEARS Catalog - the wish fulfullment book! It was so fat - fatter than the telephone book! And it had EVERYTHING - furniture, clothes, appliances, every form of fabric item from curtains to sheets to cothing, shoes, hats, and TOYS! More toys than we ever knew existed! Houses were being built in new developments all over the countryside and cars were being built to carry the families out of the cramped and damp and teeming cities to those new houses in the green and shady suburbs. We bought a house in the city, then we bought a house across the river in New Jersey! New Jersey was just across the river but it was a world away from the brick canyons of South Philadelphia under the tall smoke stacks of Publicker's whiskey manufacturer and the oil refineries - all concrete and asphalt, dark smoky sky and lifeless vistas. New Jersey was the Garden State! And when we got there, we gardened! The Victory garden of the war years became the vegetable garden behind our brand new three bedroom suburban house. And we had a pantry into which all the bountiful produce could be stored after it was poached, and sealed into sterilized Ball jars for use in the winter. We had trees and birds and flowers, fields and even a Creek! Pennsauken Creek.

My parents got stout in the new stout world. My mother got appliances - a washer and dryer. And we got a new tv and then a stereo in a beautiful wooden cabinet. I had my own bedroom.

My father was intelligent and his experiences had taught him to refine his native abilities so that he rose through the company where he worked and we had plenty - plenty of everything. He worked overtime all the time and "brought home the bacon" and my mother treated him like a king and she was thrilled and satisfied to be a home-maker in her beautiful new home nicer than she had ever imagined she would have with all her new stuff. Her creativity was used in upholstering and curtain making. She literally was a home-maker! She made our home beautiful guided by the many magazines to which she subscribed: Better Homes and Gardens, Woman's Day, and all the old ones we'd had in the City, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic.

With her new friends who lived along the 'cul de sac' of Roland Avenue in Maple Shade, she went to the Cherry Hill Mall - a new and amazing museum to opulent purchasing. Every morning the ladies, all of them stay-at-home mothers - (I never knew a mother who worked outside the home during my childhood) gathered in my mother's dining room with the percolator and Steve the Breadman's boxes of donuts and their menthol cigarettes to drink coffee and chat, about babies, husbands, houses. They seemed happy. At least they seemed happy to me, a child, staying home from school to spy on them. I barely remember what they talked about, but I don't think it was dissatisfaction. At least not then.

As a family, in our stationwagon, we would go to SEARS in Camden and shop. SEARS was the farm field in which all the glistening products of fertility and re-birth were blooming and harvested and ready for us to buy. We bought our Easter outfits there, everything from my white straw boater, patent leather Maryjane shoes, petticoat and dress, little duster if it was a cold spring and my gloves and purse. My brother got his little suit and his shoes, and my mother and father their new outfits for the Easter church attendance where everyone would be dressed in their NEW outfits to welcome the new year, the new decade, the new era! We had left the Depression and the War and we were entering the BABY BOOM - the 1950's, which for all its faults was a wonderful decade, a decade devoted to the family. Family day vacation spots rose all over in New Jersey - lakes with picnic areas and row boats and dance pavilions with juke boxes, motels with swimming pools on the way to the seashore! Everything brand spanking new!

A new kind of re-birth. And that is what I miss now that I am 80 and my life is coming to its close, my own winter. I miss that exuberance and the beginning of things, the prosperity and the joy and relief. I miss being young and excited by shiny new things. I miss the opening of the world that was to be my life. Happy Easter everyone - Happy Spring! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Easter 2026

Easter is an interesting word. Begining with the root word EST = derived from old English which derived it from Proto-Indo-Euyropean root word est for East or dawn - where the sun comes up. Approaching Easter at my age, 80, is interesting because I am an anachronism in so many ways and Easter points out a couple.

I was looking for womething for my sister's grandson who has everything. He doesn't want candy and he has every toy and art supply known to American culture. He has such piles of toys that it is, to me, a bit revolting. For an example: He has THREE electric bicycles (like little motorcycles) and two electric scooters. I can't even begin to dig through all the reasons he has so much stuff, but he has several house-holds - his mother's house, his father's house, and his grandmother's house. All three are filled with toys.

My sister is 20 years younger than I am and it is a diffent generation. We were talking about that today. I was born in 1945 to parents who were raised in the Depression and became adults in World War II. They had the life habit of ration books, string and metal and paper drives for the war effort: the community vegetable/victory gardens which were a necessity not a hobby. There was a food shortage! My parents were careful and thrifty and then came the boom of the 1950's! But even then, we, my brother Joe. who is near me in age, and I, got one or two toys for Christmas, not 15 o 20 in three different houses. Even my daughter got two gifts from me and one from Santa and usually a couple of outfits for holiday events. When she was growing up, I was poor - a single mother raising a child, paying a mortgage, and earning a teacher's pay. I didn't even have a car for the first fifteen years that we lived in New Jersey, and I walked with a wheeled shopping basket from the Supermarket, and took my daughter to the babysitter and the day care center in a wagon, So although I have fallen into some bad habits, generally, I am simple and spare in needs and expenditures.

I thought I might buy the great-nephew a book about Easter, because I am sure he has little or no idea about what it is other than Easter egg hunts. but the Right-Wing political culture has taken over popular Christianity and the books in the Supermarket were a bit creepy, not the coloring books with nice Bible stories of my youth or the view of Jesus that reflects his values: Love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness.

Lately I have thought a lot about the roots of holidays in relation to astronomy/archaeology. During St. Patrick's Day, I looked at lots of documentaries about the stone circles and the structures made to celebrate the Spring and Autumnal equinox. The rays of the sun shining through the stone portals of the structures. I was thinking about sun dials and the ways in which early people measured time, seasons.

So Est - East, estrogen, fertility, the season when the world becomes fertile, flowers open to tempt the bees to pollinate, rabbits breed, birds lay eggs and the earth produces fields of golden grains and trees bearing fruit. The world comes alive.

It is removed from the Christianized version of the holiday - Jesus, the prophet of Christianity arrested, found guily, betrayed and crucified, then resurrected from the tomb. Today, Good Friday, is the day he was crucified.

Just like in Autumn when we celebrate Halloween the season when the world seems to die. The trees go bare, the earth shuts down, animals go into hivernation. And then the world is covered in the white shroud for the long sleep.

Spring arrives, the tomb is opened and life emerges, born anew! Easter!

Throughout my childhood, we celebrated the Christian version of EAster along with the pagan one. We dyed eggs and put them in baskets, we ate symbolic chocolate bunnies, coconut eggs, and got all dressed up in new outfits to go to church for the special celebration of the life/death/and re-birth of our prophet, Jesus, the prophet of love, sharing, forgiveness, suffering and simplicity - putting our values in our relation to our fellow beings not in the accumulation of material wealth.

Had lunch with my great-niece Alex today and we talked about religion and institutionalized Christianity. She is a Catholic, which is how she was raised and she practices. In fact, after lunch she was going to sing with the choir at the local Woodbury Catholic Church and she has a solo part. It is very important to her.

We talked about Jesus dying for our sins and I quoted Patty Smith, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.

In my opinion he died for the sins of men! Men killed him and men have built an edifice around him that would be appalling to him if he saw it. Jesus lived in poverty, not pomp. He threw the moneylenders out of the Temple. The Catholic Church has built a bank there.

Well, I am not feeling too well today. My body just doesn't work right any more. I don't digest right, I don't have a good chemical balance, or a physical balance for that matter. It is hard to walk around, I can't see, I can't hear - background noise is amplified to the point that it gives me a headache. I hope I feel better soon. Tomorrow I have Easter Saturday brunch at Maritsa's with Sue and Archie and Bryson.

I hope I can find something on my laptop to divert me from my discomforts and self absorption. Also, I hope the rest of you have a Happy Easter! wrightj45@yahoo.com