For St. Patrick's Day - the Unwanted Immigrant workers we can't do without!

Sometimes coincidence steps in and reminds you of something you wouldn't have thought about or remembered. I have to interject a funny personal anecdote about my cat Lucky. When he first came to live here from West Virginia ten years ago, I had to sequester him in the back room until he got checked out so he didn't bring anything into the house and infect my other two cats - Seamus and Padraic. I would go down the steps to the back room and open the door and give him kitten milk and a little visit several times a day. He had made a nest for himself in my music bag where I had a harmonica, maracas, a small Irish bodran drum, and other little things I had picked up over the years for my daughter - a flute, and so on. It was a copious canvas bag! One day when I got down to the back door, I saw a postcard had been slipped under the door and into the hallway! It said WISH YOU WERE HERE! I am not jooking! Tht little rascal had scratched the postcard out of something else, a book off the floor to ceiling bookshelf, probably used as a book mark, and he played with it until he slipped it under the door.

Today, March 5, 2022, when I went back to the den to let the dog out, I found a photocopy of an old news article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6, 2011 on the floor. Obviously, Lucky or someone else fished it out of something, a file or a book it was tucked into. The article was about the attempt to excavate a mass grave where Irish railroad workers had been buried called DUFFY'S CUT.

In 1832, dozens (about 51) of Irish workers were buried under mysterious circumstances in a mass grave and forgotten. The East Whiteland Township site was found to be too close to the Amtrak and Septa lines to be excavated. The rsearchers had hoped to exhume the bodies and give them a proper burial.

Yesterday the history book club of which I am a member discussed the crisis in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the government was forming and the "Founding Brothers" (the name of the book) were faced with petitions from Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, about the Slavery Question. In the end, it was decided nothing could be done at the time because the whole new nation enterprise was in such a perilous and vulnerable state. The Southern States were threatening to secede if the new government did anything to abrogate their "Property" rights.

The worker class of our country from 1619 to the present has always been an abused, unappreciated, exploited class of people, generally immigrants, who do the work that those who have risen through education or other means upwards in the social economic class, are no longer willing to do - agriculture, mining, cleaning, domestic work, cooking, service jobs, and they have often been immigrants. At present and for some years the agricultural workers have struggled to find a fair balance in wages and worker protections. There was a great old protest song "All They Will Call You is Deportees" written, I think by Woody Guthrie, about how the farm workers were brought in to pick the crops then deported when they were no longer needed. Just as in the debate of the new nation, it was discussed to buy the slaves from the plantation owners and transport them back to Africa. That was finally deemed to be too expensive.

The Irish workers will lie in anonymity but we can remember them here, and an Irish Celtic Cross of limestone from Ireland has been laid as a memorial near the mass grave. One of the researchers said there are hundreds of such graves strewn across the country where Irish workers have been buried in unmarked graves. I imagine this is true for Chinese rail workers as well, and for farm workers. These Irish workers were believed to have been sick with cholera and some were murdered by vigilantes afraid they wiould carry the cholera into the community. Thrown away like polluted rubbish. One set of remains was identified, John Ruddy, a teenager from Ireland. Family members from Ireland came and took his bones home for a proper burial.

I suppose my purpose here is to remember those workers and to remind myself and others to acknowledge, affirm and be grateful to all workers who labor to keep our society going whether in the coal mines, the restaurant kitchens, the farm fields, or the home! But especially to remember all the Irish workers who came here filled with hope after the despair of the Great Hunger - the terrible unforgiveable famine in Irlend from 1845-1852 when a million people died of starvation.

I was so grateful to learn while doing family history that my own Scots-Irish ancestors, the McQuistons of Pennsylvania, were already here and hadn't had to suffer that event to get here.

Erin Go Bragh! This phrase from Eire Go Brach, originated during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 just when our own country was struggling to find its way to cohesion and survival. Jo Ann

Additional Comments on reading FINDING THE MOTHER TREE, Suzanne Simard

Still enjoying this book but dismayed to discover during chapter 3 that Dr. Simard's awareness of the interconnectedness of the forest systems, a broader consciousness, didn't yet embrace other entities. I am referring to her supporting her brother, Kelly in his rodeo ambitions. Somehow her awakened consciousness didn't spread far enough to take in the tortured, suffering, enraged bull her brother was riding and lashing with his metal spurs for the entertainment of the crowd.

Many people, like myself, saw, even early on in our lives how various animals were suffering in what others saw as entertainment. Somehow, no matter what the exhibition, I couldn't help but be aware of the fear and suffering of the animals unwillingly caught up in it. The most intense suffering I encountered from this kind of experience was at a bullfiht in Spain which I wouldn't have ever thought of attending except that I was 21 and was taken there by my husband when we were traveling around Europe during his US Military deployment. It was, to me, heartbreaking. The bull kept trying to jump over the wooden fence around the arena to escape the stabbing spears of the men on horseback. The crowd shrieked and screamed in bloodlust and barbaric cruelty. It reminded me of the Roman Collisseum. Even as a child, I couldn't help but read the expressions on the faces of the animals imprisoned in the zoo. There eemed to be an invisible barrier betwen other people and these animals, but I didn't have it. I felt their sorrow, loneliness and fear.

I am not the only one. I have several friends with a history in the animal rights movement, and I remember once one of them and I went to the Camden Aquarium and we saw the poor alligator entrapped in a narrow plexiglas coffin like enclosure and his sorrow was palpable. We were both repulsed and depressed. Once, back in the 1970's I was at a friend's house and they had an enormous white fish almost as big as the aquarium in which it was imprisoned. They were proud of it, but I was disheartened and I had this overwhelming feeling that the fish was about to die, which I, impolitely I must confess, expressed outloud. I said, "I think he is dying." He died that night. They kind of blamed me as though I put a spell on him, but it was his unhealthy an depressing confinement that killed him, but they didn't want to face their own guilt.

Another story of awareness is when a friend of mine who has no such sensitivities to animals, was given a lobster. She called me on the phone and said she couldn't boil it, and every time she opened the fridge, his eye stalks looked at her. I told her I would go with her the next day to put it in the ocean, but it died durin the night. Sometimes the invisible rays, the radio signals of emotion can penetrate even the most hardened human and give an insight into the reality of another species.

No such thing happened with Dr. Simard and his brother, the Rodeo champ. I wish she could read one of the web sites devoted to ending this barbaric and cruel form of animal torture for human entertainment, so that she might know what suffering the animals endure for the ego and fake bravado of these "Cowboys" - as the old cowboy song goes "It's your misfortune and none of my own. Yippee tie yi yo."

AS soon as I finished that chapter, I sent a donation to PETA.

And just in case someone reads this and sks the usual questions of anyone who feels for other creatures - No, I do not eat meat, and No, I do not buy leather products, and No, I do not buy lumber - I buy already fabricated 2nd hand furniture, and I buy recycle paper products whenever possible. I do what I can. No, I do not use pesticides and I have no lawn and my cats do not roam free to kill birds - we have an outdoor chain link catio for them to enjoy the outdoors without predation on other creatures.

Consciousness is a many layered resource and perhaps in time, Dr. Simard's will increase to include the well being of other sentient creatures as well as the forest.

Jo Ann

Reading: FINDING THE MOTHER TREE, Suzanne Simard

Some few years ago, I was fortunate enough to sign up for and take a workshop and tour with the Saddler's Woods Conservation Association. The tour took us on the hiking paths through the 25 acre Saddler's Woods and the tour guides were so immensely knowledgeable about the plants and trees that I was deeply impressed. One of the guides picked up a bag and gathered trash throughout our hike. I can't begin to tell you all they told me about the watershed, the berries, the invaders and the indigenous plants. You need to take their workshop and tour next time it is offered! I found it through the Audubon Adult Education program, but I noticed it wasn't on their Winter/Spring online brochure, so perhaps the best thing to do would be to contact the Saddler's Woods Conservation Group directly. I can give you their mailing address right now because I am going to send a donation today, but you can look them up online to get a phone number. Saddler's Woods Conservation Association, P. O. Box 189, Oaklyn, NJ 08107

This fits in with a couple of conversations that sprang up recently in my days about what to do to help, how to focus on a worthy cause when so man clamor for our attention. My answer was that generally the causes drop in my lap. Twice a year, I make a series of small donations when I get a windfall - my Income Tax Refund, and my Property Tax Reimbursement. On the Income Tax Return, let me say what I told the tax preparer when she said I didn't need to have so much taken out: "It is a good way for me to save. Also, it is MY Government, and I don't mind allowing them to use my tax money to keep our country the rich and comfortable place that it is, for me, anyhow. At the end of the year, I get my money back just like when I was a young working woman in the city and I had a Christmas Club at the bank!."

So, when I get my windfall, I usually send small sums (consoling myself by thinking that if everyone sent such sums, these charities would be well provided for!) to various animal charities such as Alley Cat Allies, PETA, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, and sometimes environmental groups such as the Arbor Foundation and Greenpeace. This year I am adding two new ones, Funny Farm, and Saddler's Woods Conservation Association. The rest of my charitable effort goes into taking loving care of the animals I have rescued from the neighborhood or from shelters. I rescued a cat from a cemetery, three kittens from the Vet., a survivor of a house fire, and a dog from the Animal Orphanage in Voorhees. They are expensive and take a lot of work, so I consider that a volunteer job - and all of that came to me, I didn't have to go seek it out! The book I mentioned above is the selection from the Book Club in the Meeting I attend - Woodbury Meeting. As it happens, I had bought the book months ago after reading about it in the New York Times Sunday paper Book Review section. I LOVE trees! Here is a little poem I wrote about trees after a snowy lunch time walk when I was still working.

Trees are neither silent nor still

They move into the minds

of those who walk among them

Leave love letters on sidewalks in chemistry

and red love letters in snow.

I know I mentioned before that I was raised in the city, in the brick canyons of South Philadelphia down near the stadiums, the airport, and the highway. We had one tree on our block, trapped in a sidewalk size square of dirt. When I had the great fortune to get to New Jersey, I was permanently enchanted by the woods, the trees, the beach, the ocean, all the magical wonders of the natural world that city children never get to know.

In my town there is an ancient and enormous tree with a huge spiral turning trunk that I think is a willow oak, but I am not sure. I have looked it up. It has been the subject of a few ofm my paintings and I like to visit with it every day when I walk the dog. I love the way the vivid green lichen grows in the folds of its huge paw-like exposed roots, and the way the snow lays in those same folds in winter, and the leaves are captured there in autumn.

The book I am reading is very interesting to me so far (though I am only in early chapters) for two reasons: One - it is a memoir, and Two - it is a transformation story. It has been a life long matter of inquiry to me about what events or experiences cause the profound transformations that some people experience in their lives. For example, one day a slave ship captain had a lightening strike to his conscience and he became a monk and wrote AMAZING GRACE! In this book, the author was an employee of a logging company and the descendant of a logging family, but she has her eyes and heart opened while examining a plantation of new sickly seedlings in a clear-cut forest area. I will let you know more about this book as I read more, but I wanted to say that sometimes I am filled with despair when I see another tree cut in my neighborhood, or another small patch of woods destroyed to build more houses, not to mention fertile farms turned into housing developments here in our Garden State, but I help ameliorate my despair by doing whatever small things I can for whatever has dropped in my lap, and in this case, it is a donation to Saddler's Woods to help the dedicated people protecting this little irreplaceble treasure in our midst. Also, I protect the 25 trees on my own property and have planted several over the years.

Happy trails! And by the way, you can find Saddler's Woods and hike there, it is an easy and short hike. It is located on MacArthur Road, just off Cuthbert Blvd. in Haddon Twp. It is between a shopping center and a diner and there is a light at the turn to MacArthur Rd. Just a short way down the road there is a historic marker and there are two trails you can walk. Jo Ann

What's In a Name - Bits and Pieces

It is interesting to me how I get tricked into the rabbit hole of family history from time to time, and what better time than a rainy afternoon while doing the laundry and after walking the dog.

Let me see if i can remember what I was doing before I walked through the Looking Glass of the Farm Directory of Gloucester County. Nope, I can't remember. Anyhow, I got seduced by the gorgeous photographs of old farms - Oh, WAIT - I remember now! I was looking for information on Platt's Form in Clarksboro after looking at the Mickleton Friends' Meeting web site. My sister lives in a bungalow on Platt's form with her son, my nephew, and I thought since I was down that way on the internet, I would look up history on the Platt's farm. Instead, I found myself going through page after page after page on the Farm Journal. May the Gods look with favor upon whatever volunteer took the time to digitize that Farm Journal Directory! What a treasure trove to anyone interested in New Jersey History! (Weavers and Tinsmiths!) As always when I get into anything with a directory, I began to look for my family names: Cheeseman, (Rachel Cheesemean) Garwood, (William C. Garwood married Rachel Cheeseman in the early 1800's in Turnersville), Goldy (Levi Goldy married Sarah Garwood) and I always look for Wrights though there are so many it is like looking for a stalk of hay in a haystack.

I found lots of information on the Cheeseman family because Major Peter Cheeseman was an early pioneer of Turnersville, New Jersey. At the time that he lived there, as did my other ancestor, William C. Garwood, in the early 1800;s, there were about 150 to 200 people living there, and there were two saw mills owned by Cheeseman millers, a grist mill (First one built by Peter Cheeseman prior to 1800) a store or two owned by the Turner family and a school where my ancestor William C. Garwood was teacher. All of this was the first half and middle of the 1800's. Rachel and William had two children and Rachel died very young. The Garwood trail eventually led to my Grandmother Sarah and her sister Lavinia. But back to William C. Garwood: I haven't been able to find out much about him before his busy days in the mid 1800's, but he was township assessor from 1849 to 1851 and Town clerk from 1857-1859 and he was trustee in 1855 of the Methodist Episcopal church established in 1780. His middle initial stands for Collins and I wonder if he has some connection with Isaac Collins who built the earliest local saw mill about the same time that Peter Cheeseman built his grist mill, prior to 1800. Since to a large extent women lost their identities early on when they married, they often gave their sons their maiden names for a middle name. I wonder if a Collins female descendant married William Collins Garwood's father?

Speaking of names and tracing family history, on one photo of the Farm Journal, there was a big farmhouse with five people standing out in front, three men, a woman and a child. They named the famer father and his farmer son, both farmers who subscribed to the Journal but not the woman or the farm worker. When I gazed at all the lists of people, mostly male names unless a wife appeared in (parenthesis) I couldn't help but think ALL of those listed had been born to a woman who had become more or less invisible. It is very hard to find your female ancestors. I named my daughter after five of her famale ancestors who live on becasue their first names were used again in subsequent generations. The first Lavinia came from Ireland in the early 1800's, to Philadelphia. My daughter was born in Philadelphia in 1983.

Anyhow, hours went by and I was lost in the world of the past, wondering as I always do about those blood relations of mine, forgotten by everyone else in the family and scattered and buried hither and yon in graveyards I don't know about and graveyards that may be paved over by malls or overgrown by weeds and saplings somewhere. Some of the cemeteries I have found, like that of Sarah Garwood Goldy, and the graves of my German ancestors on my faather's side, the Sandman family, all in Philadelphia. I have a cat sleeping beside me on the sofa who came from the cemetery where the Germans are buried. He walked over to the graves where they were buried, New Cathedral Cemetery in northern Philadelphia, and the grounds keeper said the cat needed a home so I took him with me and he is my favorite cat. I named him after my German Uncle, Joseph Frederick Young, know to one and all as Uncle Yock. Since the cat is much smaller than that formidable old Uncle, I call him "Little Yock."

I always look for these names whenever I slide down the rabbit hole into New Jersey history or family history: Cheeseman, Garwood, Goldy, and sometimes Jaggard and Wright. My Gloucester County ancestors married into the Jaggard family (Randall and Mary Cheeseman Jaggard for example, and later the Jaggard who ran the Gloucester County almshouse married a female ancestor of mine). Wrights abound. The most interesting Wright I found so far was on a Revolutionary soldier veterans role at a historic church site in Salem, South Jersey. He was listed with soldiers who had been paid for their service with land grants in Indiana. That was interesting because the earliest Wright I had been able to find before that was listed by the LDS as crossing the Ohio River into Indiana in 1810 with his wife Edna Crow. My father's male ancestor came to Philadelphia from Franklin, Indiana, his father, Franklin Allen Wright, to join the Merchant Marines.

Well, back to the laundry!

Happy Trails wherever your wanderlust may be taking you! Jo Ann

Post Script: I had to return to add this name piece. Throughout my wanderings in South Jersey history and my own South Jersey family history, I came to understand that most of the early families became connected to one another due to proximity and small populations. I remember when Megan Geordano, the brilliant historian anc one-time curator of the Whitall HOuse who was an inspiration to me and so many other volunteers, asked if Anne Whitall was related to the Coopers of Camden. I had come across a family history essay about the Cooprs when I worked as a volunteer for the Camden Historical Society as a suitcase school visitor, and sure enough, Anne Cooper Whitall was sister to John Cooper the Woodbury Committee of Correspondence Revolutionary War activist and early Continental Congreessman who was a descendant from the branch of the Camden Coopers who had migrated south to mingle with the Clarke family. Turns out, we, too are related to the Coopers through:

When Jemima Roe Cooper was born on May 8, 1712, in Gloucester, New Jersey, her father, John, was 40, and her mother, Grace, was 29. She married Richard Cheesman on October 27, 1727, in her hometown. They had ten children in 21 years. She died on July 20, 1798, in Gloucester, New Jersey, having lived a long life of 86 years.

Which is a clue I found today in ancestry.com where I have a family tree and dna record. I often think of Anne Whitall and what it must have been like for her. She gave birth to nine children. Childbirth wa without doubt the most traumatic thing that ever happened to my body, I can assure you, and most of the women I know who had babies would say the same thing. I can't imagine what it must have been like for poor Anne with no pain medication, and nothing but just powering through and enduring. True, she was a well-to-do woman with servants and household help and could afford to take many hours off to go to meeting and sit in silent worship, what a great luxury that must have been. But still - nine children! Yikes! Well that's it for me. I think since I am in the family history mood I will watch some FINDING YOUR ROOTS!

Book lists and CAUSES

Book Lists and Causes

Today, I was reminded of a favorite place, Saddler's Woods off MacArthur Blvd. in Haddon Township, a right hand turn off Cuthbert Blvd. It is a 25 acre old growth forest which has been miraculously protected from the ravenous grasp of both a local school wanting to make it sports fields, and the local shopping center wanting to make it a parking lot. It has been protected by the Estate Will of Joshua Saddler a once enslaved man who worked for a local Quaker farmer named Evans back in the 1800's. Saddler bought the land and a small village grew around him called Saddlertown, which is now one street and a school and church on the eastern border of the little 25 acre woods. Saddler left the forest to be kept in its wild and natural state for perpetuity! I took a tour there once with the Saddler's Woods Conservation Association, a representative group of four tour guides, outstandingly knowledgeable and dedicated women. They have a small science center and meeting hall across Cutbhbert Blvd in a little corner of a street I think is called Buttonwood. Anyhow, they were able to point out the poisonous berries from the nutritious and healing plants, and were able to show how to tell how old a tree was and how to triangulate its height among many many other things.

The hiking paths through Saddlers woods are small but they make you feel you have left the urban environment behind and entered a different world. Suddenly it is quiet except for the whisper of the trees, the chatter of a squirrel or the call of a bird. You don't smell the car exhaust or the smoke from the local burger joints, only the sweet exhalations of the trees. Sometimes, when there has been a significant rain, you can hear the gurgle of the water meandering through the gullies and stream beds in this small patch where the water of Newton Creek still flows in a natural state. Mp/> I was reminded of Saddler's Woods, where I walk whenever I can, by the theme of a book club of which I have recently become a member. We are reading In Search of the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard. The book deals with the interconnected networks both above ground and below ground that are the community of trees and fungi. This theme of the family network nature of trees and forests was first brought to my attention by another book The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Woleben, a German forester. I have read many other books on this theme since and here is a list:

The Forest Unseen, David Haskell

Teaching the Trees, Lessons from the Forest, Joan Maloof

You may have heard about the healing forests of Japan. I had a book about them but I have lost it. In Japan there are forests of specific breeds of trees the exhalations of which have been shown to heal various human diseases in the people who walk among them. Some forests help heal for example, Diabetes!

A few people I met this morning were talking about various causes and we were discussing vegan, vegetarian advocats. I am a lifelong vegetarian. At least two of my freinds are dedicated vegans. An overarching structure is concern for the environment as well as concern for animals. As we speak, the Amazon rain forests, known as the lungs of the planet are being cut down for farming and animal agriculture. My first introductionn to the wastefulness of animal agriculture, besides the ethical consideration, was in the book Diet for a Small Planet, when Frances Moore Lappe shows the amount of grain it takes to make a pound of meat compared to how many people the grain could have fed. On top of that there is the impact on climate change from animal agriculture. Although the book came out around 1970 and was a best seller, you can still order it and it is still relevent.

We were talking about how to prioritize your causes, and I said mine fall into my lap. One of my causes is to care for homeless animals. I have adopted half a dozen cats and the latest in several generations of dogs, a big beautiful Husky Lab mix who was exploited as a back yard breeding dog until the people moved away, taking the puppies but abandoning her in the yard. It is my privilege and my pleasure to give these animals a loving and responsible home environment for the extent of their natural lives. As you may have guessed from the opening paragraphs, I have been a vegetarian most of my adult life, and I have a natural tree filled yard, no lawn - as part of the movement away from wasting water on lawns and using pesticides against wild flowers such as dandelions. In small ways that are available to me, I do what I can to help my fellow creatures, and my environment. Soon it will be spring and time to get bck out and about. If you feel like it, you may wish to join the Saddler's Woods Conservators in their spring clean up. Check out their website for details. If you have a yard, plant a tree, and try to bring some plants that help the butterflies into your yard; I have Rose of Sharon in mine. Also, I keep my cats indoors except for a chain-link CATIO (intended as a dog run, but very useful as a place for the cats to go out through their cat door in a window and sit in the sun without excercising their natural desire to hunt and kill).

Happy Trails! Jo Ann

Canadian Truckers and A Passport for Europe from 1969

On my living room wall is a 20 inches by 16 glass front display box with my 1069 passport, vaccination booklet, German Driver's liscense plus a packet of postcards from several countries in Europe that I had sent my Grandmother and she saved for me, tied with a ribbon. The year I decided to put them in a display I had read an article about a passsport collector and the photos accompanying the essay were so evocative to me, the way they spoke of this enormous transitions in people's lives, people emigrating from their homelands, fleeing war and destruction, getting married and starting life in a new country and so many more stories.

It was my vaccination booklet in particular that I was thinking about when I went to bed last night after watching a news report on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's efforts to move the blockade on his border with US. I thought of all the shots I had gotten to travel as a military dependent after my marriage to a drafted soldier during the Vietnam War. After his draft, my ex had done basic training successfully and then gone Oo officer'Candidate School. The military suited him just fine. He was obsessive by nature and his outward penchant for control was a manifestation of his lack of inward control, although he could control everything about himself when he was in the army. When he was discharged, his uncontrollable rages and other destructive behaviors took over and ruined two marriages and a good deal of his life, but that is another story. Suffice to say, he was eventually diagnosed with bi-polar disorder after a suicide attempt in a state out west long after we had divorced.

But back to the innoculations booklet. When I was told that I had to ge the shots and show my booklet at the borders, I didn't demur, I got the shots. I could clearly see even at that young age of 21, why a country would want proof that I was vaccinated against deadly diseases that were once the scourge of the world like Typhus, Diptheria, Cholera and so on. Also, I was well aware that I could come across bad water, or any other conduit of a bad disease in any of those countries aw well, so I rolled up my sleeve and got my shots.

When I watched the outrageous behavior of the truck drivers at the border to Canada, blocking the bridge, I thought, "This isn't about Freedom! What it is it about?" They weren't forced to get the shots. If they didn't want to follow the border regulations, they could simply not drive over that border, tell their bosses they wouldn't get the shot and take the consequences, not shut down the border to everyone else. And there was a key - they werent' concerned with everyone else, the autoworkers whose shifts were cut, the people trying to get to work, the people who had been sick and the families of those who had died of Corona virus. They got belligerant over a puerile, toddler size idea - NO, they wouldn't do it! They were angry at having their regular lives disrupted by a pandemic. They were tired of it and they were impatient and angry. They looked like children. >p/> Sometimes I think that what saved my father and made his life work out so well was that he did so much time in various services; the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Merchant Marines, and the US Navy. He couldn't display a temper over a vaccination there, and furthermore, they taught him to be neat and tidy and organized and self-disciplined. Self-discipline is the key.

I don't know what the answer is to this whole cohort of people who are overt in their display of unexamined prejudices, and who show no shame in their immature display of temper at having to endure the restrictions of an epidemic. But, I was heartened by Trudeau's measured and patient and diplomatic handling of the situation He didn't give in to temper or impatience. He used conflict resolution attitudes and told them he heard them and understood their growing impatience with the restrictions of the epeidemic and he gave them warnings and enough time to move out of their position before he sent in the police to further move the blockage and let the life blood flow again. That was the hopeful thing I got from the situation, a good leader stepped forward and displayed mature and intelligent responses to a situation that could have gone even worse.

Conflict Resolution should be taught in school, but school is so burdened with things that need to be taught it is as though schools have to take over where mothers and fathers and churches and other institutions used to fulfill a role in raising people.

By the way, here is a short list of 6 steps to resolve Conflicts.

1. Take Time to Cool Off

2. Use "I messages" to state feelings-No blaming, no name calling, no interrupting

3 .Each person states the problem as the OTHER person sees it.

4. Each person says how they are responsible.

5. Brainstorm solutions and choose solutions that satisfy both.

6 Affirm, forgive and thank each other.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Hurricane Hawkins and Magic Moments

On February 10, 2022, Hurricane Hawkins turned 106. A year ago at 105, she set a world record for sprinting for people in her age category. Frankly, I am astonished that there are people in her age category sprinting at all! Ms. Hawkins has been a lifelong athlete and before she took up sprinting, she bicycled. She looks really good too. I have seen pictures of centenarians and they looked frightening, Jeanne Calumet, for example, the oldest woman in the world before her death, I believe in France. The oldest 'documented' person in the world, she was what was termed a 'wupercentenarian' who died in 1997 at age 122.

Last night I watched an episode about long life in a series called Explained, where they talk at length about topics of interest and they (the narrators and interviewees) said the cut-off for humans is 120. There was a lot of information about telomeres and genetic mutations that accumulate over time, I can't remember it all, but I know from personal eperience both my own, and that of my friends who are my age, that whatever we do, we all wear out. In fact, there was a little graphic that showed what wears out on most if not all of us, our hearing diminshes, our eyesight, our muscles weaken, we get high blood pressure, and decreased mental acuity. So given all that, one wonders why anyone would want to live to 100, let alone 120, but if you could live like Hurricane Hawkins, maybe it would be good. I don't know how she fares off the track, they didn't go into that very much, but I do remember something a friend of mine who was 90 said - "At my age, everyone you've ever cared about it dead." It was mentioned that Ms. Hawkins had children and grandchildren, so people she cares about are still living. My friend, Marguerite, a fellow volunteer at Gloucester County Historical Society for some time (she was there for years, I was there for months) was still mobile and had her mental bilities, but she died of cancer. She had never had children and she was widowed and everyone in her family had died except a niece with whom Marguerite didn't have close or positive relationship. The niece borrowed money and didn't pay it back.

Anyhow, one of the things Ms. Hawkins mentioned was the enjoyment of what she called Magic Moments. One of her examples was the enjoyment of a particularly beautiful sunrise. For some reason, this made me remember a bonfire in the woods at Ridley Park in Pennsylvania at ngiht in the spring. A group of poets I knew met there once or twice a year and spoke or sang their poetry at the camp fire. That was magical, especially one night when a youngish man sang a Scots ballad in Scots dialect in a clear and beautiful voice. It was deeply moving, perhaps especially so because I have branch of family ancestry from Scotland adn the bagpipes and Scots music and poetry has always touched me. Another Magic Moment before I leave the Scots - I was pulling out of the driveway at my bank one day and a man dressed in full Tartan regalia was marching alone around St. Mary's Church playing the bagpipes. It was sos solemn and beautiful, I was transfixed. I learned later that he was a local policeman and was playing for a funeral that hadn't arrived yet.

I found the story of Hurricane Hawwkins very inspiring. It was when I was driving to meet a friend for lunch yesterday, that I heard it on on the radio on NPR. When I got home, I looked her up and I was struck by her forward momentum in life, not just the sprinting, but the energy to try something new, to keep on going. Needless to say, we can't all be like her. She has some rare genetic gift, but she can be a lighthouse for the rest of us poor voyagers! Happy Birthday Hurricane Hawkins and thank you for reminding me to look for the Magic Moments!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann

Pam & Tommy, Tara and education

Last night I watched a tv series via Hulu? I am not sure which streaming service because I pop back and forth from one to another a half dozen times before I find something I want to watch. To be honest, I never would have chosen Pam & Tommy except for an article I read during the day about the show and how it affected their lives and careers.

My only experience with Baywatch was one day when my daughter and I were babysitting my nephew who was an EverReady Bunny of relentless energy. We had taken him to the park, the playground, and my daughter and I were TIRED! But he was still a firecracker. My sister had told us that in the evening, if we were tired and he was still on the go, we could turn on Baywatch, that he was mesmerized into a kind of trance by it. I laughed at the idea and had never seen Baywatch. To be honest, I have been a kind of intellectual snob and I thought shows like Baywatch were beneath my intelligence. Frankly, in another program I watched on The Mind, a narrator had made the observation that attention and how we spend it was what it is all about. I wasn't going to waste my valuable attention on some bathing suit, woman-insulting-mockery when I could be watching a documentary or reading a book. That evening, however, we were running for cover. We needed a break, so I put Baywatch on and the magic happened. My nephew settled down into a kind of beatific stupor and we got to rest.

I thought about that but it simply became a family anecdote about my nephew (who is now 28) not a topic worth exploring or resolving. In fact, I really didn't give Baywatch another second of thought. I had never listened to the rock group Motley Crue either. But the article that I read about the Pam & Tommy show talked about the impact of a papparazzi event on the lives of Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee. They had made a home movie of themselves having intercourse which had been stolen and sold over the 'new' World Wide Web. Ironically, the release and popularity of the video had slut shamed Pam Anderson into the dust bin of history and it had re-energized the fading career of Tommy Lee. That's what the article was about, how Pam Anderson became a late-night talk show joke, ridiculed and humiliated, while Tommy Lee had become a kind of raucous cultural hero. I couldn't say if this was true or not because I didn't follow the story at all, and the tv series has stopped at episode 4 which is when the video is stolen and sold on the internet. It hasn't gotten to the aftermath yet.

My initial reaction to the four episodes of the show that I did see last night was, first, humor at the roguish Seth Rogan and disgust at the depraved and shameless lifestyle of excess Tommy Lee displayed. Needless to say, I wouldn't be on the team celebrating Tommy Lee's snagging of his cultural sex symbol Pam Anderson. I was with the proletariat chafing at the exploitation of the rich against the working class. Tommy Lee had hired a team of home renovators to create his fantasy bedroom for himself and Pam. He keeps changing the plans and never pays the the construction workers for anything, leaving them holding the bag for all the materials they purchased and the labor they did, when he eventualy fires them in a fit of temper. He also threatens the contractor, Seth Rogan, with a shotgun. Seth Rogan burglarizes the house in revenge and finds the sex tape in the safe he steals.

I am still processing the emotion that I felt through most of the episodes and afterward which was sadness and pity for these hollow, shallow people who had nothing to talk about and lots of money but no real interests besides intoxication and sex. And poor Pam was derided and exploited although being well paid for her humiliation. Inside the major plot there is also a sex worker in the porn industry which kind of underlines the point about the varieties of exploitation that women at the bottom of the sociodemographic financial strata are prey to.

This morning I was reading a very interesting essay by Tara Westover, who wrote a 2018 best seller called EDUCATION. It was about her escape from a horror movie version of a fundamentalist Mormon childhood in rural Idaho. She and her siblings never went to school, saw a dentist or a doctor; the children taught each other what they could. Through a series of almost miraculous events, Tara is rescued, gets to go to school, get dental care, and an education and career. Her book was of great interest to me espcially in light of a never resolved argument I had with a professor/friend when I was in colege. She had written a book extolling Home-Schooling. She had come from fundamentalist background herself, and was a kind of Sarah Palin prototype, a right wing conservative sexy swinger. Her sense of morality was all over the place. She seemed to want to restrict others while being permitted to flout whatever moral rules didn't fit her desires. We argued and argued over Home-Schooling and I said it would give crazy parents the opportunity to shield themselves from being exposed as neglectful and even abusive towards their children. Aside from the children being denied one of the few ways they had to contact the outside world about living conditions at home, I felt there would never be the kind of oversight that would protect the children from not getting educated at all at home. This became demonstrated to me in at least two cases of home-schooling I ran across in later years. In both of these cases the children weren't educated at all. The mothers were, in both of these cases, feckless, sentimental, and ignorant and the children were let to run wild and not educated at all. In another case, a young man I met in an adult education program where I taught, was denied further education because he had been home-schooled and had no diplomas. We helped him get an Adult High School Diploma so he could go to Community College.

All of these things made me think about education and what it meant to me and what it means to other people. My college education was my greatest love affair. I didn't go to college for a career, but the career came out of college and saved my life. It did, indeed, lift me from what would have been a life of drudgery and poverty, into a life of comfort and security. I went to college as an adult of 27 because I was a reader and I wanted to know more about the magic and the mechanics of litereature. I went to college to learn. In those days I could work my way through college and I did at the jobs that would have been my future without an education: waittress work, Kelly Girl and Manpower Temp work, factory work, and nurses aide work in a nursing home. When I got to college, it was the best of times to be there becasue thanks to the student revolution. I had marvelous teachers, real poets like Basil Pyne,and real authors like James T. Farrel, and teachers who were passionate. I became a teacher to show more kids like the child I was how to get to this nirvana, this paradise of learning which would lift them from lives of poverty and intellectual deprivation.

I spent 35 years in education from my early days teaching in high school to my last days teaching at a university. What I found in the early days was that none of my students were like me. Just because I was working class and poor, didn't mean that our shared culltural and economic milieau made us alike. What I found myself teaching were classes full of Pamelas and Tommys. They were interested in sex and intoxication not literature, not writing, and I spent all my energy researching ways to turn that tide and open those doors.

My experience underscores for me, the miraculous nature of a Tara Westover story. It wasn't just our circumstances that were filled with extraordinary twists and turns, but it was the extraordinary nature of our own minds that made us want to learn, to study, to know more, to rise up. My own daughter was a good example. I could make it possible for her to go to college and yet she rejected it and quit in her freshman year to fly to California and become a movie star. She survived and has a fine creative life in Brooklyn, New York with a whole tribe of talented and accomplished young men and women who rejected college and made their own way in the world through film, music, theater and art. The world changes and with it the resources and paths that new generations take and travel. She didn't want or need a college education and she has made a very satisfying and fulfilling life for herself. I guess the only conclusion is that no one can know where the journey will take us when ww set sail on adult life and the weather on the oceans is always changing.

Tara Westover, in her essay, lamented that financial circumstances have made it impossible for young people to do what she did, and indeed what I did (college was even less expensive when I went - $1400 per year in 1970). All I can say to any of that is ADAPT and EVOLVE, and maybe the education route isn't the only or even the best answer any more anyhow. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac were both drop-outs from college, and they managed to find the vein of gold in the mountain that brought them unimaginable success if not necessarily personal happiness. Maybe that is a different kind of journey after all.

Happy Trails whereever your journey is taking you. Jo Ann

TwoSides to Every Story

Just a few minutes ago, I read an essay from Friend's Journal which debunked the William Penn "Carry the Sword" anedote. The author (and I apologize that I lost the e-mail when I went back to find the author's name) reminds us of the zealous belief of early Friends and how George Fox would have felt the need to take a more zealous stand in regard to the non-violence doctrine when with William Penn. And speaking of 'doctrines' the essay went further to take a more nuanced look at the Hicksite/Orthodox split which I have never really understood, but of which I now have a somewhat clearer picture. Apparently in the "free thinking" Hicksite meetings which were heavily on the side of the individual conscience and individual understanding of the voice of God speaking from within, things were said that Orthodox Friends found both "UnFriendlike" and insupportable and so they veered more towards an old style Friends approach, more self-contained, more orthodox, more in line with the religion as it had evolved. What surprised me was that they had gone so far as to "strike-off" those in each side who disagreed with the other side.

It strikes me as particularly interesting in this age when our nation is so clearly, evenly, and deeply divided by values and passions. Whether or not the episode ever happened in regard to George Fox admonishing William Penn to"Carry the Sword as long as you can," the anecdote is still a useful one in explaining the tolerance in allowing people to follow their own conscience but it is also true that the effort at persuasion, or intervention must not be neglected.

Lately there is a new movement in regard to coping with loved ones experiencing alcoholism. It used to be said that you had to let them "Hit bottom." Then they would have to rescue themselves. Many family members found this a hard and cold choice to make. New theories say you could lose your loved one to death before they hit bottom and that on the way to the bottom they often take everyone with them, and that intervention is a better plan. But what kind of intervention? Loving persuasion, patient support, provision of useful support strategies, phone numbers, connections and so on, are suggested. This seems to me a kinder approach, a kind of Hicksite approach.

This also reminded me of the diary of Anne Whitall which I transcribed from a typed copy onto the computer so people could access it. She was often criticized as a complainer and a strict zealot and indeed she had complaints which to the modern mind seem nagging and trivial. But we take her out of context. She did believe as she had been taught to believe, in hell and damnation and the personal struggle to live a righteous and pious life. She struggled with it with herself and she struggled to intervene and remind her loved ones of this necessity as well. Anne would have been an Orthodox Friend.

It is interesting how as the saying by Faulkner goes, "The Past is never dead, it's not even past"

Happy Trails, Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

"Carry the Sword as Long as You Can" Struggling with Peace Testimony 2/3/22

This morning as I had my coffee, I was shuffling through the basket that holds my ever growing pile of magazines, journals, budget books and so on, looking for a magazine to read. The heavy and substantial MUZZLELOADER, still in its plastic wrap made its presence felt, and this time, in stead of burying under the New Yorker and more favored magazines, I took it out.

I am not stupid although it is still possible for me to make stupid mistakes from time to time and this magazine is a perfect example. I must explain: Because it was advertised in Early American Life, which was for many many years my favorite magazine, I was entirely mistaken in what I assumed would be its content. I know, when something says "GUNS" it is probably about guns, but, they always listed in the advertisements in EAL that it was also about log cabins (which I used to love) and early American crafts, so I made an entirely erroneous assumption that it was called Muzzleloader just because that was an item of the period (just as in a case where a magazine might be called Spinning Wheel but might be about many Colonial crafts not just spinning wheels) but Muzzleoader magazine like EAL would be about Colonial life and re-enactors. It isn't. It is about guns.

Last week in the newest issue of Harpers, I read a shocking article about the proliferation of "permitless carry" laws in most states in the US as wwell as the tidal surge of sales of guns such that there are 120 guns for every 100 citizens in the US now. I am against guns. They have no purpose but to kill. They kill animals and people. And since the next question faced by anyone saying they are against guns is usually "Well, you eat meat don't you!" My answer isn that NO I do not eat meat and have been primarily a vegetarian sind the 1970's and I am perfectly healthy thank you - no choloesterol problems for example, no polyps in my ten year colonoscopies either. Unlike dogs or cats, we do not need to eat meat to be healthy. I have many vegan friends who are similarly in excellent health in our seventies. They are even healthier than I am because they hike more.

Over the many years of my life, it has grown in me to respect life in its myriad and miraculous forms. There is a comradeship in the flow of the life force through all of us sentient beings that I am in tune with. It breaks my heart to think of the miraculous being of life cut short unnecessarily, or worse, for entertainment.

Yesterday, when I was reading the Harpers article on the proliferation of guns and the avid marketing and purchase of them, I was thinking of GUnsmoke, an old tv show that was highly favored back in the days when families had one television and everyone had to sit in one room and watch the same thing. I do not in any way wish to return to those days for many reasons including that back in those days in the place where I lived and grew up, fathers literally ruled. So whetever Dad wanted to watch on tv, the rest of us watched. After all, Dad was the only one who worked or had money. He bought the house and he bought the television, so he ruled! There were compromises such as when Ed Sullivan had the Beatles on his show. And I didn't mind The Champagne Hour with Lawrence Welk. But to get back to Gunsmoke, there were elements of that show that already made me uneasy but I accepted it as the 'past' and as fiction. For example the only notable female character was the good hearted ever accepting and supportive Miss Kitty, barmaid at the local saloon. Did Miss Kitty have kids? Did she have sex with the Sherriff (played by James Arnett) Where were her kids? She wasn't married, that's for sure, but the sexy outfits and other hints suggested that some form of sexuality was going on in her life.
There was a lot of shooting and gun play in Gunsmoke, indeed, it was the way things were resolved. Bad men came into town and shot it up, robbed people, murdered ranchers, attacked the stage coach, drank and insulted and assaulted other people in the bar and on the street and the Sherriff and his trusty sidekick had to shoot them or use their guns to shoot enough of them that they could round up the rest and put them in jail. Those bad men were indeed scary, and I couldn't help but conflate them with the Nazi's in the war movies we also watched constantly as my father had served in the CCC, The Merchant Marines, and the Navy in the Pacific during WWII. WWII was his primary historic period of interest and another example of how violent force was necessary to curb and repulse the forceful energy of Bad Men like the Nazi's also a very scary bunch who robbed and murdered and had no compassion or mercy, only the power and the will and the weapons to destroy and to harm.

When I first was drawn to the Society of Friends everything about it seemed to fit me perfectly, the meditative silent worship, the respect for the inner light, the kindness and compassion of the people, the adoption of a sane and sober lifestyle without the greedy pursuit of wealth, and the equality of women. The one thing about which I could never feel quite certain, however, was the peace testimony because I had seen those bad men, the Nazi's and the outlaws and I knew they still existed because I lived in the city and evidence of their continued existence was clearly visible all around me. Could peace and compassion really stand up to the energy of violence, lust and murderous rage? I wasn't sure I was ready to die on the cross like Jesus for the peace testimony, although his message did go on to enlighten a good part of the world. He lived on in a remarkable way. I didn't feel that if I had to face up to a Nazi, my goodwill and Christian compassion would be sufficient. I thought I might prefer a gun.

I didn't have to decide immediately however, because the Friends allow for independent development and personal conscience, you can be a seeker, you don't have to buy it all hook, line and sinker, you can develop toward it. When William Penn faced the same confusion in regard to the peace testimony, he was told to "Carry the Sword as long as you can." In other words allow you conscience and the light within to show you the way.

I am pleased to say this was the last issue of Muzzleloader. I felt so uneasy about it, I didn't even pass it on as I usually do with my magzines. One image from within the attractively and evocatively photograph laden magazine was especillay disturbing to me, a father had passed on his legacy of shooting to his daughter and she was holding upside down the swan she had just killed. It was a tall as she. It almost made me cry, but I turned instead to writing this blog entry. I wonder how that daughter felt later, thinking of the beautiful creature she had destroyed, after the glow of her father's approval wore off and after her conscience and her consciousness had a chance to once again peek through. I thought about the swan's mate left to grieve for the rest of its life and the black lake left in darkness without the bright light of the swan, like a candle, to brighten it.

In my electronic news feed, which pops up when I open my cell phone to see if I have received any text messages or calls while I was sleeping and my phone was off, there was a short piece about President Biden sending 3000 American troops to Poland and Germany to reassure our NATO allies considering the massing of thousands of Russian troops on the border of the Ukraine, ready to invade and possibly spark World War III. The January 6th Insurrection and the article on the proliferation of guns, the many articles on the increase in road rage caused accidents and even the short piece I read on the truckers striking in Ottawa because they don't want to vaccinate against covid or wear masks, these and mamy other indications are that there is a green haze of violence and anarchy rising in the world and it frightens me, it is like an algae bloom suffocating a lake, or like the Covid epidemic itself, a madness and sickness of the soul.

A sad note but an example of the way, is that Thich Nhat Hanh died recently, the Zen Buddhist monk from war torn Vietnam who helped bring the Buddhist way to Americans. All you can ever do, I suppose, is work on yourself, and walk your own path, carrying the message that is in you. Sadly, Muzzleloader made me realize I am not as fond of the Colonial period as I once was. My path has diverged. For many years, I volunteered at a number of historic sites relating to the American Revolution and the colonial period, and I was raised in Philadelphia, south of the center of liberty in America. Now, however, I feel myself turned more and more away from that time when lives were limited in so many ways, but there was then, carried from England, the message of the Society of Friends, the LIGHT in the darkness of times of turmoil.

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

TREES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

Opinion: It May Seem Like a Small Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails! Jo Ann

Winter Weather January 29, 2022 noon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOUGH TIMES TOOLBOX Jan. 24, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Netflix film: MUNICH-At the Edge of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

My Red Sweaters and Clothes for the Homeless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Family History and Woodbury Friends Meting 1/10/22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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