Too much posting after 3 a.m. this week, and I’m going to go to bed and see if I can catch up. I love that this bridge exists in the twenty-first century. It always makes me imagine I'm paddling about 150 years back in time, and that just on the other side of this bridge there will be piles of sawdust, teams of horses pulling wagons stacked with logs, and the old mill, still sawing wood.
It always makes me feel tearful when I read the love-notes to you when you take a night off. Even then you always leave us a gift--this time a lovely bridge and a fantasy about another time. I suspect it is a relief to read these well-wishes and grateful notes from people who love you. I am one of this crowd, and wish you a peaceful and restorative night.
"Too much posting after 3 a.m. this week, and I’m going to go to bed and see if I can catch up."
Thank you, Dr. Cox Richardson, for your amazing contribution and the hard work that takes. I'm glad you're caring for yourself while running this marathon.
What I love is reading your insightful thoughts, backed by historical knowledge, research and discipline, not to mention artful language, and then seeing how touched you are by this wonderful old bridge. You make me smile with affection.
While Heather gets some much-deserved sleep, the insidious conspiracy continues to seep forth big chunks from the sewer in which a constitutional coup was concocted.
I thought that nothing more about Trump’s conspiratorial and deadly narcissism would shock and surprise me. I was wrong.
At the July 21st House 1/6 House Hearing it was revealed that, as White House officials were monitoring frantic Secret Service messages of ‘farewell’ to their families and their professional doubts that they could prevent the murder of Vice President Pence, Trump spoke and tweeted brazenly of Pence deserving what would befall him.
Whether the Secret Service was more concerned about their own lives or of Pence’s may be revealed, when they are subpoenaed to testify before the House 1/6 Committee..
Pence had a momentary ‘Profile in Courage’ moment, when he insisted on staying in the Capitol Building to perform his constitutional duty.
That subsequently he has sucked up to Trump in his bizarre attempt to be the Republican 2024 presidential candidate underscores that he didn’t earn a courage medal from the Wizard of Oz.
What possibly can the Service Service be concealing in its ‘missing messages’ ruse? Such gross insubordination demands subpoenas and firings for such a flagrant cover up.
I’m looking forward to a rested Heather providing us a Baedeker to these wicked underworld machinations.
Thank you for your intrepid work, and for this beautiful verdant image. You are amazing and your work is invaluable. Rest well and enjoy sweet dreams of democracy!! ♥️🙏🏽🙏🏿🙏♥️
To live on a boat (again) was my husband’s dream retirement. What we could afford was a used French rental boat - actually English, as it was built on the Norfolk Broads for a French rental boat company. We spent a month on her in the summer of 2021 and went back in October to spend most of the year until October of 2011. We started off on the Canal du Midi, but that canal became so crowded that my husband decided, after a second trip up the Rhône, that we should stay north where we could move about freely. Our home port was Pont-de-Vaux, a small town 100k north of Lyon and 3k east of the Saône. Because my husband was an experienced boats man and I had years of French as student and teacher behind me, we explored rivers and canals, ate from farmers markets and occasionally from Michelin restaurants and, with visitors, explored the champagne houses of the Marne, all the while watching climate change become more and more obvious in every facet of our lives.
That’s much more than you asked for, but I must add that until the pandemic I visited friends in France every year from 2012 (the year of my husband’s death) until the pandemic closeted me in 2020. One friend in the Nièvre emailed the day after DT was elected “You must come live with me.” I renew that invitation every year. She lives on a huge cattle farm where every year now the family grows more wheat and fewer cattle and sheep because the EU hopes to “feed more people.”
As you see from this, I have seen much of France from a boat, most of it beautiful. A girl from farming country in Virginia, the first city lived in as a student, was Paris. When I say “I am going to France,” the response is frequently “You are going to Paris” so I have to explain that I will land there, but catch a train at the airport for another place, visiting Paris friends on my way out of France, a country so much more than its capital. To have seen the battlefields of WWI and arrive by boat at St. Valéry-sur-Somme where William the Conqueror set sail for England is a thrill as great as any to be had in Paris!
Thank you for asking the question and please forgive the early morning pleasure in over-answering it.
We all need to spend time in nature. On the water. In the water. Too many of us are much too disconnected from the real world, from our planet...from the universe...and live here in the electronic land of flashing lights in a box. Thanks for the reminder. I'm going to visit my granddaughter today and get centered on a 2 1/2 years olds level of being.
It always makes me feel tearful when I read the love-notes to you when you take a night off. Even then you always leave us a gift--this time a lovely bridge and a fantasy about another time. I suspect it is a relief to read these well-wishes and grateful notes from people who love you. I am one of this crowd, and wish you a peaceful and restorative night.
"Too much posting after 3 a.m. this week, and I’m going to go to bed and see if I can catch up."
Thank you, Dr. Cox Richardson, for your amazing contribution and the hard work that takes. I'm glad you're caring for yourself while running this marathon.
Under the bridge
Beyond the bend
Adventure awaits
Where nature mends…
Thank you for your incredible insights Heather.
Thank you Heather for your letters this week and the beautiful sun-kissed picture of water, trees and proud stone bridge.
Liberty
by Frederick Douglass
He loves to see his eyrie seat
Some Rock on ocean's lonely shore
Whose old bare top, the tempest beat
And round whose base the billows roar,
Or mount through tempest shrouded air
All thick and dark, with wild wind swelling
Or brave the lightning's lurid glare,
And talk with thunders in their dwelling.
Written by Douglass in a notebook on September 13, 1847.
© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
Frederick Douglass
By Robert Hayden
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Source: The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966)
The best thing about the images you post? All evoke tranquility. And it's easy to be transported into them, where we find a respite from the madness.
Rest well and many thanks for all you do to keep us informed. You are a true patriot!
What I love is reading your insightful thoughts, backed by historical knowledge, research and discipline, not to mention artful language, and then seeing how touched you are by this wonderful old bridge. You make me smile with affection.
While Heather gets some much-deserved sleep, the insidious conspiracy continues to seep forth big chunks from the sewer in which a constitutional coup was concocted.
I thought that nothing more about Trump’s conspiratorial and deadly narcissism would shock and surprise me. I was wrong.
At the July 21st House 1/6 House Hearing it was revealed that, as White House officials were monitoring frantic Secret Service messages of ‘farewell’ to their families and their professional doubts that they could prevent the murder of Vice President Pence, Trump spoke and tweeted brazenly of Pence deserving what would befall him.
Whether the Secret Service was more concerned about their own lives or of Pence’s may be revealed, when they are subpoenaed to testify before the House 1/6 Committee..
Pence had a momentary ‘Profile in Courage’ moment, when he insisted on staying in the Capitol Building to perform his constitutional duty.
That subsequently he has sucked up to Trump in his bizarre attempt to be the Republican 2024 presidential candidate underscores that he didn’t earn a courage medal from the Wizard of Oz.
What possibly can the Service Service be concealing in its ‘missing messages’ ruse? Such gross insubordination demands subpoenas and firings for such a flagrant cover up.
I’m looking forward to a rested Heather providing us a Baedeker to these wicked underworld machinations.
Reminds me of the John Denver song "Cool and Green and Shady"
Okay, now ya'll know how old I am LOL
Thank you for your intrepid work, and for this beautiful verdant image. You are amazing and your work is invaluable. Rest well and enjoy sweet dreams of democracy!! ♥️🙏🏽🙏🏿🙏♥️
A lovely bridge and a wonderful vision. Sleep tight and awake renewed. It has been a long week.
I love this photo - it looks like it's asking to be a painting!
To live on a boat (again) was my husband’s dream retirement. What we could afford was a used French rental boat - actually English, as it was built on the Norfolk Broads for a French rental boat company. We spent a month on her in the summer of 2021 and went back in October to spend most of the year until October of 2011. We started off on the Canal du Midi, but that canal became so crowded that my husband decided, after a second trip up the Rhône, that we should stay north where we could move about freely. Our home port was Pont-de-Vaux, a small town 100k north of Lyon and 3k east of the Saône. Because my husband was an experienced boats man and I had years of French as student and teacher behind me, we explored rivers and canals, ate from farmers markets and occasionally from Michelin restaurants and, with visitors, explored the champagne houses of the Marne, all the while watching climate change become more and more obvious in every facet of our lives.
That’s much more than you asked for, but I must add that until the pandemic I visited friends in France every year from 2012 (the year of my husband’s death) until the pandemic closeted me in 2020. One friend in the Nièvre emailed the day after DT was elected “You must come live with me.” I renew that invitation every year. She lives on a huge cattle farm where every year now the family grows more wheat and fewer cattle and sheep because the EU hopes to “feed more people.”
As you see from this, I have seen much of France from a boat, most of it beautiful. A girl from farming country in Virginia, the first city lived in as a student, was Paris. When I say “I am going to France,” the response is frequently “You are going to Paris” so I have to explain that I will land there, but catch a train at the airport for another place, visiting Paris friends on my way out of France, a country so much more than its capital. To have seen the battlefields of WWI and arrive by boat at St. Valéry-sur-Somme where William the Conqueror set sail for England is a thrill as great as any to be had in Paris!
Thank you for asking the question and please forgive the early morning pleasure in over-answering it.
We all need to spend time in nature. On the water. In the water. Too many of us are much too disconnected from the real world, from our planet...from the universe...and live here in the electronic land of flashing lights in a box. Thanks for the reminder. I'm going to visit my granddaughter today and get centered on a 2 1/2 years olds level of being.
Thank you.
You are making such a difference.
You're heading to bed as my wife and I start to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary. Sleep tight as I look forward to your posts.