WINTER DISPATCHES

Still Continues to snow fast, looks gloomy…

…Mrs Reid of Keysburg, Virg, with us, wood Scarce, difficult to get anymore…

…snow fast yet new snow about 3 feet deep, wind Southwest, no Sign of clearing off…

..and on the twelfth, fell in with some of the Indians, who treated us kindly, gave us Acorns…snowing fast, wind Northwest.  Snow higher than the shanty, must be 13 feet deep, don’t know how to get Wood this morning…

…it is dredful to look at.

-- From the Donner Party journals, January 11-13, 1847

It’s been a rough and cold couple months, a winter of record.

It’s been a full-time job, maintaining against the season, but I think I finally got the hang of it.

I’ve been keeping the thermostat at a balmy seventy degrees…

…although somewhere inside the urban igloo there’s still a considerable draft coming in.

The most likely culprit?  The air-conditioner installed in the eastern row of windows in the bedroom.

On particularly drafty nights, I cover the box up with spare towels right before crawling into bed.

Fresh food is scarce and getting scarcer.

I’ve been hoarding the remainder of my local produce, saving it for a special dinner…

…one final spaghetti squash and one last acorn squash called a carnivale.

Last week, the spaghetti squash’s stem snapped off all on its own, a sure sign that it doesn’t have much time left.

Over the last few days, the carnivale has been developing a waxy residue over its orange mottled ribs, one last defense against the inevitable mold.

I’ll have to eat them both soon or else they go to waste.

After that, it’s beans. 

Maybe mom was right.

Maybe I should move west.

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, OF TREE I SING

It’s Independence Day Weekend here in Philadelphia.  What a fine time to be in the city.

Block parties and live music, barbecues and picnics, burgers and ice cream, sparklers and fireworks, road-blocks and detours, this city truly lives up to the standards and expectations of Founding Farmer John Adams, who once wrote that Independence Day ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade…

…with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Well, actually, he always thought it should be celebrated on the Second of July.

Sorry, old man.

In the Fourth we trust…a celebration of the tried and true totems of American history: the bald eagle and the buffalo, Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty…

…the light bulb and the television and the arcade game, the steamship and the automobile and the space shuttle, the pioneer and the cowboy and the rock star…

 

…and that Old Glory herself…

…that grand old flag we call the Stars and Stripes.

In the spirit of Independence Day, I made a quick pit-stop to pay my respects to our most famous seamstress, Betsy Ross.

She’s buried, right there in Olde City, at 2nd and Old Sassafras Streets, underneath that monumental American elm…

…rocketing over the colonial courtyard, bursting with heavy branches high up in the muggy Coyote sky.

Or, at least, we’re told that she’s buried here.

It turns out that Betsy Ross’s funeral was held on 5th Street.  Twenty years later, her body was exhumed and moved to the now abandoned Mount Moriah Cemetery near Cobbs Creek in West Philly…

…and then, just in time for the Bicentennial of 1976, her body was moved again to this half-museum-half-gift-shop restoration, to be closer to the parade of her colonial brothers and sisters.

 

Or was she?

Rumor has it that, back in 1975, her gravediggers found no bodily remains under her tombstone there in Mount Moriah. 

Only a few bones, found elsewhere in the family plot, were hastily authenticated as Betsy Ross’s and moved to this courtyard…

...just in time for the opening of the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976.

It doesn’t matter.

Fiddle-de-dee.

Like we say here in America, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

And so the legend stands.

She’s buried here, First Seamstress of the United States, the beautiful and noble widow who made, with her own blistered hands, the very first version of the American Flag.

Or did she?