It is 9 a.m. EDT and on FB there was a memory that came up from ten years ago today. In my house on Benjamin Street in NE Minneapolis, Minnesota I was yep, canning tomatoes. As I type 7 quarts of tomatoes have been canned and are cooling, and 6 pints of tomato juice are bubbling away in the water bath. So much has changed in these ten years, and yet here I am still canning in my kitchen in Patten, Maine. My house is full of jams and salsa's and summer squash and herbs from my container garden. The past ten days have been gloriously sunny, warm and a reminder that summer had not yet finished its show. Yesterday, the winds changed. The breeze which has been mostly absent of late returned, and with it more than a hint of fall. The colors are beginning, and the talk everywhere is if we will have a vibrant fall color season, or if the dry spells we have had will dull out the color. Whatever it is, the nights are cool and getting cooler, the sun has shifted so very f
HOPE FREEDOM JOY WE ARE NOT GOING BACK! It is the day after the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was just miles away from the Convention Site in Chicago in 1968. I had just graduated from college and I did not have big dreams. My Mother's biggest stated dream for me was graduating from High School, I do believe that both my Grandmother and my Mother had bigger dreams for me, but life circumstances, the times, and their own conflicted hopes and fears could not allow them to say them out loud. I sat in the living room of my house, watching what was happening outside of the convention. I had friends that had gone, and in those moments something stirred deeply in me. I had been slowly opening my eyes and heart to what was happening in my world - the conflicts within our own country, the conflicts around the world, Vietnam, Civil Rights, who held power, who took it away. Questioning what stories we were told and who thought they had a monoply on the truth