Happy Longest Day of Sunlight Of The Year

 

Steamboat Days

Today is the end of a five day celebration here in Winona called steamboat days. There was a carnival a few blocks away on 2nd Street. Here on 3rd Street was a classic car show. Musicians performed at Levee Park. Food trucks were available. Princesses were elected.

This afternoon a parade was held on Broadway. I brought a chair and watched the performance. Here are the Clydesdale horses. My favorite are the marching bands. I saw high school bands from all over SE Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Richfield and Montevideo high school bands came too. Parades get a little crazy. Tiny children run into the street for tootsie rolls and starbursts while giant machines with big wheels go by. There was a pumpkin thrower from a rural Wisconsin town. Instead of pumpkins they loaded the explosive device with 2 inch plastic balls. The kids enjoyed catching the balls. Another refuse hauler had a t-shirt bazooka that threw blue company logo t-shirts into the crowd. I don't know why some of these events are so popular.

 

Whistler

 Whistler is Ann Patchett's newest novel. The story is about Daphne. Daphne and her husband are visiting the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City. An older, white haired man seems to be following them. The man turns out to be Daphne's stepfather who was married to her mother for a year when Daphne was nine years old. Daphne and her stepfather were involved in a car accident one winter night when she was nine. After the accident Daphne's mother divorced her step-father and she never saw him again. Daphne and her step-father were quite close. Her mother never explained why she divorced him. Once they met again at the art museum, nothing could keep them apart. Sometimes family fiction is the best.

 

 

Bad Move

Linwood Barclay is the author of Bad Move. This mystery/comedy fiction novel is about a guy name Zach Walker. Zach is very concerned about safety. Prior to his wife and two teenaged children moving to the suburbs, they lived in the city. Lately their neighborhood had taken a turn for the worse with drug users and prostitutes frequenting the area. He decided to move to a new subdivision in the suburbs. His wife worked for a local newspaper. He worked from home. The two kids attended high school. Zach has a problem with his wife leaving her keys in the vehicle or hanging from the front door lock. Zach has a problem with his two kids leaving their backpacks at the top of the stairs which is a serious tripping hazard. Zach is a nagger about safety. Sometimes he makes bad moves. When he found his wife's keys in the car he decided to move the car around the corner and out of sight leading her to believe the car was stolen. She did not appreciate his safety lesson. Zach makes a series of bad moves like this when an actual crime occurs in his neighborhood. Two people are murdered and thanks to his bad moves he is implicated in one of the murders. This is a somewhat humorous story about a paranoid freak of an anxious and unlikable character. 

 

 

The Lost Story Of Eva Fuentes

I read a book set in Cuba. The Lost Story Of Eva Fuentes was written by Chanel Cleeton. The story is told by three women in three timelines. Eva's story is told in 1900 before Castro came to power. With other Cuban teachers, they traveled to Massachusetts to study at Harvard for the summer. She writes a book while she is there. Pilar's story is told in Havana in 1966. Pilar is a librarian trying to save books from being destroyed by the government. Any books critical of the government are banned. People who leave Cuba are not allowed to take their belongings with them. Pilar hides books for families and arranges for them to get their books back in the United States. Margo's story is that she is working for people who have lost art or rare books. Her job is to track down their belongings. Her job in searching for Eva's book puts her in danger. The writing was beautiful and the history was richly detailed.

 

 

Weaver Dunes

Today I volunteered to collect seeds at Weaver Dunes Scientific and Nature Area which is run by the Nature Conservancy. The location is near the town of Kellogg. I was the first  person to arrive. On the driveway I spotted this mature Blandings turtle. I stopped the car and approached the turtle. I waited a few minutes. I talked to it. I explained the danger of waiting in the road. I touched it with my foot. The turtle wouldn't move. Another car approached. A man got out. Together we went to see the turtle which had decided at that point to move off the road. We followed the trail of it's tail and found it waiting in the tall grass on the way to a pond. The female Blandings turtle are sexually mature at age 14 so seeing one this size was very satisfying. This is turtle nesting time.

This is a hairy puccoon.

Our goal was to collect porcupine grass. I put a bungee cord around some belt loops and ran the handle of a milk jug through the cord. I think I gather a little more than half a cup of seed. Porcupine grass has sharp seeds. Seriously sharp seeds. You could remove a splinter from your skin with one of these seeds. One seed even punctured the plastic of the milk jug. The seed tips are heavy and have a long attachment called an awn. We removed the awns so the seeds wouldn't get all twisted together.

The prairie was very pretty. I have never seen so much healthy and lush poison ivy in my life. I washed my clothes and took a shower when I got home. This delicate beauty was all over the hills. This is called a larkspur which is in the delphinium family.

Besides our leader from the Nature Conservancy, four other men made up our group.

This is called goat's rue.

Our leader said they found a new species of milkweed on an east facing hill. She spent an hour looking for it. Last week it was knee high and had a flower bud on it. She found it but most of the plant had been eaten. This is a clasping milkweed. The leaves attach to the stem in a different way that other milkweed.

I always thought of this as goat's beard but the actual name is salsafy. Salsafy sounds much like satisfy. Salsafy is how you feel after you eat a tasty taco.

Our three hours were almost up when we found this fawn lying next to the roadway. I thought one older man in our group would really enjoy seeing this fawn since he seemed to love nature so much. I point out the fawn and wait for his reaction. He pretends to shoot it with a gun. You can never tell with some people.

 

Martha's Vineyard Beach And Book Club

 If you like historical fiction I think you would like Martha's Vineyard Beach And Book Club written by Martha Hall Kelly. The author has family ties to Martha's Vineyard as her grandparents had a grocery store on the island. The story is about two sisters who lived on the island year round. They weren't as wealthy as the summer visitors. They lived with their grandmother on a farm near the end and high point of the island. Their brother also lived with them. Before he went off to fight in Normandy in World War Two their brother planted a crop of potatoes that should ripen before other potatoes guaranteeing them a high price at harvest time. One of the sisters, Briar, was unconventional. She wore men's clothing. She spotted German submarines offshore and reported their presence so often no one believed her. The other sister, Cadence, loved to read. With a group of friends they started a book club on the beach. A mysterious man washes ashore and is taken in by Cadence, Briar and the grandmother. A enemy spy is on the island but Cadence and Briar have a hard time figuring out who it is. The title of the book and the picture on the cover would lead you to believe that this is a romance book but that is false. This is historical fiction at it's finest.