If I Could Turn Back Time

 In my high school we had one student of Japanese descent. I didn't know her well. We talked once in a while. One day she told me that the United States government put her family in a detention camp.

 I said, "No."

She said, "Yes."

I said I never heard about that in history class. We left it at that.

If I could turn back time I would change my response. The person who I am now, who knows more now, would have said, "The government put your family in a detention camp? How terrible for you and your family. I would love to learn more about that. Can we get together and I can ask you more questions?"

 

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Replaceable You

 Mary Roach is a medical/humor writer and one of my favorites. She wrote Stiff, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, Fuzz and others. This time I read Replaceable You: Adventures In Human Anatomy.  Having had a few parts replaced myself (lenses, hips) I felt weird reading about myself. She travels to a burn  unit where they use frog skin to cover burns. She travels to China to explore genetically modified pigs to replace human parts. She writes about amputee replacements. Through her work she gets to sit in on surgeries and autopsies and other interesting places that the general public doesn't get to visit. Her book is very entertaining and informative.

 

 

The Fox And I

Catherine Raven has a PhD in biology. She worked as a National Park ranger in Washington and Montana. She bought a small isolated cabin in Montana. She taught classes remotely and also at Yellowstone National Park. One day she noticed a mangy looking fox hanging around her cabin. She thought garlic would cure the mange so she started feeding the fox raw eggs and garlic in half an egg shell. She and the fox developed a relationship. She read books to the fox. She used her relationship with the fox in her classes. She wrote the book The Fox and I. I enjoyed the book but I think the same story could have been told in half as many pages.  

 

 

Dingley Falls

 Dingley Falls is a literary novel first published in 1980. The author is Michael Malone. The book is long. I spent a little over 9 hours reading it. The author starts out introducing the characters. And there are a lot of characters. That part was a little hard to get through. After 20+ characters are introduced the book moves chronologically. The author describes a morning in Dingley Falls by talking about the weather. After that he tells us what all the characters are doing. We learn about what time they woke up, what they had for breakfast, and where they were headed for the day. The characters range from teenagers to senior citizens. One lady works at the post office and her husband is the sheriff. One guy is a banker. His wife is the town gossip. His two teenage daughters are getting into trouble. One guy, the owner of an antique store, has got to be a psychopath. The story telling is great. Many of the scenes are humorous.

 

 

Memorial Day

 This morning I traveled to lakeside park in Winona for the Memorial Day festivities. We started with the pledge of allegiance. The municipal band played the national anthem while the big crowd sang along. Two kids from a local high school read poems about Flanders Field (about a location in Belgium during world war one). The band played the song from all four branches of the military. People who served in each branch stood up while the song from their branch of the military was played. An English teacher from a local parochial school gave a speech. A man from a Quaker congregation gave one too. We heard four veterans shoot their rifles three times. The crowd moved over to the lake to honor those lost at sea. Then the crowd moved over to the gazebo. Before the gazebo were 200+ white crosses in the turf. As each name of a Winona resident killed in action was read aloud a boy scout (including girls) laid a wreath on that white cross. While this was happening a man playing a bagpipe played Amazing Grace over and over until all the crosses had wreaths on them. We had another volley of gun fire followed by a mournful/jazzy rendition of Taps.  We had a very nice ceremony.

 

 

Trempelau

Today I went to Trempelau National Wildlife Refuge. This is a 15 minute drive from my house and across the Mississippi into Wisconsin. Black locust trees were in bloom and the air smelled so sweet.

I saw sandhill cranes, Baltimore Orioles, Northern mockingbird, Northern Waterthrush, common yelowthroat, scarlet tanager, yellow warblers, gray catbirds, house wrens, song sparrow, field sparrow, red-eyed vireos, Canadian geese, American robins, blue jays, red winged black birds, tree sparrows and great blue herons. Someone else reported seeing a nighthawk here yesterday but I didn't see any.

This is spiderwort.

This is white campion. I loved pulling these flowers apart when I was young.

Slender leafy spurge

Yellow salsify

Driving on the wildlife loop I saw more lupine than I have ever seen before. These are native lupine. Some hills were covered in beautiful purple lupine.

I would have guessed false Solomon seal but my phone app says it is Solomon's plume.

I like the name of this one - mouse eared chickweeds.

I walked out on an isthmus on the Pine Creek nature trail. Minnesota is far is the distance. I only got 3 woodticks today. I found two of them crawling up my leg while I was parked with the door open reading on my phone.

 

The Jump Off Creek

 The Jump Off Creek is a historical fiction novel written by a lady from Oregon named Molly Gloss. A woman named Lydia decides to homestead on her own in the mountains of Oregon in the 1890's. Why anyone would choose such a difficult life is beyond me. She arrives at her cabin to find a couple of men squatting there. They move along and she starts to clean the cabin. She brought a couple of goats and a pair of mules. Her goal is to raise cattle on her land. Her nearest neighbors are a pair of bachelor brothers who lend her a hand and offer advice. Most of the book is about the weather and the hard work.