A Poem to Start the Week: If I can stop one heart from breaking

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.'

By Emily Dickinson

Walking With Lil & Jordan

 It's great to have Lillian and Jordan with us this weekend and so glad to have their company for an hour or so on a walk along the river. 

Since the last time we walked the trail -- quite a while actually -- the local geocache folks have added a bunch of bollards containing caches. Jordan was not familiar with this activity, so we told him about our few geocaching exploits and about the big annual geocaching weekend that is held in Rome. Naturally of son-in-law, always curious to know about stuff, consulted Mr. Google (or DuckDuck or whatever) and downloaded a geocaching app. On our return walk he found one cache under a rock near the levee. 

Lillian and Jordan have two cats, Waffles (15) and George (8) so we pointed out the grave of Tom Cat along the trail:

Lillian and Jordan sit ion the bench at the trailside grave of Tom Cat near the Mount Berry Trailhead.

As we neared the Little Dry Creek bridge on our return walk I noticed a tree full of berries near the creek. In sandals and pants not meant for bushwhacking I made my way to it and took some pictures. My plant ID app declared it "Possumhaw Holly,"  (Ilex decidua). Maybe

that's right. I'd like to have a couple of these in my yard.

When we got to the railroad bridge and the shelter beneath it we paused for a selfie in indirect lighting. 

In the afternoon we went over to my mother's house where Lillian picked up some of her choices from her grandmother's estate. Then in the evening we visited River Remedy where a charity "chili cook-off" was going on. Good to see several friends. Ty & Caroline were there to eat. James Schroeder was one of the chili cooks. And it was good to see our CRBI friend Amos Tuck and my former fourth grade student and now Australian football enthusiast, Dylan McLaughlin.

This way Mom?

 This little 30 second video has brought me such joy that I want to save it here for the future. Susannah has mastered the scooter at two.

A Short Spring Walk

 It was great to be into the woods my friend Richard Ware again yesterday. We had decided to ride out to Blacks Bluff and do a little spring botanizing along the road at the little ecological jewel right here in town nearly. We thought we might find a toothwort or some other early wildflowers in bloom.  But Tom Spring has been very lazy this year. He has been tardy with his buckets of bright paint for the spring ephemerals. There were just no significant blooms to be found here in the last half of February. 

So we didn't stay long. BUT I'll post a few pictures anyway to memorialize a very pleasant visit with this friend of over sixty years.

101 Years Ago

Mother signing one of her books surrounded by five of her seven children. L-R: Sharlyn Beth Shaw (Roszel), Deborah Ruth Shaw (Lewis), Sarah Ruth Baird (Shaw), Lynda Joan Shaw Turrentine, Charles Terrell Shaw

Today marks the one hundred first anniversary of the day in Porterdale Georgia in 1923 when Wilson and Ieula Baird welcomed their eleventh baby, Sarah Ruth. Ruth was the first of their children to be born "in town". All the others had been born on the farm in the Oak Hill area of Newton County. Wilse (Benjamin Wilson Baird) was 62 years old. Ieula (Ieula Ann Dick Baird) was 37. The couple had lost one baby (Lola Frances) a dozen years earlier at only a few months old. Their eldest child Grice (Wilson Grice) was already 18 years old. Little Leon (James Leon Baird) was just three. 

The joy of this day would turn to terror and sorrow when measles struck the baby and Leon. Leon died when the measles turned to pneumonia. The baby, Ruth, would live more than 98 years. 

What a somber beginning for my mother. But what a wonderful heritage of love and faith she left us. 

Mother was an amazing woman who wrote a lot -- sermons, poetry, reminiscences -- including a blog! She continued to write her blog throughout her eighties and a little into her nineties. "Ruthlace"

She writes about Leon in this post: https://ruthlace.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-cotton-was-king.html

I just posted the following link a few days ago, but just in case -- hear and see my mother here as she explains how to fix biscuits (and also sings a song she wrote.)

I wish I could bring you a bouquet of my daffodils this afternoon, Mother. I hope there are lots of them where you are. I miss you every day.

Forty Biscuits Every Morning

My Mother's breadboard

Handholds are cared underneath on each end.

We don't know how old this breadboard is, but we think it dates to at least the late 1800s.

The following is from a Facebook post in 2016:

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My mother married very young. She and Daddy lived for a very short period in 1938 with Daddy’s parents and then into their own little mill village house in Milstead, home of a Callaway Mills plant. Mother says she learned most of her cooking after she married. She bought a round wooden dough bowl so she could make biscuits daily like her mother always had in her childhood. 

Later as children came along, my grandmother Baird suggested my mother should take her dough bowl since her family was now larger. Mama Baird took mother's smaller round bowl. That’s how the larger hand carved wooden bowl you see here came into the home I grew up in. 

I can remember my mother sifting flour into that bowl, punching a depression into the center then dropping a lump of lard (or later shortening) into it while gradually pouring in buttermilk and working up a big ball of dough with her bare hands— she would say: “Tie back your hair. Roll up your sleeves. Clean your fingernails. Wash your hands as if you were scrubbing for surgery.” — pinching off individual biscuits onto greased baking sheet. A few minutes later she would pull golden brown flaky biscuits from that 375 degree oven. I love my Mama’s biscuits. 

Mama says Joan has dibs on the inheritance of this beautiful prize. 

I wonder how old it is. I suspect it is very old. Who knows its history before Mama Baird gave it to my mother. My great grandmother Baird (Mary Marks Baird) lived with Ieula and BW Baird after she was widowed. I can imagine it coming from some previous family member like that to Mama Baird at some point as she was raising nine children (and burying two others) from 1902 through the forties. But its origin is lost to us.

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Below is a video made by my nephew Jonathan Lewis of my Mother making biscuits in this breadboard in 2009.

Unanimous Decision: No Way, Mr. Trump.

 Today's unanimous court decision knocked down every single contention by the Trump team in their ridiculous arguments that would negate the entirety of the Declaration. No Mr. Trump, no one in a republic is above the law, even a spoiled little boy born on third and screaming that the ump cheated when he gets tagged out stumbling toward home. Trump's lawyers literally argued that a president could have the military murder his political opponent and not be tried criminally.

"At bottom, former President Trump's stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches," the court wrote. "Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the President, the Congress could not legislate, the Executive could not prosecute and the Judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter."

A vote for Donald John Trump is plainly, unabashedly, undeniably, a vote against our republic and for tyranny.

Like Trump the president is old. Unlike his opponent the President makes wise appointments, has principles, knows our history and the ins and outs of how a republic reaches consensus, listens, and makes wise decisions.