I write southern historical fiction, local history, and I've written a devotional book. The two novels I'm writing are set in Virginia and the Carolinas in the 1760s. My weekly blog started out to follow my journey as a writer and a reader, but in 2025 it has been greatly expanded to include current events and politics in the United States as I see our democracy under attack from within. The political science major in me cannot sit idly by and remain silent.
Do you remember last year when I introduced my book, I Need The Light! 26 Weekly Devotionals to Help You Through Winter? It’s mid-September and time to remind people who live in the northern hemisphere to reconsider that book. Although it is still much warmer than normal here in North Carolina in mid-September, I don’t want fall and winter to sneak up on you.
I Need The Light! 26 Weekly Devotionals to Help You Through Winter, by Janet Morrison
I wrote the book from my own experience. I don’t just dislike cold weather, I dread autumn and winter. That’s half the year! What a waste of my time and energy! It’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I thought it only affected people in the cold, but I have read that some people experience this in the spring and summer.
When I was given my diagnosis, the physician’s assistant urged me to get out in the bright sunshine every morning. Since I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis, that simple-sounding recommendation continues to be a challenge for me. When you don’t sleep well (or at all) at night, and you wake up every morning feeling worse than you did when you went to bed – even if you got a few hours of sleep — early mornings are not an enjoyable time of the day.
It was one morning as I walked that I kept repeating to myself, “I need the light. I need the light. I need the light.” It was perhaps the fifth time I said those words that I realized that the short sentence had a double meaning.
I need light to help me cope with SAD, but I need The Light – Jesus Christ – to help me cope with all facets of my life. That is why “The” is capitalized in the book’s title.
Each weekly devotional looks at a different passage in the Bible that references light or The Light. I quote five versions of the Bible in each devotional and I draw on several other books and Bible commentaries in my comments about each passage. Each week includes a suggested activity and a recipe for a comfort food.
People have commented that they like the conversational style in which the devotionals are written. That pleases me because that’s the comfortable and familiar manner in which I hoped to share my thoughts.
These are books that you can read again every year and get something new out of them. I hope you or someone you know who does not thrive in cold weather will find these books helpful.
I concentrated on my writing in August, to the detriment of my reading; however, I did read two interesting and very different books.
P.S. I Forgive You: A Broken Legacy, by D.G. Kaye
P.S. I Forgive You: A Broken Legacy, by D.G. Kaye
In this memoir, D.G. Kaye writes about how difficult and painful it was to grow up with a narcissistic mother. Everything was always and only about her mother, so Kaye grew up knowing that she could never be good enough to gain her mother’s praise.
Kaye writes about how she and her siblings coped in different ways through the years and then handled the situation differently when they reached adulthood. Kaye struggled to make her decision to estrange herself from her mother, but as her mother’s death approached and came to pass she had to deal with that decision all over again.
Kaye loved her mother, but she eloquently writes about how difficult it was to live with her and under her lingering influence.
P.S. I Forgive You: A Broken Legacy is not an easy read, but I highly recommend it.
For people like me, who had a wonderful mother who always put her children ahead of her own desires and needs, I found it jarring to read about Kaye’s experience.
I was fortunate beyond all measure in my childhood home life.
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau, by Kristin Harmel
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau, by Kristin Harmel
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau, by Kristin Harmel was the August pick for the Rocky River Readers Book Club. It created lots of good discussion. The moral question presented by this novel is whether it is ever all right to steal.
Intrigued?
The book’s protagonist, Colette Marceau, was born in to a family of jewel thieves. The catch, is that her mother told her that they were descendants of Robin Hood and, therefore, their thievery was justified in that they used the proceeds for good causes.
Specifically, Colette dedicated her life to stealing jewels from Nazis and Nazi sympathizers and putting all the money gained from those jewels to build and maintain a Holocaust museum/center.
The story revolves around the disappearance of her sister along with her sister’s half of a butterfly bracelet. Colette had the other half. In her later years, Colette set out to find her sister’s half of the bracelet and determine who killed her.
The story becomes very complicated as everyone is not who they claim to be, there are familial connections you won’t see coming, and was the body retrieved from the river actually Colette’s sister… or did she survive World War II?
All the loose ends are tied up in the end, and some of them will surprise you.
When we think about earthquakes in the United States, our thoughts usually jump to California, but 140 years ago today Charleston, South Carolina experienced a powerful one.
Present-day street scene in Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by Leo Heisenberg on Unsplash
The Charleston Earthquake predated the Richter Scale, but it is estimated now that it was probably a magnitude 6.9 to 7.3. It was felt as far north as Boston, as far west as New Orleans, as far south as Cuba, and as far east as Bermuda.
It was felt here in the southern piedmont of North Carolina, so I wrote about it in 2010 when I was writing a local history column for a newspaper. Therefore, my two-part newspaper series about “Earthquakes Felt Here” is included in my book, Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Book 2.
Sand and water spewed from fissures in the ground approximately 12 miles west of Charleston, and it is believed that the earthquake was most intense in that area. The sound was compared to that of steam escaping from a boiler. The term for that is soil liquefaction.
Reading that was the first time I remembered hearing about that possible result of an earthquake.
The Times, a newspaper in Concord, North Carolina, reported that the first shock at 9:52 pm toppled chimneys and kerosene lamps in homes. That three-and-a-half-minute shock caused houses to crack and sway.
A second shock came fifteen minutes later, and a third one came about fifteen minutes later. Aftershocks were felt here in Cabarrus County, North Carolina (200 miles northwest of Charleston) through at least September 5.
Other topics in Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Book 2 include the following: an 1849 meteorite, the 22-mile ring dike Harrisburg sits in, the building of the Rocky River Presbyterian Church’s fourth sanctuary in 1861, baseball, the Piedmont Area Development Association, the incorporation of Harrisburg in 1973, the Sauline Players, bridges built over Rocky River in the 1870s, Rocky River Academy, an attempted train robbery in 1907, a tribute to George L. Govan, a year without a summer (1816), gristmills, early schools, the push to get electricity in 1928, the coming of the “high-speed” rail in 2012, and the Pioneer Mills goldmining community.
Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Book 2, by Janet Morrison
Janet
All history is local, but no history is just local
Note: I failed to include the following information in my original post: There were at least 60 deaths. Approximately 2,000 buildings were severely damaged and most of the chimneys in Charleston and the Summerville area were toppled. Damages were estimated at more than $5 million at the time of the earthquake, which would be around $200 million in today’s dollars.
I love maps, but just let me say that the Trump Administration has once again acted loose and fast with the facts.
We all remember when Trump took a Sharpie pen and altered a NOAA hurricane prediction map to show Hurricane Dorian taking aim at Alabama.
The latest in White House-issued maps was apparently intended to substantiate Trump’s threat to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America and to remind us that, in Trump’s mind, the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America. Trump believes he has the authority to do whatever strange thought crosses his mind. He believes if he says it, it is true. He believes if he does it, it is legal.
That latest White House-issued map is a Lego map. Perhaps it was AI-generated. If so, it stands as a prime example of why AI cannot be trusted. Regardless of who or what created the map, it was the White House that proudly issued the map on the internet for all the world to see.
I preface the following paragraph by reminding you that I have lived in North Carolina my entire life. I have visited Washington, DC several times. I visited the Great Dismal Swamp two years ago.
You see, in addition to proudly displaying “Lake America” and the “Gulf of America,” this week’s Trump map places Washington, DC smack in the middle of the Great Dismal Swamp in northeastern North Carolina.
Map of USA posted by the Trump White House on social media on August 25, 2026
It is ironic that Trump campaigned promising to “drain the swamp,” but now he has apparently moved our nation’s capital 200 miles south to real one.
Janet
The government should be afraid of its citizens, not the other way around.
P.S. I didn’t even mention the social media post that the U.S. Department of Education had to take down this week when it was brought to their attention that it equated the Trump Administration with Nazi Germany.
Perhaps someone in the Department of Education needs to study World War II. Or… could it be that someone inside the Administration was trying to tell us something?
I have heard it said that the 19th Amendment “gave” women the right to vote. The verb “gave” or “gives” is a slap in the face of all the women (and men) who risked their lives to have the right to vote.
Photo by LSE Library on Unsplash
It would be tantamount to saying that black people in the United States were “given” civil rights in the 1960s. No, they earned every one of those rights. The word “give” in all its tenses and forms insinuates that rights were bestowed as a gift. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In July, I read an excellent little book, Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote, by Susan Zimet. I told you a little bit about it in my August 4, 2026 blog post, Books I read (or attempted to read) in July 2026. I urge you to read that book.
Roses and Radicals, by Susan Zimet
The road to women securing the right to vote in the United States started before the nation’s founding. In 1776, Abigail Adams famously told her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” as the Declaration of Independence was being contemplated and written.
Of course, John Adams did not take her pleas to heart (and probably paid for his foolishness in various ways for the rest of his life.) The Declaration of Independence states that “all men were created equal.” Today, we (well, most of us) take that to mean “all people were created equal,” but women were technically and deliberately left out of the Declaration. But I digress
As is told in Roses and Radicals, it took women down a very long and winding road to secure the right to vote. There were women’s rights conventions and campaigns throughout the decades from 1840 until the 19th Amendment was finally made part of the U.S. Constitution in 1920.
Women were beaten and arrested for marching in the streets and simply for standing beside streets to protest the lawful discrimination that was holding them back from being all they could be. They had to fight for education, not just the right to vote.
That story cannot be condensed into a blog post. There’s just too much history – too much history that was never included in a single history textbook I ever read – for me to do it justice here.
It is an unbelievable story, akin to the story of how many centuries it took for people of color to get rights equal to their white counterparts in the United States. There is still racial discrimination that flies under the radar of the law. We see it every day. We also still see blatant racism in Trump wanting to plaster his name (no doubt, in giant gold letters) on the aircraft carrier that was already designated to be named in honor of World War II hero Mr. Doris Miller. Mr. Miller just happened to be black. His story of heroism during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is extraordinary. Trump, on the other hand, dodged the draft because he claimed to have bone spurs.
Back to the 19th Amendment…
Those of us born after 1920 cannot fully appreciate the sacrifices made by women (and by people of color) to try to get the right to vote in this country.
Photo by LSE Library on Unsplash
It astounds me to think that when my mother was born in 1912, women did not have the right to vote! The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not ratified until 1920. That’s just 33 years before I was born! I simply cannot get my head around that fact. To put that 33 years in perspective, 33 years ago today it was 1993!
And now, in 2026 in the U.S. we have people in positions of power, including the U.S. President, who are pushing for a so-called SAVE America Act which will make it more difficult for married women in our country to vote. It goes well beyond “voter ID.” A married woman – or anyone whose name today does not match their birth certificate – will be required to produce documentation of every name change they’ve had.
This is primarily targeting married women, regardless of what supporters of the Act claim. It is an alleged solution to a problem that does not exist: voter fraud.
Don’t be fooled! The real crime is voter suppression.
Today’s blog post is about a North Carolinian most North Carolinians have never heard of. Such is the way that women and people of color have been left out of our history books.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born in slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina on August 10, 1858. She never knew who her father was. This wonderful photograph of her can be found at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016702852/.
Dr. Anna Julia Cooper Photo from Library of Congress website.
After the slaves were emancipated, she enrolled in St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh. The school was supported by the Freedmen’s Bureau and was created to educate black people to become teachers. A local pastor made it financially possible for her to attend the school.
She was not just any student. She went to school at St. Augustine’s for 14 years and took every course offered, including the ones that had only been open to male students.
She graduated in 1877 and married George A.C. Cooper, a theology student at St. Augustine’s from the Bahamas. Unfortunately, George died in 1879.
Cooper taught at St. Augustine’s for two more years after her husband’s death until she was accepted for study at Oberlin College in Ohio. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin in 1884 and an honorary Master’s degree there in 1887.
She started teaching at the M Street Washington High School in Washington, D.C. in 1887, and became more involved in social activism after moving to the nation’s capital. She was an advocate for black students to have college opportunities.
Cooper’s book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, was published in 1892. It is acclaimed as the first book-length work about black feminism. She put forth the theory that black women were in the unique position of having to face discrimination due to their gender and the color of their skin. (I’m sure Dr. Cooper would be distressed to know that they are still in that position in 2026!)
Cooper helped found the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C. in 1892 and served as the corresponding secretary. At the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in Boston in 1895, Cooper was a delegate. She delivered a paper calling for organization of black people at the conference. The National Federation of Afro-American Women no doubt came about in response to the Boston conference. Cooper took an active role in that organization.
In 1900, Cooper spoke at the Pan-African Conference in London, but she focused her efforts in her own community in Washington, D.C. where she became the principal of the M Street High School.
She and W.E.B. DuBois had similar theories about race, but DuBois and Booker T. Washington locked horns. Cooper moved to Missouri for a while to get away from their political differences. She returned to M Street High School in 1911.
In case you aren’t sufficiently impressed by Anna Julia Haywood Cooper…
In 1912, she went to Paris and finished translating Le Pèleringae de Charlemagne. She studied at Columbia University for several summers and then completed her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris, thus becoming the fourth black American woman to earn a Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis about slavery and the French Revolution was translated into English in 1988.
Dr. Cooper became president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. in 1929. She gave the university her home for its permanent site. The “Hannah Stanley Opportunity School” at the university was named for Dr. Cooper’s mother.
Dr. Cooper died at the age of 105 on February 27, 1964. She and her husband were buried in City Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.
My March 20, 2026 blog post
When I posted a blog titled “Puzzling Banners at Dept. of Education” on March 20, 2026, Ni of ShiraDestProjectDoBetter (shiradest.wordpress.com) reminded me that Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s image should have been on one of the banners hanging on the U.S. Department of Education headquarters building in Washington, D.C.
(To jog your memory, in my post I questioned why in the world Charlie Kirk’s image was on one of the banners. I never did figure that one out!)
Ni was exactly right. Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s image should have been honored there alongside Booker T. Washington and Catharine Beecher.
Janet
Never take access to higher education for granted.
After having a very good month of reading in June, I had high hopes for July, but sometimes our reading experiences don’t meet our expectations on all counts. July turned out to be a mixed bag.
The River Knows My Name, by Kelly Mustian
The River Knows My Name, by Kelly Mustian
After reading The Girls in the Stilt House, Kelly Mustian’s debut novel in 2021, I kept hoping she would write another historical novel. She came through for us last year with The River Knows My Name. I finally got around to reading it in July.
As the blurb on Amazon states, it is “a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love.” Set in the early 1930s in Mississippi and 1971 in North Carolina and Mississippi, Mustian has woven a story of intrigue, family loss and love, and how one decision can affect generations to come.
Why did Evie appear at Nell’s house when they were young children and Evie never left? What did Evie’s hidden birth certificate reveal?
This is a dual timeline novel, which you know is not my favorite format, but I stayed with it because the characters and the plot drew me in from the beginning. Mustian did a masterful job of telling a complicated story of secrets, the passage of time, “where there’s a will there’s a way” perseverance, the love a mother has for her child, and how family isn’t necessarily based on biology.
I highly recommend The River Knows My Name, and I hope Kelly Mustian will gift historical novel fans with many more novels.
John of John,by Douglas Stuart
John of John, by Douglas Stuart
After watching an online interview of Douglas Stuart, I eagerly awaited my name reaching the top of the waitlist for John of John at the public library.
I have had the privilege of visiting the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I have spent some time on the Isle of Lewis and visited the Isle of Harris. They are wild and stark and incredibly beautiful!
John of John, by Douglas Stuart is set on Harris. The author does a great job of giving you the setting. The moon-like starkness, the incessant wind coming off the Atlantic, the sometimes-rough ferry crossing of The Minch – the body of water between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides. The houses, the crofts, the weavers of Harris Tweed (which is also made in cottages on Lewis), the single-track roads, the sheep, the Gaelic native language, and the conservatism of the Free Presbyterian denomination (which is quite different from the Church of Scotland) are all brought to light in this novel.
The setting is almost a character in the book because to give the landscape and climate justice, one has to be immersed in it to truly appreciate the story.
The protagonist is John MacLeod, son of John MacLeod, son of Iain (John in Gaelic), son of Iain MacLeod. Young John has left the island to go to art school. He has gotten caught up in the fast life (life everywhere is “fast” compared to life in the Outer Hebrides) in Edinburgh. His father calls him home to care for his ailing maternal grandmother.
The younger John is not keen on the idea. The life he has lived on the mainland as a gay young man will surely upset his devout Free Presbyterian father to the point that he expects his father will disown him. How long can he keep his homosexuality a secret from his father.
But his father also has a secret.
If you are sensitive to “F-bombs,” you might not enjoy this book. I accepted them as apparently being part of the homosexual scene in which the younger John lived. Not that all homosexuals casually use this language, but it was part of the make up of the younger John – probably as part of his rebellion against the strict religious home in which he had been raised.
I tired of the story after 150 pages. There were other books I wanted to read, so I returned John of John to the public library. Kudos to the author for transporting me to the Outer Hebrides for a few hours.
Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote, by Susan Zimet
This book caught my eye when I was at the public library the week of July 4th. It was part of a display the librarians had assembled of books pertaining to the 250th birthday of the United States Declaration of Independence and related patriotic books and history books.
The book prompted me to pause and contemplate the incredible sacrifices the women (and a few men) made throughout the first fourteen decades of our country’s history to work toward the passage of a Constitutional Amendment that would make it unlawful for any state in the union to prohibit anyone from voting based on their sex.
I will write more about the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in my blog post on August 26 – the 126th anniversary of the ratification of that amendment.
Roses and Radicals is a relatively small book of barely 150 pages, including the bibliography and index. I thought it would be a quick read.
Sprinkled throughout the book are sidebar-like sections within chapters that tell the stories of individual including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, Lucretia Mott, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida B. Wells, and Edith Wilson. A book could be written about each on of them.
Roses and Radicals begins with the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Elizabeth Cady Stanton accompanied her husband, who was a convention delegate. But her story began when she was five years old and her last brother died. Her father said to her, “Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy.”
In response to that remark, she was determined to be the son her father had lost. That path served to show her how difficult it would be for a woman to fulfill the burden her father had placed on her because women were so restricted by law and society norms. Fathers held legal rights over daughters and husbands held legal rights over their wives and children.
But, getting back to the anti-slavery convention in 1840… The wives of delegates and the women delegates were not allowed on the main floor. They were relegated to a balcony. The women were so incensed that they began laying plans during the convention. If people from around the world could meet to work for the abolition of the slavery of Africans, the women concluded that they could organize themselves and fight for the rights of women.
The book tells how each of the women I named in an above paragraph worked for the equality of women, women’s rights in the eyes of the law in the United States, and ultimately for women to have the right to vote. It gives little-known details of how women worked behind-the-scenes as well as marching in the streets to secure women the right to vote.
Janet
Too many books. Not enough time. Not enough bookcases. Never take your right to read – or your right to vote — for granted.
We all have days when every little thing seems to go wrong and one insignificant event leads to another insignificant event until things come to a head.
I had one of those afternoons yesterday.
It all started last week with a fraudulent charge on my credit card which necessitated the issuance of a new card. I had finally gotten comfortable with my old security code. Oh well.
Yesterday I received an email from the credit card company indicating that I needed to go to my account where I would find a letter regarding my fraudulent charge claim.
When I went into my account, it said I didn’t have any letters or notices, so I got my card in hand and prepared to call the credit card company.
But first, this might take more than a few minutes. I need some water. That’s when things took a turn.
I went to the kitchen for water. Decided a couple of ice cubes would be nice. In the process of getting two ice cubes out of the freezer compartment, I hit my “funny bone” on the door which made my hand release the ice cubes which hit my bare toes.
That wasn’t enough. I realized the washing machine had stopped, so I went to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer before calling the credit card company.
I got to the laundry room.
That’s when I stepped in water.
Janet
Prayers for our U.S. military personnel in harm’s way in the Middle East and prayers for the people of Ukraine. My problems yesterday afternoon were tiny.
The United States was officially neutral regarding World War I when, on July 30, 1916, German agents blew up the Black Tom railyard on land that is now part of Liberty State Park in New Jersey.
A blogger friend of mine, Francisco Cabrera, brought this event to my attention a couple of years ago. I had to admit that the Black Tom Explosion in New York City did not sound familiar to me. That was embarrassing!
In an effort to prevent the U.S. from sending munitions to England, spies and the men they recruited had packed two million pounds of explosives in train cars destined for the depot on Black Tom Island. Germany knew tons of munitions were shipped out of Black Tom Island to the Allies, and they apparently knew security there was lax.
Men sorting munitions shells at Black Tom Island railyard. Photo from the Library of Congress.
The 2:08 a.m. explosion and the second one a half hour later shattered thousands of windows in lower Manhattan and Jersey City, New Jersey. I found conflicting casualty reports while researching this post, but at least four people were killed, including an infant.
The Statue of Liberty was pock-marked by shrapnel. The damage to the statue made it necessary to close Lady Liberty’s torch to the public, and it is still closed today.
Property damages in New York and New Jersey were estimated at $20 million, which would be equal to $500 million today. Hundreds of rail cars were destroyed, included 87 filled with dynamite. Thirteen huge warehouses and six piers were destroyed as well as barges tied to the dock.
The explosion registered 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
As a result of the attack, Congress passed the Espionage Act and in 1917 passed the Sabotage Act. Both Acts gave the Bureau of Investigation oversight jurisdiction.
Although not the only act of sabotage by German upon the United States, the attack on Black Tom Island was instrumental in turning public opinion in the United States against Germany.
It was a different time. For instance, the Bureau of Investigation – the forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) only had 260 employees. The FBI website states, “The most successful and experienced anti-sabotage investigators turned out to be the detectives of the New York Police Department’s Bomb Squad. Even so, the German agents who blew up Black Tom were not identified at the time.”
On July 6, 1921, The New York Times reported that Michael Kristoff, a non-citizen and immigrant from Slovakia who served in the U.S. Army in World War I had been arrested and was suspected of taking part in the attack. He had been recruited by a German intelligence operative. Kristoff admitted that he had worked with German agents by carrying suitcases and claimed that two guards at the Black Tom railyard were German agents.
Law enforcement agencies initially dismissed the possibility that it was instigated by Germany. It took lawyers years to pursue the attack for their clients before it was proven before the Mixed Claims Commission at The Hague in 1939 that Germany was behind the attack.
Germany was ordered to pay $50 million in damages but, of course, the Hitler regime did not pay. The case was renegotiated in the early 1950s, but it would be 1979 before the last reparations were made to claimants.
Janet
All history is local, but no history is just local
I took a three- or four-week break from blogging in June. While I disappeared from the blogosphere, I learned some things. Here are 15 of them:
I learned that I can still get lost in reading a book when I’m not trying to blog five or six days a week. I hadn’t read a complete novel in months!
Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi
I learned that it was time for me to take a step back and work to get my life under control.
I learned that depression is not an unusual occurrence in writers and other creative people, and I learned why I am the way I am.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
I learned that depression can be addressed when you have a caring primary care physician who truly wants the best for you.
I learned that people are very forgiving when they know you have a problem.
I learned that I’m a happier person now that I don’t dwell on what Donald Trump is doing. I’m still keeping up, but I’m limiting how much TV news I watch.
I learned that there is a support group for former Trump supporters who leave MAGA. It’s a real thing. Who knew? If you are finally seeing Trump for what he is, you can find a support community at leavingmaga.org.
I was reminded that Trump doesn’t know the difference between socialism and communism.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
I was reminded to be thankful I don’t live in Texas. That state legislature is trying to out-do ours in North Carolina. Tell me again, Texas, where Jesus said the government should beat school children over the head with the Bible. I can’t find that verse.
I think we all learned that hydrogen peroxide kills ducks and can strip American Flag Blue paint off the bottom of a reflecting pool.
Photo by Sydnie Sellers on Unsplash
I think we all learned that it’s foolish, short-sighted, and illegal to give someone a $13 million government contract without going out for competitive bids. (As a former government employee, I already knew that, of course. That’s Public Administration 101 – in addition to being common sense. This is what you get when you put “a businessman” with no experience in government, no knowledge of government, and a total disregard for the rule of law in the White House.)
I learned that listening to music is better than watching TV late at night – and most anytime, for that matter.
I learned that a buck can be mean to a pregnant doe and prevent her from eating the corn you put in the backyard for them to eat so they’d stop eating the shrubbery. That buck doesn’t want any does to eat. I’ve named him Bucky Trump.
I learned that rabbits are brave little creatures who are not afraid to eat at the feet of deer. They obviously know that North Carolina is a “stand your ground” state.
Rabbit eating near a deer. (Sometimes they eat under a deer or at a deer’s feet, but I haven’t gotten a good photo. Taking photos through a window screen is a challenge!)
I learned that when four rabbits organize themselves, they can scare Bucky Trump away from the corn! (Members of Congress, take note!)
I learned a lot in June!
Last week I learned that when a fawn runs away from its mother, Mama Deer will look for her fawn 24/7 to the point of exhaustion. I’m happy to report that a couple of days later, they had reunited and came into our backyard again.
Reunited fawn under the watchful eyes of three does after it learned it’s not a good idea to run away from Mom!
Between the World Cup (¡Muchas felicitaciones, España!) and the wildlife, it has been an entertaining summer so far. It has been sprinkled with thunderstorms, power outages, fried computer speakers, and a fried modem.
There are also daily prayers for our U.S. military personnel in harm’s way in the Middle East and prayers for the people of Ukraine.
Janet's Writing Blog 