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Showing posts from May, 2024

The Zen of Cicadas

  In the summer of 1803 President Thomas Jefferson concluded the purchase of the Louisiana Purchase from the cash-strapped, strutting little tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte.   Jefferson then sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark off to map, explore and document the flora and fauna of the land which nearly doubled the land area of the newly created United States of America.               On that journey through the lands of the Missouri River, the Dakotas and westward to the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark would have heard something that has not been heard in this country again—until this summer.   That is the irritating, pervasive, constant, abrasive sound of a rare double hatch of two periodical cicadas.   Yup, the last time Brood XIX and Brood XIII cicadas both emerged at the same time was 1803.   What is more, a brood is not the same as a species.   Different broods can have many species present.   But this wonderful year, all species of each brood will be surfacing, singing, and co

She Won Against All Odds

My husband’s sister, Kimberly Sue Wynn, died on May 1.   Kim was born with every card in the deck stacked against her.   Born of unknown parents, on an unknown date in an unknown place in South Korea any reasonable person would say that she had no chance for a good life.   It was not unheard of for unwanted Korean babies (especially girls) to be left on the roadside to die from exposure.   Indeed, a Korean child who did not have a Korean man declare himself as father did not even have citizenship.   But Kim’s mother made a critical choice, and Kim was placed in an orphanage.   The orphanage offered her life, though it would be a half-life at best.   She would be given marginal care, marginal food, marginal education.   She would be trained for a life of servitude, with virtually no opportunity for marriage or a family of her own.   But once again, fate took a hand. Half a world away, a family that embodied the best this country offers, decided to add to their family by adopting

My Yearly Take on Cinco de Mayo

  On April 12, 1861, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Ft. Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay, beginning the American Civil War.   Three months earlier, Benito Juarez had been elected President of Mexico.   Like Lincoln, Juarez inherited a country with serious, perhaps fatal, problems.   In Juarez’s case, however, the problems were primarily external. In 1861, Mexico was a country in financial ruin.   It owed money to all of the major European powers and, smelling blood in the water, they were circling the drowning nation.   When Juarez defaulted on the loans France, Britain and Spain all sent their ships into the harbor of Veracruz to wrest something, anything, of value from the destitute government.   Britain and Spain were satisfied with negotiated settlements, but France’s Napoleon III saw a chance to claim some semblance of imperial grandeur by annexing Mexico.    Napoleon III (nephew of the great Bonaparte) was certain he could assure a quick win (and therefore h