Moving Right Along

Monday Muffineering

In point of fact, this post is the result of Sunday muffineering, which was itself somehow the consequence of Saturday afternoon excess.

Saturday afternoon my true love and I attended the "First Annual BLC Ice Cream Social."  (Thank you, Erika!)  It was more of an orgy than a social.  (This must not be construed as criticism.  Everyone there was a consenting adult.)  Before diving in, I managed to snap one coherent picture, of this Grey Catbird, one of many who had been eying our collected, lusciously melting feast with frank curiosity.

Then I began to glut myself upon taste all the different flavors of ice cream assembled, and my next photo looked like this:

I gave up all pursuits beyond cool, creamy delectation.  Hours later, when the golden-eared bunnies began to appear in the dusk -- not sugar-born hallucinations, but real bunnies, honest! -- my true love managed to snap one enjoying a feast of his own (click to enlarge) --

-- but I collected no other photographic evidence. Just as well, right? What happens at Larz Anderson Park stays at Larz Anderson Park. Er -- maybe.  No guarantees.  I was hardly the only one there who had a camera, after all.

We left in a giddy state.  Is it even legal to drive ice-creamed?  I suspect not.  I suspect the source of impairment is not so important legally as the fact of impairment.  We made it home safely, though, thanks to my true love's excellent driving, and we were so desperate for protein that we called in an order for a steak from Serafina to pick up on the way, take home, and split at once.  It was drenched in chianti, leek and gorgonzola sauce (repulsive looking but great tasting, especially after being scraped off) and accompanied by asparagus and a great heaping blob of naughty, naughty embellished mashed potatoes which had also unavoidably become impregnated with that same sauce.  It was perhaps not the best choice for nourishment designed to restore our wits, and I fell into an epic nap immediately after consuming my half.

And then I awoke craving muffins.

Perversity?  Hair of the dog?  Whatever.  I had to have them.

I was too overcome with lassitude to make them that very night, but yesterday was a different story.  I knew I wanted something that wasn't fluffy white, but my true love winces at the thought of extremely hearty baked goods.  I examined the pantry and the freezer, consulted two cookbooks (Mom's and Betty Crocker's), and these were the results:

Hair of the Ice Cream Dog Peach-Oatmeal-Spice Muffins

all ingredients that were grown were organically grown, of course -- except the oatmeal; I just love McCann's and can only wish it were organic

1 C flour
1 C quick oats
1/3 C your favorite natural sugar
1 T baking powder
½ t sea salt
½ t nutmeg
¼ t cinnamon
¼ t allspice
1 C plain soy milk (cow milk will work fine, I'm sure)
¼ C canola oil
1 T alcohol-free vanilla extract
1 jumbo egg
1 10-oz. pkg frozen peach slices, defrosted, drained, and chopped into two or three pieces each (a cup of chopped fresh peaches would probably be even better, but I didn't have any)
12 large pecan halves
turbinado sugar and allspice for sprinkling

1.  Preheat oven to 400°.

2.  Grease a pan of 12 large (2¼"?) muffin cups with unhydrogenated vegetable shortening or butter and set aside.  (Note:  Although this makes a runny, lumpy batter that doesn't exactly poof, muffins will spread outside their cups while baking, and the turbinado on top of each will caramelize.  This can make removal tricky unless you have not only greased inside the cups but also the top of the pan between the cups, as well.)

3.  Whisk together dry ingredients (except for those set aside for sprinkling) in a medium-sized bowl.

4.  In a large bowl, beat together milk, oil, vanilla, egg, and peach pieces.

5.  Dump dry ingredients into wet all at once.  Gently blend with a spatula or wooden spoon until everything that was dry is now moist, but don't beat it or go crazy obsessive with the even blending because you don't want to wear out the baking powder.

6.  Divide the batter equally among the greased muffin cups.  Top each batter portion with a pecan half, then sprinkle turbinado on top, then very lightly pinch little bits of allspice on top of that.  Although I put the turbinado and the allspice on before the pecans because I was making it up as I went and didn't think of the pecans until after I'd done that, your muffin cups should look something like this:

7.  Bake 20 minutes or until tester comes out dry.  Cool as long as you can stand to before removing from pan and eating; this batch got a whole ten minutes.  The longer you wait, the easier it will be to get them out whole, however.

While they are quite nice cold, being light and moist, these muffins are superb still warm, sort of peach-cobbler-y kind of wonderful, and -- dare I say it? -- might be especially amazing served in that state with vanilla ice cream.

Really perfectly acceptable plain, however.

Distractions from another Saturday

It's raining today, and while the rain has its own loveliness, I am overcome with sloth.  Instead of planting red verbena by my doorsteps in the thready shadow of the Eremerus Bungeii, which is FINALLY setting brush-like, bristly buds and promising to bloom, I shall show you some scenes from the walk my true love and I took at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge here in Concord two Saturdays ago.

Two Saturdays ago, there was more sun, but smaller leaves.  Most leaves were tiny green tufts a true "spring green" just like in the crayon box of my childhood. (Click to enlarge.)

Among the tufts of that green and the pink and white and red of new blossoms were birds as bright as jewels. (Click to enlarge.)

The first we saw once inside the refuge, which is known for its bird populations, was this orange bird (which another enthusiast confidently informed us was a Baltimore Oriole).  I couldn't quite find him on the tiny view screen of my camera.  It is relatively new, a Christmas present from my true love (which I completely forgot how to use while having a brain tumor, incidentally).  Almost all the photos on this blog posted between Christmas 2007 and now were taken using it, but this one had to be shot by my true love because I just couldn't figure out how to find the tiny bird so high above our heads.

"I'd love to try," he told me, having left his own camera at home.

"Please go ahead!"

And he shot this beautiful bird four lovely times, this being my favorite.  Ever since I saw a photo over at esteemed correspondent Leslee's place awhile back, I have been thinking about images like this one, images that give me insight into what the great fabric designers and porcelain painters of ancient Asia were thinking when they invented some of their patterns.  I've been pondering, not the way life imitates art, but the way art has helped me see life, specifically nature, all my life long.  What would this look like to me if I'd never seen a decorated vase or ginger jar, or a beautifully embroidered floral brocade?

It would probably look more like this crop:

That's all I would see.  Or perhaps I would merely think that this was the only "good" part of that previous shot and all the others in the series.  And it's perfectly lovely, too, of course.  But there is more to see, and there is more than one way to see all the same stuff, and that is the delight and the gift of other artists' work, and of the whole millennia-old legacy of art.

In the national wildlife preserve we did indeed see wildlife.  After the Oriole, I was stopped by the beauty of this snake, which another person with a camera told me was an Eastern Water Snake, or a Northeastern Water Snake; I can't remember which.  (I wasn't taking notes, alas.)

I do remember that the man and his wife assured me that this was a male snake, as the females I usually see are much larger and blacker.

So many birds!  There was yet another man with an expensive camera rig attempting with no success to capture one of the stunningly graphic Redwing Blackbirds in the act of flying.  He became increasingly frustrated with every miss.  It was almost as though the birds were taunting him.  He cursed, but persevered.

One posed for me among the cattails --

-- but here is the only wing action I was able to record of any species (and I'm not even sure which species it is, just that it's some kind of corvid):

Beyond the grasses where the snake made his home (click to enlarge),

there was the view (Click to enlarge.) --

-- and beyond that view another, where sunlight filled breeze-rippled open water with glittering dancers gone if you blinked, back before you could blink again, thousands of them, all made of the light itself. (Click to enlarge.)

The view closer in held less of the sparkle,

more of the shine.

Really cute shine.

We wandered idly down the land bridge between the two main ponds.  (Incidentally, we think this path, and at least the two broad, flat ones into which it splits may be wheelchair accessible.  But if you power your own, wear gloves because the path is gravely, sandy dirt, likely to throw myriad tiny but potentially wounding projectiles into your hand flesh.)

All along the paths, benches are placed strategically.  At the "top" of the T where the path splits, there is a bench to the right, and there is also a bench farther up, near the river.  This is where we will land when we canoe here for a picnic some day this summer. (Click to enlarge.)

Perhaps we shall dine among the roots immediately southwest of this bench. (Click to enlarge.)

Perhaps we shall dine across the river.

Perhaps we shall make merry to the east of this bench, dining where this bright little bird dined, maybe leaving crumbs for him and his family and others to enjoy after we have left.

Perhaps we shall tie up the canoe and take a stroll down the gravelly, sandy path between the ponds. (Click to enlarge.)

Maybe we'll even remember to bring binoculars (for once), not just a single digital camera with a zoom lens.

And we will return.  When we return, the tree flowers will be gone, and the leaves will no longer look like a subject for fine embroidery or a painting on an ancient vase. (Click to enlarge.)

There will be other stories when we return, stories sleeping now in the earth and in the green, or that have only just been born --

-- two weeks ago today.

Meanwhile, back in the necropolis...

Friendly robin, where was I?  Oh, yes, I was talking about Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and what I did there on Monday.  I was also talking about esteemed correspondent and honorary niece Elizabeth McClung, and she saw what I had posted, and among other things commented to me, "I really like your cemetery, though it must be THE most un-f*cking-accessible cemetery I have every seen.  What, do you need a hovercraft wheelchair to get there?"

Funny she should mention that, because that was one of the things I wanted to talk about next.  I also wanted to point out some other amusing little tidbits and prettinesses.  But let's talk about the accessibility issue first.

Though still an active cemetery today, with new residents being interred every month, this is nevertheless a nearly 200-year-old burial site, laid and expanded over several small hills, and also in the spaces in between.  It's very natural, very beautiful, and also a bona fide historic place in Massachusetts.

Those of you in wheelchairs can guess what all that means for you as potential visitors.  Yes.  Accessibility is a problem in many, many parts of the park, and this is not likely to change any time soon.  However, everything in the park is not completely out of reach, and some things are very accessible.

I'm going to show you some moderately rough to impossible parts first, just to get them out of the way and give a full sense of the range of challenges in this park for people with limited mobility.  Let's start with a look at the main place I visited, Authors Ridge, where all the Transcendentalist authors are buried.  I accidentally (but without regret) came at it through essentially the back door.

And that was also the long way.  There is another way, a far more direct way, and most likely the only way if you are using a wheelchair. (Click to enlarge.)

This is a nicely paved, wide, well kept path with a banister a couple feet high on at least one side all the way down.  There's just this one problem.

Yeah, it's f*cking steep.  This part here isn't so bad, but you see that sharp lefthand turn up ahead?  Well, this next picture shows how that part of the nicely paved and banister-ed trail looks about half or two-thirds of the way down, assuming you don't get there ass over ears.

This next picture shows the view to the bottom from about where I shot before I clambered down this more vertical branch of the path -- clinging to the rail all the way, I might add, because of course I didn't have a walking stick with me, because what would an adventure of mine be without hubris? (Click to enlarge.)

It's really quite a way down that extremely steep bit.  And I'm not 100% sure there isn't a nice six-inch or higher step at the bottom instead of a ramped finish.  A moderately fit person using a prosthesis and/or a cane can use this path, as I have demonstrated, though I actually found it more challenging than hiking in the back way over cobbled paths, alternately grassy and gravelly slopes, and bare forest earth.  A determined person who is really an expert on crutches could probably do it, too, either way.  And a person in a wheelchair could also use this nice paved path -- if, as Elizabeth has suggested, the wheelchair could fly, or if the person in the wheelchair had a muscular manservant Sven or a few willing Japanese men to assist.  Or something.  Sure, I could probably push someone not very heavy up that slope, probably excruciatingly slowly, but I could not help them get back down; someone with both original legs and a lot of muscles could do better.  And I don't know how a motorized chair or scooter would do here, do you?

Now going from difficult to worse, I don't think anyone in a wheelchair OR scooter is likely to be able to lay flowers on the grave of Daniel Chester French any time soon.  One way up to it is the way I went down from it yesterday, when I discovered that cool thing my new foot can do.  Another way is a small set of rustic stone stairs.  There's one more way, and this is it:

Gorgeous, certainly.  But those are stairs at the end, and this is what this part of the pavement looks like up close.

This is what the unpaved part of the same path looks like in some places.

Lovely, all of it, and it is my pleasure to show it to you, especially those of you in wheelchairs who will not be able to see it for yourselves unless something changes drastically or unless you travel in glass-bottomed palanquins.  And for those of us who still walk but use alternative or supplementary equipment, it can still be quite challenging.  And now you know exactly how challenging.

But look, even though the graves probably of greatest interest to tourists are difficult to impossible for people with limited mobility to reach, it's not all bad or inaccessible.  There are roads coming in off the highway and running through the park on which cars drive every day, some of which are even wide enough for two cars to pass each other.  And mostly, they are broad, not too steep, and well kept.  For example, remember the lovely Melvin Memorial (by the now completely inaccessible French), in front of which I ate my sandwich? (Click to enlarge.)

Well, this is the bench I sat on, which is just tucked off to one side on the road leading down to her.

A moderately fit wheelchair user or a motorized chair or scooter user coming in off the street all alone could do this, and enjoy it I think, and accompanied by someone to help over the steeper bits could have quite a nice outing in the park at large, even without a personal stop at the graves of the Transcendentalists and their families.  You see, this is a very beautiful park, even without all the famous dead people and fancy tombstones.

The park is sprinkled carefully through these forested slopes, preserving as much of the woods as possible, and also maintaining the aspect of a cultivated garden, an aspect which I suspect is rooted (if you'll pardon the pun) in all the flowering plants with which mourners have graced family plots and the graves of their beloveds over so many years.  (Click to enlarge.)

All throughout you can see nature knitting itself into the architecture. (Click to enlarge.)

And speaking of buildings, there are all kinds of delicious examples of Victorian grief architecture, from the shamelessly sentimental to the most pompous.  Drapery!  There must be drapery!  Even if it doesn't make sense!  I mean, what is this atop this obelisk, a draped urn?  Seriously?

Some of it is both bold and exquisite.  I love this next tombstone very much.  Here is the lush, rich back --

-- and here is the front:

I can't quite make out who this gentleman was (and I assume it was a gentleman and not a lady), but I love the illusion of carved text that keeps running behind the carved drapery.  Oh, if only you could brush that drapery aside and read it all, but at least you know it is from "Isaia."  To the people who commissioned this stone and their contemporaries, in another day without television, radio or the internet but when most of the people who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, were churchgoers of one denomination or another who knew and could quote from the Bible as fluently as you and I might talk about, I don't know, the sitcom Friends, this is all the stone had to reveal, a legible phrase here and there and the simple citation "Isaia."

For our generations, apparently, things have to be spelled out a little more clearly.

Now that is sad.

Still more parts of the park tempted me than what I have shown you in these last three posts, but it was getting late and the sky was clouding over and threatening rain.  There is something stimulating about hurrying to get out of a graveyard before sunset, even if it is only because that's when the big black iron gates close and you've chained your ride to one of them.

Naturally, Hello Kitty and I made it out with plenty of time to spare.

And naturally, because all this has been at least partly about Elizabeth, just about the first things I saw when I got home were squirrel nipples.

No, squirrel nipples have nothing to do with wheelchair accessibility or Victorian grief architecture, but you will just have to trust me when I tell you that a photo of them is the perfect way to end this series.  Because it is.  Especially with such a cute little squirrel mama flashing them at us.

Quick Note to Bob:

Dude, I totally get how this foot works now.  And no, you can't have it back.

No, actually, I don't completely get it, but I'm starting to.  I had this astonishing breakthrough yesterday while cruising the local necropolis.  For those in the know, this picture clearly illustrates what I discovered about this foot that makes it so much more useful to me in my particular walk-everywhere-over-every-kind-of-terrain lifestyle than my last perfectly satisfactory (and possibly slightly holy) foot (the Endolite Dynamic Response foot).  For those not in the know, or for those who may be shopping for a new foot themselves, I shall explain.

First, let me pull back to show you the whole picture. (Click to enlarge.)

Can you see what's happening here?  If you have ordinary, functional, organic feet, what you can see here is something you probably take for granted:  side to side flexion, allowing the entire sole of my foot (and all the traction of the bottom of my shoe) to remain in contact with the ground.  This is very important for someone who goes up and down as many hills as I do, and over as many diverse textures.  The texture shown here, for example, is that of age-worn slippery shoe sole on essentially small river rocks, also worn smooth.

This was the angle of descent, incidentally.  (Click to enlarge.)

Yes, I was walking down that not-exactly-path, more like a rainwater run-off, to get to the road below.  Not a big deal for someone with all their original body parts in good working order, but not the easiest or safest thing for someone with a stiff-from-the-ankle-down doll foot.

My previous foot flexed brilliantly from front to back, which gave me a lot of spring in my step -- and the amount of spring was adjustable via a little key through the back of the heel.  This one doesn't do that at all, not as far as I can discern at my large size/weight and small shoe size.  The loss of this spring is not important to my long term goals, as I am not a runner but a walker, hiker, and climber.  It confused me, though, because I've been using that spring to walk and strategically employing it to climb and even climb downward for over four years.  At the same time, the side to side flexion created by a split metatarsal spring in the new foot (there's your cloven hoof, Ron; it's there, but hidden under all that pink plastic) plus some really superior new alignment in the whole leg to which I was not yet accustomed were together making me feel unstable when I stepped on the foot in ordinary forward walking.  I didn't realize the foot was actually adapting safely to the angle of impact.  I thought I was rolling off it, that it was too narrow.  Not true, however.  While I've lost some forward spring, I've gained safety in downhill walking and for all surfaces that are not evenly flat.

Neat, huh?  I can't wait to learn what other tricks little Barbie can do.

Okay, back to the tour -- tomorrow.

My Own Personal Día de los Muertos

Well, crap.  Another Memorial Day has come and almost gone, and there's still war, and my country is still in it and doing it.  Just as when I wrote my very first Memorial Day post here nearly three years ago, I grieve for this fact constantly, for all the loss, for all the waste, for all the ridiculous cruelty on all sides.

I'm quite done with war.  I don't want to spend another moment arguing about it, wallowing in pain about it, and certainly not justifying or glorifying it.  I can't make it stop, not even in concert with all the other people who want it to stop, apparently, but I can make myself and my own peaceful practices better, and more, than what they are on holidays devoted to war and war-related subjects where I sit in a lump and cry or snap at my true love or just stay in bed and try not to think about how sad and angry I am.  So I have decided to make a new tradition.  I have decided to turn Memorial Day into my own private Día de los Muertos.

I have always loved this holiday, as long as I've known about it.  One of the features of the day in Mexico and in the southwestern United States is to go to the cemetery and have a picnic with your living friends and family on the graves of your deceased friends and family.  You have a party.  You offer sweets to the dead, make an effort to include them, because even though they are dead they are still your family and you still love them.

My family as I know it is mostly still above ground, and the ones I love who have already passed on were either cremated and scattered without ceremony (by their own choice) or buried somewhere I can't find, for example, a specific Jewish cemetery in New Haven where I long to plant perennial bulbs on my grandfather's grave.  (Of course I do.  Look at how adorable he was, and how much we loved each other.)

I live, however, in a town chock full of graveyards.  And some of the people in them, not so much the warriors but the poets and artists, the arguers and dreamers, gardeners and canoers and adorers of nature, the ones with the Big Ideas and the inability to live practically, as well as the ones who supported them and maybe also were poets and dreamers with Big Ideas, but were able to step up anyway, all these people who lived passionately and fully here, in this town I always wanted to live in because I'd read their words, they really feel like family to me.  If I'd lived here when they did, I would have known them, and possibly liked them in spite of our religious differences.  I would not have corrected Thoreau on his verbosity or Emerson on his pompousness; given half a chance, I would have read and appreciated and tried to match them per the standards of the day, their day, one of the many without radio or television or the internet, just as I do today, in our day, with my blogular circle where the writing (especially mine) is not always perfect, the emotions (oh, yes, really especially mine!) are not always mature, the concepts discussed are all works in progress, every one, as well as the lives (and don't we know it) -- and the love is, surprisingly, real and true.

Meanwhile, esteemed correspondent and honorary niece Elizabeth McClung has been having a dreadful time this last week.  Due to time constraints, I have been unable to read all about it until just now, but bottom line, the girl needs cheering up.  Apparently, she even issued a friendly demand for other people to go forth, have fun and be silly this weekend, and to tell her all about it.  You can read about what happened when she tried her own advice here.

As you can see, Elizabeth's particular brand of fun runs to the goth.  So just for her, I took many pictures of my excursion today.  Because what could be farther up her street than a merry celebration in a largely Victorian graveyard?

(There's even some Hello Kitty involved.  But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.)

This is me, looking distinctly not-goth, about to leave on my afternoon adventure.

(Notice that I am wearing my beloved lost glasses, as they have now been restored to my loving face.  Thank you again, BLC!  Also, you may recognize this damaged mirror and attempt to smile nicely into it while shooting myself from former similar attempts.  Okay.  Moving right along...)

This is sort of what I looked like while actually leaving, or at least while leaving the bathroom.

Next stop:  Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Authors Ridge!

Appropriately, I parked my tricycle at the "Authors Gate."

I knew exactly where Authors Ridge was, just up this hill.

Yup, this little hill right here.

Yup, this one.

My true love did not accompany me on this trip, so I had to photograph myself climbing this hill for you.

I just trudged right up.  I was absolutely sure this was the right way to go -- and it was one way to go, that's true enough.  See I'd been here before, with my old leg and my true love, and I did remember that this is how I got there.

That ridge at the top, though?  Not Authors Ridge.

Oops.  Very pretty, of course, but not Authors Ridge.  And after you have traversed its brief crest and come back out of he woods, you know what?

You still can't see Authors Ridge.

And moving ahead a bit further, to the bottom of that sunny slope, you see that ridge across the dip?

Yeah, that's not it either.

Nor that.  Not quite. 

"Bit steep up ahead," a concerned mother of small children hurried to warn me unsmilingly as she and her family passed.

"Yeah, and isn't it awesome!  This is about the only exercise I get, you know?"

"Oh, okay then.  Very good," she responded, like a businesswoman who'd just been corrected on some detail of a client's needs.

And up that steep slope, there's still another little bit to go, and then (Click to enlarge.) --

-- voilà!  Surrounded by double loops of thick black metal chain, here lie Ralph Waldo Emerson and family, and the start of Authors Ridge.

And this is where I began my own personal Día de los Muertos celebration.  As you can see, many people have stopped at these graves and left flowers and other little markers honoring the sleepers and also stating the connection these visitors have felt with them.  If you look closely at the leavings on the ground before each tombstone, you may see here and there a bit of cake.

Yes, cake.  Yes, that cake.  The one made with a recipe I got from a writer and then passed to a fan of the Transcendentalists, most of whom are buried here on Authors Ridge.  Good grief, what else could I possibly bring them?

Some people leave money, which I thought sort of poignant on some of these graves, for example that of Louisa May Alcott who supported her family with proceeds from her writing after her father had failed to do so. (Click to enlarge.)

Someone left Henry David Thoreau a pencil. (Click to enlarge.)

And me, I left cake.  Good cake.  Writer's and readers' cake, enough for several families. (Click to enlarge.)

It's what you do on el Día de los Muertos.  You honor your beloved dead by embracing them into your family, reminding yourself that you love them and why, and feeding them sweets to let them know they are still loved and still part of the family and that you know that death is just another part of life, one that might throw up barriers stronger than stone, but not entirely stronger than love.  And I think it's one of the points of Memorial Day, actually, which does not have to be all about war.

Lots of people made us who we are.  Lots of people sacrificed.  Not all of them were soldiers.  Soldiers and artists, statesmen, craftsmen, needlewomen, and shopkeepers, they are all part of the family.

All these authors are some of my beloved dead, yes, even though they never knew me, even though we are not related by blood, and yes, even the ones whose writing drives me crazy (as mine would drive them, given half a chance).  So today I did not grieve for them; I celebrated them and how they have touched my life, and I gave them bites of delicious cake which I know will not really feed them, but the life all around them.

(The life all around them today included this robin, who followed me around a bit, sang for me though he didn't know it was for me, and posed for my camera frequently, though not always this patiently.  Elizabeth has a crow for a cemetery buddy; I have a robin.  Go figure.)

I did not just give cake to Transcendentalist writers.  This lady looked nice, and her name sounds sort of familiar.

I left cake for a guy whose tombstone, in Harvard colors, didn't photograph well but with whom my true love once felt some sort of connection (probably the Harvard thing and the medicine thing mentioned on the enormous, imposing, and very shiny tombestone -- and the fact that the guy is actually buried beneath Harvard colors).  And I left some for Daniel Chester French and his wife, who lie ironically beneath one of the plainest markers in the entire cemetery. (Click to enlarge.)

See, it's ironic because French was a famous sculptor, specifically a sculptor of different kinds of memorial markers.  He made the Concord Minuteman who stands at the Old North Bridge vigilantly guarding history.  He made the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that gazes wistfully down at us from within the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  He also made the sculpture across from which I sat while I ate my little picnic (salmon, tomato and cucumber sandwich on rye), the sad, sad memorial to the three Melvin brothers who died within two years of each other in the Civil War, commissioned by their only surviving brother. (Click to enlarge.)

(Yes, there's a half-naked woman on it.  Yes, it made me think of you, Elizabeth.)

As I mentioned, my true love did not accompany me on this trip, as he has been engaged in a massive feng shui (house cleaning) project.  He is half-Mexican, though, so naturally I invited him to participate in my plan to appropriate el Día de los Muertos as my own personal replacement for Memorial Day, and I told him whom I planned to honor in this way, or at least to blow cake-scented kisses to.

"Oh, I definitely think this is something you should do on your own."

"Okay."

"Be prepared for weird things to happen, though."

"I am always prepared for weird things to happen.  Or let's just say I sort of expect them, as long as they're not the unpleasant kind."  (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...)

Of course, nothing terribly weird did happen.  There was only how I met at the grave of Louisa May Alcott a Mexican woman whose family had moved to Los Angeles when she was a child.  What are the odds of two former Angelina's meeting at the grave of a famous Victorian lady author on Memorial Day in Concord, Massachusetts?  One of her family asked about the things people left on the graves, and I piped right up with an explanation while another family member, a handsome adult with a neurological disorder of some sort that rendered him exuberantly frolicsome if not particularly verbal, leaped and shrieked among the tombs.  I said I was leaving cake, and when most of them had moved on I started to do so, and explained why to the woman left behind.

She thought this was quite wonderful.  She plans to do it herself every year from now on, too.  She has family members at war, too, and beloved dead who were never soldiers, and she completely understood where I was coming from.

And all that does tend to make me feel better about the whole cultural appropriation thing.

(She also tasted the cake and agreed that it was delicious.)

***

There is much more to say, and I have many more pictures, but it is after 5:00 a.m., and I must sleep.  I shall show you more another day, with another point -- demonstrating my fantastic new foot, for example, whose secrets I only began to grasp today, and pointing out some diverting aspects of this particular mostly Victorian graveyard, which is also still a "live" cemetery where new people are interred every month.

I'll just leave you with this image, which I think is great advice for someone facing a grave.