It's good to have a weekend in town, especially this weekend. For a place that was the crown jewel of the Shenandoah confederacy, a hot seat of succession and rebellion, historically, my town loves the Fourth. It literally throws a giant birthday party, and everything takes on a festival atmosphere leading up to a parade and huge fireworks display. Everyone is walking around and talking to everyone all weekend, all the shops are open, there's music, flags, outfits, all that bullshit. When it's time for the fireworks, I like to sit up on the guns - the real ones from the war - in the graveyard and watch. It feels so terribly ironic that I'm literally sitting on an implement of war against the federal government, on a hill that was an artificial construct created from the literal space of a mass grave of thousands of Stonewall Jackson's men that died in the Valley campaigns... and watch the display of explosive Union nationalism! 

I don't feel smug or anything - my ancestors were still mud farmers in Norway around the time of the Civil War. I don't mean to imply that somehow gives me a pass, or no skin in the game, especially with how much the reverberations of that war still impact our culture. I don't know if I've talked about this before - probably have - but I've been almost insanely consuming Civil War books. I've finished up the major summaries, the thousand page biographies, and now I'm moving into primary sources, which are harder for me, but very interesting. I like to read because when I read, I don't think, and my brain feels more and more like an enemy these days. Anyway, all of that is to say some of them - the Confederates in my graveyard for example, and I do have some famous ones over there - Hotchkiss, Imboden - feel almost familiar to me. They fought a war for a reprehensible cause, but I wouldn't dance on their graves on purpose. If there's a hell, it will swallow me up just the same as them.

Hmm, talking about the rebellion and celebration of a country that has just decided I have less rights than a corpse! What an ugly, tired, sad old woman I've become. 

At least my garden is very beautiful right now. I need to water it, pick flowers and arrange them on various tables in my home. I have a squash to pick: a lovely, yellow oblong. 

I haven't run for the last two days - more because I was dealing with various crisises than because I was resting my knee or shin splints, though both still hurt as if I did nothing and get no credit for anything. Yesterday it became very apparent that the little feral kitten I've been trying to bring back to health in the backyard had been entirely abandoned by its mother, so it was the rush to get food and water into it, to bathe it and clean off the millions of fleas, and ultimately, to find it a little home in town. All of these things were done, but they took so much of my energy. 

Forgive me. I'm sentimental this weekend, and nostalgic.