The crescent moon and Venus are particularly beautiful tonight. Great composite photo by Greg Hogan, a really gifted photographer.

A remembrance of my brother.

There are better pictures of him but I can’t find them right now. Here he’s dancing with Bobbie Ann, Jim’s sister, at our wedding picnic/celebration/barbecue at Arrow Rock. She’s trying to teach him to two-step. She was a great dancer and Ken wasn’t bad.

He told tales and fables that came right out of his head without the least hesitation or mental editing and did so all his life, an impulsive and charming storytelling that may or may not have had some relation to the truth but that didn’t matter because they were riveting from beginning to end.

My mother used to reprimand him severely for ‘making things up’ but I suppose he was a born storyteller and sometimes the stories were believable and other times they were like science-fiction or fantasy. I remember once ( and I told this story at the funeral service) when I was in third grade and he in fifth, in Marshall, Missouri, he came running into the house crying out that there were zebras and camels and elephants walking around the streets!!!

Mother became very exasperated with him (she was ironing at the time) and told him to just stop it, but there really were camels and zebras and elephants walking around the streets, the circus had come to Marshall on the railroad, and they paraded the animals through the towns they came to to drum up interest in the circus. I ran outside and saw them, and with a lot of other kids followed them as far as I dared. They were beautiful and magical. It was as if Kenneth had invented them and they came true.

He kept steady jobs all his life and raised five kids, adopted a sixth, wrote poems, played guitar, all of his with a houseful of kids and a factory job. Finally in his old age got the solitude he wanted and had always needed. Solitude right up to the end. Raised wonderful kids, I have the deepest affection for every one of them. Here they are at the Peninsula Burial Ground, where he was laid to rest.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post did an interview this morning for the Wash Post Book Club and emailed that he would like to link the files of us playing, the ones that are on the audiobook. Frantic call to Mark: ‘Mark can you send him the files?’ Mark was on a hilltop somewhere building. He is a builder, making houses rise up out of airy nothing and he is also a whiz with computer things as I am not. So he’s walking around here and there on the hilltop trying to get a good connection, but we finally got through and he’ll link the files for Ron Charles. This is so cool. All I can think of, of course, is the three or four notes I flubbed badly on ‘Red River Valley’.

Tom commiserated; ‘A person never gets it perfect, never.’

And so Lowe’s grocery store in Bandera scored on a huge load of toilet paper from Mexico! I should have gone to the manager to ask how they pulled off this amazing feat but I’m not a reporter and I was tired and had a forty-mile drive home but there was plenty for all and no kidding. Two packages per customer.

This was at about four in the afternoon. What a weird place the world has become when I write an excited blog post about toilet paper.

Best of luck Simon and Doris and thank you to everybody at William Morrow and HC who worked hard on this book! And a tribute to two really good fiddlers, may your roads all lead to magical places.

Jesse Milnes

Tom Bomer

Palm Sunday today and Passover starts on the 8th.

And not much to offer on the news front except babies keep getting born no matter what, and no cases yet in the surrounding three or four counties although that may change soon .

Human babies getting born too although I don’t have any pictures from my grand-niece yet but will add as soon as I get them.

Interesting article from Breitbart on the toilet paper shortage, best I’ve read so far;

1.) People are staying home and using the TP at home rather than at work, so use up more personal, household TP.

2.) There are two kinds of TP, commercial and home consumption kinds. The commercial kind is of course more utilitarian and in larger rolls that don’t fit home holders. These are not being sold at WalMart etc., they are sold to hotels, offices in big lots. So people can’t buy them, they are sold in case lots to large business and government organizations.

3.) They come from different paper mills, with different machinery, and are a different supply chain. The paper mills have not yet switched over from one to the other and it might be difficult for them to do so.

So there you go.

My friend April, whose mare just had the baby pictured above, (and another on the way, Easter maybe) had ordered a case of the commercial TP for the big kid’s recreational camp she works for — she heads up the equestrian side of it — and the case is just sitting there as everything is shut down. She is just keeping it dry and safe.  She is wondering if she still has a job, given that no kids can come to the camp, but on the other hand there are 60 horses that need care and feeding so not likely she will be let go. It is the most beautiful camp I’ve ever seen.

That’s just the old cabin on the camp lands. The kids accommodations are gorgeous.

The churches here in this little community are doing what they can. Women got together to sew masks and hand them out free, people donated money and material, Living Waters church is making up boxes with TP, bottled water etc. but as Evelyn said, “We don’t know who to give them out to.”

No need for them yet apparently. The feed store is open and receiving re-supply, the General Store is open and by tomorrow, Monday, will require all patrons to wear masks and stand outside in a line and come in a few at a time.

So I had my birthday party — a surprise. All riding friends came to bring presents and have a social distancing party on the front porch!

Very grateful for my friends and relatives; opened my cousin’s box as well, she sent some home-made scarves in leopard pattern and a hammock. It was a great day!

Such silences, no jet trails overhead, very few cars or trucks moving, an economy coming to a halt. Kids at home, no school. Perhaps they are learning about the supply chain, a good thing to know.

Have a peaceful and blessed Palm Sunday/Passover week!

My brother passed away last week (not from corona-virus) and the family gathered to put him to rest, all his five children and the grandchildren and me and my sister. It was a good family gathering, so there’s that. He had been ill for some time. We drove from Springfield Missouri to the old family graveyard in central Missouri and there put him to rest with his ancestors.

Our little town and area is now being affected by the lockdown, no near cases of the virus but today at the feed store I saw that the feed was being cleaned out and they said they were having trouble with resupply. I bought as much as I cold for the horses, although thank God the new green grass is coming up in case it all gets bought out and nothing more coming in.

The general store is restricting purchases somewhat.

Flying to Spring field through Dallas, and then home out of St. Louis, the airports were fairly empty and so were the city streets.

The lovely Suzanne Mitchell who is doing the audiobook for HarperCollins asked my group to do some music for the intro and outro, and so even though we (as a group — Tom and Diane and Mark have recorded — I guess I was the only one who hadn’t) had never recorded before, went to studio (Chaney Rutherford’s music store and studio) in Boerne and recorded and it came out fine and they are putting snippets in the audiobook. We are so thrilled.

Diane Causey on banjo with Tom Bomer on fiddle playing ‘Jock of Hazledean’

Tom and Mark Hall did ‘Mississippi Sawyer’ and ‘Red-Haired Boy’.

I did ‘Red River Valley’ on C-whistle with Tom as backup, forgot to ask somebody to take a picture of me but people always look weird playing whistle so no matter.

Feel very privileged to be part of this group! Lucky. Happy. We get along.

Why are cats so funny? Maybe because they are not conscious of being funny.

Sir Roger Scruton; “Fictional worlds require imagination from both the reader and the writer.” And “Romantic love is an invention of the western world. It is a unique idea. It requires an immense effort to lift the erotic to the spiritual.”

I enjoyed listening to him so much. All the tip sheets are done. June has just had her last chemotherapy treatment and I’ll take some flowers over to her. Hoping for the best.

HarperCollins needed 3000 book plates signed, to be inserted into copies of Simon The Fiddler, and I actually managed to get it done although with signs of incipient carpal tunnel showing up. Set up a ‘signing place’ in the guest room, and got to work at least part of every day. Set up my iPhone and listened to Youtube videos of Sir Roger Scruton — ‘On Beauty and Consolation’, and various other things, so it was worth it.

Am considering writing something about the various attacks on American Dirt, de-latforming and so on, and how many otherwise obscure people are trying to ride on her sudden fame, or the media attention she is getting, and deplatforming in general, and an interviewer with whom I never should have spoken (she is pursuing my friends and family as I speak) and like many authors, thinking. “But this interview was supposed to be about my book!”

Well, it was my last interview so it is appropriate that it should have been astonishing.

Deplatforming/cancel culture —- look up ‘tortious interference’ on wikipedia.  People should be sued. I would, in a heartbeat.

What is it with this notice that appears when I try to log in, covering the ‘enter’ bar, saying it is not secure? Clickbait? I can barely edge my arrow into the blue to get a hand and open. Grrr. Clickbait, viruses, who knows.

Letters! Handwritten!

Just heard from an old friend (by email), Michael Brown, who writes that he and his wife Eva are having their 50th anniversary this year! Half a century has slipped by me! Yikes.

Also from my friend in Australia, the wonderful Daphne Murray, who is in her mid-nineties and whose letters I value greatly, one of the best correspondents I have ever had. She is bright and funny and extremely well-read, thanks to a classic education in England. She was a Land Girl during WW2 —young women of the cities who volunteered to go out to English farms to work, making up for all the men being drafted by the military. She was assigned to one of the royal tenant farms and met the young Princess Elizabeth, and stayed in contact, met the Queen Elizabeth several times in later years, invited to dinner, QE remembered her from the farm. She married an Australian who later become governor of New South Wales, traveled the world.

December 30th

“Years ago I read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Castlebridge, it was a paperback. I have a set of old authors and they are all covered in the same cloth — red…(but) I had already devoured it. I love his work…Have you read his works? I am trying to get the bookshop here to get Middlemarch for me as I read it is a beautiful story…

“As to reading Dickens again was it Dotheboys headmaster who had a great jar of pickles? ‘Boys need pickles’ he said. So do old ladies as I have just had a plate of Christmas ham and some of my home-made pickles. A bit of vinegar does you good.”

“I was friendly with one of the boys who flew the planes to Germany. Walking back to the dairy one day I saw a plane over my head wobbling about and I thought it would crash, it was only just off the runway, but it righted itself and flew off. At the weekend I saw Mike and he said, ‘Did you see me on Thursday? I waggled my wings.’  The most romantic thing that ever happened to me!”

(Recent fires) “The terrible fires continue and we have months of hot weather to go. the Gov. are paying volunteers to be firemen, all are exhausted. Because of the lack of rain everything is tinder dry and of course the old gum trees and Eucalyptus are full of oil, and they just explode into fireballs. So many are homeless, it is not a happy Xmas. …We are not in a timber area and there sure is no grass to burn.”

“I often think of things to tel you and then I forget. I am usually awake about 3 a.m. to dawn —then I sleep some more. …All part of aging. My friend Helen gets up and does the ironing if she can’t sleep. I’d rather cut my throat.”

I have urged her (and her daughter Paula) to write all this down to be kept for the family, and she says she is, but i needs a concerted effort and Paula is a nurse, working hard, and taking down memoirs by tape or hand is a very demanding job, but I keep all her letters and if the family there wants them I will have them all for them.

And so in the picture that wall looks awful but it is glossy white paint that I slapped on, trying to cover some marks, and it shows up dark, eww, got to fix that.

Trip to Baltimore ABA Winter Institute was fun, Jen and I went on a long walking tour of Baltimore, visited the USS Constellation, the waterfront, the Flag House where Mrs. Pickersgill and helpers sewed the Star-Spangled Banner, it was actually bigger than their house! Jen was quite intrepid with her tour map, we had a great time. Jen is much fun, good company, truly a friend.

Signed books for two hours for lines of people carrying their ARE’s, got back exhausted and a bit shaky as always, took time to calm down, get my head straight, rode with Evelyn, her horse Anna is recovering from sarcoma in the ear, it looks good, healing, Jackson was a dream as always.