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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My grandson got his MBA!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Amazon there are a great many books (non-fiction) on the guerillas in Missouri during the Civil War, and almost all of them have to do with the guerillas/bushwhackers in Central Missouri; Quantrell, Frank and Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson and others.  Blood in the Ozarks by Clint Lacy is a much-needed look at the war in southeastern Missouri. In that area things were quite different and this work makes things about as clear as they are going to get.

The geography was different, the terrain and the people and the circumstances were different and other than Jerry Ponder’s books this is one of the few or perhaps only book dealing with the war in the southeast.  I don’t have the reference here to hand but I believe it was the only part of Missouri held under martial law/reconstruction after the war was over. I think it was two years under martial law.

Other non-fiction studies; Gray Ghosts, Bushwhackers, Guerillas in Civil War Missouri and many others, almost all dealing with the better-documented activities of Confederate-sympathizing freelancers in Central Missouri.

The situation  in the Ozarks of the southeast can be simplified more easily than in other places; it was mainly Tim Reeves Fifteenth Missouri State Guard units against Union units, mainly Missouri Militia (Union) and the Twelfth Cavalry (Union). The rivalry and intense, personal animosity between Reeves and the men of the Missouri Twelfth Cavalry (Wilson and Leeper) turn the situation into a terrible years-long vendetta and Lacy documents this extremely well, including civilian deaths. It occasioned one of the most moving, despairing and yet well-written night-before-the-execution letters I have ever read, that of Asa Ladd.

During a reading and book-signing a woman came up to me and told me she was a descendant of Asa Ladd, that it was in her great-grandmother’s house they had found the letter.

This book sets out this rivalry and the tragic consequences, and it all took place in the most difficult terrain, far from the notice of “important” people or newspapers, played out, one could say, almost in darkness.

My mother’s people were from Central Missouri and we have stories passed down about the bushwhackers — Bloody Bill Anderson came close to killing a distant relative of mine but said relative (George Brownfield) escaped into the thickets surrounding the Pilot Grove post office, dodging Bloody Bill’s bullets. There was a lot at stake in Central Missouri — good farmland, harvests of cotton and hemp, the great commercial highway that the Missouri River had become, not to speak of the extremely rich bottomlands of that great river.

My father’s people came from southeastern Missouri, the Ozarks, which was not in any way a vital area for crops, conscripts, herds or war products. We have no stories, only a confused report that my great-great-grandfather was hung, no details. Leaving a wife and three children and a pregnant wife; Mahala Giles. His name was Marquis Lafayette Giles, justice of the peace, taught the common school in Carter County.

Often in war, I have heard, from the participants, that certain units will develop an intense rivalry and hatred for one another — this happened to my husband in Vietnam. He was with an ARVN unit, as an advisor, spoke Vietnamese and lived with these troops. They got it on with a certain unit of the Viet Cong, and the two units fought each other for years. In the course of which my husband was wounded, got himself repaired and went back to the fight.

Also a wonderful man, a world war 2 vet, Charles Meuth, told me years ago that his unit of the Texas National Guard (141st Regiment) developed the same personal and intense rivalry with a certain unit of the German SS tank command and pursued them all the way up the Italian Peninsula and finally into Germany, where the war ended and they surrendered. He even knew their names.

So this is the drama and ferocity outlined in Lacy’s book, very well documented, a fascinating story of conflict played out in a country of great beauty but thin soil, heavy swamps, thick forest that almost nobody wanted, except the people who lived there. Blood In the Ozarks by Clint Lacy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hark the Herald Angels siiiiiing….

Marry Christmas!

And a lovely Christmas eve sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And happy Hanukkah, Sumptuous Solistice and wishing everyone a calm, quiet, deliberate, creative, sensible New Year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This view of the hills from my front door always thrills me no matter how busy I get, pressed or hurried.

So many Johnsons have their birthdays in December! Jim Jr. on Christmas Day, Jimmy (J-III) on December 31st, Faith on December 13th. Coming up cantata dress rerearsal in three hours, tomorrow morning Christmas special with the group, me on whistle, traditional hymns, then the big cantata performance tomorrow night, on the 22nd another special with Chloe singing Hallelujah Christmas for which we have to learn the alto, which is HARD, Sherry party the 19th, which is going to be fun, just all of us with our instruments playing whatever we can come up with and drinking and eating, plus horsegirlfriends and husbands.

So this view is calming and quiets the heart.