An "eastering" is not confined simply to the story of Christ's Passion and resurrection.

It can also signify a new beginning, a springtime of the soul, after a long winter of dreary weather and endless bad news.

May today bring our nation, and all of us, a springtime of hope and joy.

And until next time, fair thee well.

Back in February, following the Super Tuesday tornadoes that ripped through the southeast and killed some fifty people, I posted the following here at FW:


Last night, as a background to the coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, there was news of severe weather affecting the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky. We're all right here, although we had rain so hard you could barely see to the road from our house; same at Willard's some twenty miles down the road. Some wind damage, a few trees down over roads and etc.

West Tennessee and north central Tennessee were not so lucky. At last report there are twenty-four reported dead, ten of those in Macon County, north of Nashville. The pictures from CNN and other news outlets are both horrifying and heartbreaking; trailer parks, a college campus in Jackson, over near Memphis, all but flat on the ground, although miraculously no dead there.

Local aid workers, backed up by FEMA teams dispatched by Homeland Security, are already beginning to try to clean up some of the mess, tend to the injured and homeless, and locate the dead. It'll be a long hard road ahead of everyone involved.

This should be a day when everybody offers up prayers and sympathy for all the victims, when politics, religion, gender, and all those other stupid labels we put on each other ought to be set aside. Imagine my horror, then, when I was scrolling through posts at The Newshole, and ran across this gem:

Tennessee hit by tornados after voting Hillary? Coincidence...?

The person who was crass enough to post this used a pseudonym.

For anyone to suggest that Tennessee brought down the wrath of God on ourselves in the form of tornadoes because the Democratic voters in our primaries chose to support Senator Hillary Clinton is monstrous. Nobody in their right mind could possibly draw a cause and effect between the vagaries of weather in the Southeast in late winter and early spring and a political candidate, but this person evidently thinks they're not only in their right mind, they think they just got off some delightful witticism, reminiscent of the "lady" in South Carolina who cost John McCain my consideration as a candidate when she called Senator Clinton a bitch.

Not only am I appalled at the sheer inhuman effrontery of this person; I am FURIOUS that whoever is moderating the board at The Newshole let the comment be posted at all. I think I have mentioned before that The Newshole is a messageboard/blog for viewers of COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN, a show I have watched for a couple of years now and in general find interesting and fun.

This is a disgrace. I frankly don't know whether I will be able to continue to watch COUNTDOWN or read The Newshole after this; how dare the moderator at the board allow a cretin to slap the people who have lost so much in the faces with such callous abandon? There is a point past which simple human kindness dictates that we give up that noble abstraction called free speech, especially when that speech is made for no other reason than to insult the living and the dead. I doubt very seriously that Saint Peter's going to ask the dead at the Pearly Gates whether they supported Clinton or not. If he does, then Satan has won the battle between good and evil; not because of who we support for our foolish political purposes, but because of the foul insinuations of moral morons.

**********************************************************************

Here, belatedly, is the rest of the story:

The person who put up the original pseudonymous post turns out to be a dear friend of mine, and it started out as a protest against something he saw on a TV program the morning after the storms. To recapitulate: On February 6th, he was watching MORNING JOE, the MSNBC show that replaced Don Imus after Imus's appalling statements about the Rutgers' women's basketball team cost him his job. Joe Scarborough has his good points, but he wasn't displaying them that AM. He and a violently partisan GOP shill named Mike Barnicle were discussing Senator Clinton in distinctly disapprobrious terms. The thought came to my friend that in that particularly volatile climate, one could get away with saying anything about Senator Clinton--and to test that thought, he posted the comment about Clinton, the tornadoes in Tennessee, and that query--coincidence?

There had, at the time he submitted the post, been no reports of fatalities following the storms. And after that, all went to hell; he got caught up in the midst of a thirty-six hour stretch of work that did not allow him to catch up on news; the moderator at THE NEWSHOLE, the blog of COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN, had let the comment go through to post; and unfortunately the one regular participant at that blog who happened to be from Tennessee--me--had come up on the post and lost it. I have an Irish temper, no doubt--but it seldom explodes as volcanically as it did that day.

In addition to calling the person who submitted the post a few choice names and disputing his humanity, I also called on the moderator of the site to remove the post and to apologize to the people of Tennessee whose lives had been shattered by the storms for letting such a post get through moderation. (And yes, I called the moderator a few choice names too.)

Once my friend was able to get away from the work situation and realize what was happening in Tennessee and at NH, a protest was in full swing, with multiple posts from a number of the regulars demanding the post be removed. In that endeavor, we finally succeeded; the post was finally taken down late on the evening of the following Saturday, as I recall it. As of today, the powers that be at MSNBC and the moderator have yet to admit any laxness on their part, nor has an apology been issued.

My friend, on the other hand, was literally physically ill once he discovered what hell had broken loose. By that time, the death toll was past thirty, and there were bodies still being located nearly a week later. He sent me a long email that explained his part in the whole debacle and apologized. He even offered to stop blogging at that site, and at another we both post at, as a mea culpa.

I don't claim to be a saint, mind. But I forgave him, and I apologized for my own conduct, which was far from exemplary throughout that whole episode.

I took the title of today's blog from a song that came out of those old old paperback shapenote hymnals: ". . .the old account was settled long ago." But I think the appropriate moral of this story comes from Hank Williams. Ol' Hank recorded a series of philosophical recitations under the name Luke the Drifter. The one I think of in connection with this episode is "Be Careful of Stones that You Throw."

So the story comes full circle. I've learned a lesson from this; sometimes even our best intentions aren't good enough. Mine certainly weren't.

And until next time, fair thee well.

Yesterday Willard came up for a visit and of course we took off to Wal-Mart. (We no longer take Madame Sadie along and have no more than suspicions as to how she's replenishing her supplies of Bud Light.) In a small town such as mine, a trip to Wal-Mart is a big event.

With Easter coming up this Sunday, they had a number of flowers for sale, all marked down from five dollars to two. Willard chose a couple of hyacinths to plant in her yard. I inhaled the heavenly soft smell of them and was transported back to my childhood.

My paternal grandmother lived in a little house about half a mile as the crow flies and across the fields in my earliest years. It had only four large rooms and a sort of mudroom at the back that came in off the back porch. She never had running water in the house; she pumped it from a cistern just outside the back door and heated whatever she needed for washing and etc. on the stove. The yard around the house was not exactly the sort to win Lawn of the Month from the local garden club. For one thing, it was riddled with molehills, and you could step into them and sink up to your ankles. But she had two great pecan trees in the back, forsythia, flowering quince (aka japonica), bridal wreath and lilacs in bushes higher than a tall man's head in the side yard, and out front, along ledges of slate rock that pushed through the thin soil, hyacinths.



My grandmother lived with us from the time I was ten until she died when I was seventeen. She was an infernally difficult woman to get along with, and many of the bitter memories I have of my father actually have their origins in those years, because he sided with his mother against my mother in every disagreement they had. Strange to say, for some years after Gran died, I was aware that, on very rare occasions, she returned to the house. I always was aware of her because her presence always coincided with the smell of hyacinths--usually wildly out of season.

This hasn't happened that I can recall since Dad died fifteen years ago.

Willard having purchased the last of the hyacinths, I bought tulips for Mom. I have no gift for growing things. I'm the only person I ever knew who actually managed to kill that tough ornamental known as mother-in-law's tongue--and as for flowering plants, if I plant them, they're not long for this world. Potted plants--potted by someone else, that is--I can handle, though.

The pot of tulips I got were still in bud, but I think when they open they'll look like this:



Sort of like sunshine tinging clouds pink.

Beautiful on the second day of spring, huh?

And until next time, fair thee well.

The deserted mining camps of Colorado are a rich source of ghost stories. When they were at the peak of their population, some numbered in the thousands: miners, gamblers, prostitutes, laundresses, dreamers, doers, bartenders, drunks, lynch mobs, musicians, children, horses, mules--and just as quickly were empty as the mines played out and the citizens moved on. The ones who died in these temporary cities didn't move on.



One of my favorite stories from the mining camps comes from a place called Buckskin Joe, after Joseph Higginbottom, a trapper and mountaineer who first settled there.

The hero of our story was a prospector named, improbably, J. Dawson Hidgepath, who came to town sometime around 1863-4. In addition to being a rather unsuccessful prospector, Hidgepath was a romantic. He was looking for a woman to call his own, and he wasn't especially discreet in his choices; he chased married women, schoolmarms, and dance hall girls with equal passion. His life was frequently threatened by irate husbands, and at least once he was beaten to a pulp by a dance hall girl's pimp, but that didn't discourage him.

Nor, apparently, did death. On July 23, 1865, Hidgepath was killed when he fell off a cliff face. Depending on which version you read, he was either working at his legitimate trade and slipped, or fell while picking wildflowers for his latest crush.

He was buried, and promptly forgotten, until his bones took to escaping from his grave.

His skeleton first paid a visit to a married woman to whom he had once paid assiduous court; he knocked at the door, shoved a passionate love letter under it, and the startled lady opened the door and toppled over in a dead faint. When she came to she babbled for hours about bones.

He turned up in totally unexpected places: a dance hall girl's bed, on the front porches of more unfortunate married ladies, and at least once in the kitchen of a very nearsighted lady who mistook his remains for soup bones and tossed them into her soup pot. Her husband, with keener sight, pulled them out just in time.

His bones were buried under a giant boulder by the exasperated townsmen, but kept up their visits to the ladies until a crowd decided to finish him, once and for all. His bones were taken a nearby settlement where the mine had already played out and dumped into the pit of an outhouse. The bones never escaped from there; as one commentator wrily put it, no gentleman goes courting smelling like a toilet.

Still, Hidgepath kept up his amorous ways. The story goes that many years later, a lady visiting the ghost town went into the abandoned outhouse where his bones rested to answer a call of nature and was startled by a whisper from down below: "Will you be my own?

For fuller versions of this humorous tale, check out TWILIGHT DWELLERS: GHOSTS, GHOULS AND GOBLINS OF COLORADO (1985) by MaryJoy Martin, and SPOOKY SOUTHWEST: TALES OF HAUNTINGS, STRANGE HAPPENINGS, AND OTHER LOCAL LORE (2004) by S. E. Schlosser.



And on that aromatic note, fair thee well.

BTW, go over to Aunt Ornery's blog at http://auntornery.blogstream.com and read her Easter story. That one even freaked me out--and you know I'm not easily freaked out.

The end of a long hard winter: we have things blooming out in greater exurberance than even the jonquils and forsythia:

dandelions



and japonica:



and down the hill in the neighbors' yard, Bradford pear:



My mind wanders like a vagrant sometimes, and from some corner it pulls an old Minnie Pearl joke about a man who said she "looked just like a breath of spring. . .well, he didn't say it exactly like that, he said I looked like the end of a long hard winter."

Our beloved lamented Minnie, you were a breath of spring to your fans--and so are these flowers.

And till next time, fair thee well.