When I feel distressed, depressed, and just generally out of heart, I go to photobucket and look for pictures that make me feel more cheerful. Since I have long wished for what I refer to as a hideyhole--a sort of hillbilly version of a boudoir, which far from having originally referred to a bedroom was actually a "pouting room" where a lady could retreat to write letters, read, or--well, pout--and in the past few days have desperately needed such a retreat, I typed in the word "sunroom" just for the heck of it. And I found my hideyhole, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.



This would be a good day to retreat to a pretty corner like this. Cooler weather with blackberry winter moving in; only 58 degrees after having been in the seventies and indeed up to eighty over the weekend; a chilly northwest wind; the cat is a nervous wreck thanks to a divebomber of a mockingbird; Mom's arthritis is acting up and her breathing is not good, thanks to an abundance of pollen in the air; the news is uniformly unsettling (to the point that, although I'm not much of an Anne Murray fan, I can hear her crooning "sure could use a little good news today"); the kitchen is an absolute wreck; and I have the blues.

So: to whomever owns this lovely little space, may I borrow it for the day? I need a place just to dream.

And lost in contemplation, till next time, fair thee well.

Out today with Willard. We rode up to Ft. Loudoun (the rangers are fine; they've come out of the visitors' center but are still looking over their shoulders and turning fast at strange noises behind them, although Madame, it seems, has left the area) just to see what is blooming this week. A chilly spell sparks reports that blackberries and strawberries are blossoming out. We didn't see any, but we did see irises.

Named for the Greek word for rainbow, irises come in some 300 varieties. Perennials, they grow either from bulbs (the most common form around here) or from rhizomes, which are sort of like creepers. The most common species in our area is the German bearded. These come in a variety of colors, ranging from almost black to pure white. My favorites are in the blue to purple range, which the older people around here refer to as "blue flags."

A stylized iris was, according to Wikipedia, once the symbol of Florence, Italy's House of Medici, but since the marriage of Catherine de Medici to Henri II of France in 1533, it has more commonly been associated with French royalty.

Iris bulbs and roots were used in perfume quite commonly at one time, but less so as other scents have become more popular.

The iris has been a favorite flower for artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Georgia O'Keeffe. The first is Van Gogh:



And this one by O'Keeffe:



Irises are the state flower of Tennessee. One of our official state songs (we have at least five) is called "When It's Iris Time in Tennessee" but it has been so long obscured by the more readily identifiable "Tennesse Waltz" and "Rocky Top" that I've never even heard it.

Did my soul good to see these. And till next time, fair thee well.

To begin, let me say, this road trip of Madame's is getting curiouser and curiouser. I'm beginning to think the old bat is capable of bilocation or maybe even TRIlocation, as the following events illustrate.

You will recall that she and the Bud Light truck were last seen, officially, outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, hitting the nearest interstate as MD troopers closed in to impound the truck. (The young trucker is, I understand, still hospitalized, gibbering about old bats and shrieking at the sight of anyone with gray hair. It could be worse; he could have seen Madame in her red wig.)

A day or two after that, Willard got a phone call. She has a private number so this was ominous to say the least, and got more so when the voice on the other end growled: "What has that old bat gone and done with my daddy?"

"HUH?"

It turns out that Madame Sadie hasn't told Willard and me quite everything about her background. Her real name is not Sadie Lipshitz, which we thought was pretty improbable anyway; it's actually Sadie Willows, and she's from some wide place in the road in the mountains. The man who called Willard is Madame's nephew, and he's worried about his dad, a former "ridge runner" (a guy who in the good ol' days ran moonshine, usually made by HIS daddy) who reformed and now works on a NASCAR crew. This brother has disappeared, but his son got suspicious when THIS sighting was reported:

Dateline St. Louis, MO: A semi with a Bud Light trailer crashed through the front gates at the main entrance at either Anheuser-Busch HQ or at the home of the owners thereof (details are understandably sketchy). As security moved in to try to stop the truck, it made a breathtaking U-turn and roared back out the way it came in, leaving officers choking and gasping in a cloud of diesel smoke.

The nephew seems to think that, since Madame is undoubtedly impaired (you surely didn't think she was gonna leave the cargo untouched!) and his daddy, like many a former ridge runner, is a teetotaler, she whipped by some NASCAR track and picked him up. Oh, great; instead of DRIVING MISS DAISY, we got DRIVING MADAME SADIE.

Things were quiet for awhile, then our friend Sherry up in NY reported a--well, let Sherry tell it:

Fairweather,

I um have to tell you I saw someone who looked suspiciously like Madame riding on the back of a Harley up here in my neck of the woods. I was heading to my local Walmart this morning when a Hog went roaring past me. Some guy with a long gray beard split by the wind so it was tickling the face of the rider behind him from both sides of his head. She had on this hat with some kind of flower in it and what looked like a bottle of beer in her hand.

Can you imagine? The "couple" seemed to be having some kind of fight, which I should imagine was hard to do on a Harley. How could he hear her screaming at him? Anyway, she would let go of her hat, pound his shoulder for a bit, take a swig of beer and grab onto her hat to keep it from blowing off.

They were headed South on Rt.49. He looked like some sorta throwback to the late 60's Hells Angels group. A bit long in the tooth but still sporting all the ink and skulls. A definite unsavory sort, mark my words. Sure hope if it was Madame that she makes it home in one piece.

Sherry

I suspect that was indeed Madame and her brother. I'm afraid to say where they might have ditched the truck and hotwired a Harley--Surely Madame hasn't drunk her way through a whole truckload of Bud Light yet! As for the beard, many a moonshiner wore a long beard, and could scare a Hell's Angel into church. (Sure did more than a few revenuers--the ones who survived, anyway.) He was probably griping at her about her drinking--especially if she clipped him upside an ear with a bottle.

To make things worse, though, there was that day that Anexplorer came down from Canada to interview me for Bookworm's "Inquirer" feature. Anex can tell that story better than me, so let me get a plug in here for the interview (the graphics are fantastic): check out http://librarycat.blogstream.com.

Sorry, Anex, to cut the interview short--but the old bat got away again. I should have taken along that butterfly net she used to try to catch Shorty the leprechaun, but I was very nervous about the interview and forgot all about it.

The park rangers are safe, though. They barricaded themselves inside the visitors' center and last I heard had radioed for backup. Nobody is quite sure who has jurisdiction, so they may be there awhile.

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

One other thing--those of you who may have left a comment and didn't hear back from me, I'm so sorry. Awhile back my Yahoo was down for two days, and since that unfortunate episode I no longer receive notification from Blogstream that I've gotten a comment or a PM (although I have my settings set to do so). It's not that I wouldn't answer; it's just that sometimes it takes me awhile to check my comments. Please be patient with me; I love hearing from you and will get back to you eventually.

And on that pleading note, fair thee well.

I overslept this morning. Sometime in the night a soft rain began to fall, and I rested better than usual. If I dreamed I don't remember it. It might have looked like this if I had, though:



It's cool and still drizzling just a bit. Lazy, drowsy sort of day. Mom is napping on her recliner, out under the japonica the cat is napping--it spreads out in a sort of little arbor and only gets wet under there if the rain comes in at a particular angle--and frankly I think I'll curl up somewhere and do the same.

Later--

Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president, died on the morning of April 15th, 1865, nine hours after he was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth. After several days of lying in state and funeral rites in Washington DC, his body (and that of his son Willie, who had died in 1862 and rested in a borrowed mausoleum ever since) were placed on a train called The Lincoln Special. This train, consisting of nine cars, left Washington on April 21st on a long, sad, circuitous route through the northern states that ended in his adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois on May 4th.

Lincoln himself has over the century and a half since his death become Washington's most famous ghost. His favorite haunt, you should pardon the pun, is of course the White House. Less common are tales of the reappearance of the funeral train that carried him home.

The best known of these tales comes from Albany, New York. In 1865, the train passed over the Hudson River Railroad, later a part of the Hudson Division of the NY Central railroad, and later still part of the Conrail system. An account from an Albany newspaper, first cited in Lloyd Lewis's 1929 book MYTHS AFTER LINCOLN, begins: "Regularly in the month of April, about midnight the air on the tracks becomes very keen and cutting. . ."

The account goes on to say that clouds obscure the moon, a black carpet seems to roll down the track, and all sounds are silenced. The engines--two; one for an escort train, draped in black crepe and crewless save for one flatcar carrying a band of skeletons playing black, noiseless instruments, the second bearing Lincoln's coffin on a single flatcar--are oldtime woodburners, puffing out great clouds of smoke from huge smokestacks, covered in polished brass as many of the old engines were.

To add to this fantastic appearance, it is said that when real trains are on the track, the ghost train runs right through them, and that clocks and watches, all along the line where the phantom runs, will be five to eight minutes slow once it passes.

A very Gothic sort of tale, but what is interesting is the date when these appearances are said to happen. The ghost train has been reported without exception on the night of April 26-27. There would seem to be no particular reason why it should appear outside Albany on that night, although it did pass through that section about that date, except for this.

On April 26th, 1865, Lincoln's murderer, John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded in a flaming barn outside Port Royal, Virginia, by Federal troops after a twelve-day manhunt. Orders were given to take Booth alive, but he was shot by Sergeant Boston Corbett, who said God told him to shoot Booth. Hit in the spine, and paralyzed, Booth died three hours later on the porch of a nearby farmhouse.

By telegraph, after the War Department and others had been notified, word could have--notice I'm not saying it did, but it could have--reached Albany by midnight.

Are the death of Booth and the sightings of the Lincoln funeral train on the same date coincidences?

You be the judge. I know what I think.

And on that note, fair thee well.