Posts for the StoryWalk went in the ground last weekend, then this weekend they got pulled out, shortened and put back in. The first few frames have been attached. We are on schedule for a December event. It's a pleasure to be out on a trail.

This week we watched all 12 hours (6 two hour episodes) of the Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution. The details of events and battles, the quotes read by famous voices (Amanda Gorman reading Phyllis Wheatley), the honesty about motives and empire building and the horrors of warfare were outstanding. The blindness of slave holders going on about liberty and freedom...the Gaza-like destruction of native American towns...the treatment of black soldiers after the war...makes me despair of the human species.
The narrator notes that before the revolution, the abolitionist movement was not an important issue, but afterwards it was. There are so many contradictory things to deal with. Washington was a slave holder, but twice he gave up power, resigning as general and doing a peaceful transfer of presidential power. The revolution was about land and empire building, but it gave the ideas and the language used by many other revolutionary movements. It gave the idea of a multi-ethnic country based on law.
As people in North Carolina are organizing and brilliantly resisting the secret police thugs of ICE and Border Patrol, Burns showed how the mostly loyalist south was turned against the British by their tyrannical occupation.

I cannot do the short walk from the library to the post office without taking ten photos, probably because I always take my favorite route, Hypotenuse Way, the people's path, the short cuts across private property.

Question 1 on the ballot on Tuesday was about requiring an id to vote and restricting absentee voting days. It failed statewide 64 to 36. We are old in Maine and need all the absentee voting days we can get. It wasn't broken so it didn't need fixing. The results by town are fascinating; the numbers are a good measure of how liberal or conservative a town is and how educated and wealthy. It failed in Unity 56 to 43. Our results are always close. Across the lake from us in Burnham (trailers and junky yards), it passed 59 to 41. On the map red is liberal and aqua is conservative. The liberal parts of Maine are in the south and along the coast, but there are pockets of liberals in odd places like Madawaska Lake Township (79 voters) way up north that failed it 77 to 23 and Carabasset Valley (362 voters) in the west that failed it 75 to 24. Makes me want to visit those places and see who lives there. I can look up stats on their education and income levels to see how those correlate.

We planned Empty Bowls for months, buying the bowls and having painting parties all summer. We made good money for the food pantry and soup kitchen, but my personal goal was to bring back meals to the community center. It was great to see the room set up with the old tablecloths that I help to hem years ago, and to see people lingering to visit over their simple meal. We plan to do 4 community meals a year. Next project: get the story walk posts in the ground before it freezes.