It's the season of trillium and trout lilies. On Connor Mill Trail, I was pleased to see that my day of service project in 2016, some steps inset on a steep decline, is still solid.

The premise of A Gentleman in Moscow (he may not leave the hotel) is an extended metaphor for having to operate within limits, and its universality is in the fact that everyone operates within limits, operating meaning doing whatever good you can and maintaining your sense of self and purpose, and limits can mean financial, medical, geographical, age. It could mean living in a small rural town. The story's timeliness is in its atmosphere of constant threat from a darkly ideological government whose power is in violence. The book by Amor Towle was published in 2016 and the netflix series that we are watching came out in 2024. Towle is American and the brief reference to Toqueville's Democracy in America hints that maybe we too are living out a tumultuous period of history while confined to an attic room. The Russian operative Osip watches Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and is incredulous that people did not have a revolution and overthrow the government. He notes that the Depression lasted 10 years and instead of rising up, people went to movie theaters.

My next sign: Primary Them All.

Jean Carr in Maryland, David Teague in Alaska, us in Ellsworth with Marjory. No idea about the facial expression. It just feels important to be out there. The vacationland approach to protest is sweet. Pick a coastal town, protest, get lunch and shop. Trying to get our numbers up to the 3.5% threshold: "Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change."

Pope Francis died today and Bill McKibben tells me that the pope and I were often on the same page:

..if he could stand so completely in solidarity with the world’s poor and vulnerable, then it gave the rest of us something to aim for. I thought this from the start, when he became the first pope to choose the name of Francis,—that countercultural blaze of possibility in a dark time—and when he showed his mastery of the art of gesture, washing the feet of women, of prisoners, of Muslim refugees. (Only Greta Thunberg, with her school strike, has so mastered the power of gesture in modern politics).
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Francis was very much a pragmatist, and one advised by excellent scientists and engineers. As a result, he had a clear technological preference: the rapid spread of solar power everywhere. He favored it because it was clean, and because it was liberating—the best short-term hope of bringing power to those without it, and leaving that power in their hands, not the hands of some oligarch somewhere.

Solar math is soothing in these troubled times. With our array online now I can see the numbers. On this rainy day, I added up the CMP numbers for 2024: 20,379 kilowatt hours for the library, 6,346 for our house. This year the array will make about 36,000 kWh. That covers our needs and the remainder cascades to Kari whose land the array sits on. It's an interesting lease to write. Now that we can show the numbers in real time on our phones we hope to use this as a model for others to make shared arrays. In money terms, the investment returns about 15% per year and pays for itself in about 6.5 years. In sustainability terms the library and our house will (except for a $25 transmission charge) never pay a CMP bill.

On this the dreariest day in the history of Aprils and just a few days after we got three inches of snow, my trigger finger is hovering above the buy-a-flight-to-New-Orleans button. That new Irma Thomas/Galactic album may have me shifting priorities. Some light reading: I don't read mysteries unless they are set in Maine; this one has the return of the old spies in coastal Purity, Maine. Gerritsen being an MD, the coroner scenes are finely detailed. The name Dionne is to Maine what Boudreaux is to Louisiana, and Currie's book is set in nearby Waterville where Babs Dionne is a criminal matriarch. Juicy.

It was a pleasure to be in that number in Belfast yesterday for the first of many protests. It was playful and joyful. Action reduces anxiety. Millions gathered all over the country. It's the small towns in red states that count the most.

It's not the EV of the future, but it's the one I can have now. All electric, 4 wheel drive, big wheels to get me off the camp road in mud season. It's a pleasure to drive. Tried out a DC fast charger in Fairfield for a few minutes. A family from Quebec was charging their Equinox and with almost no English showed me how to plug in. I'll almost always be charging at the level 2 at the library and at home. REDIKW would be a good plate.

Another tech upgrade is the expresso maker for home. These simple ones are now inexpensive and I make a perfect latte.

Looking for some hopeful vision for the future, I'm reading Abundance by Ezra Klein. Some quotes:

We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong, active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.
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A regrettable feature of history is that progress often requires the focusing mechanism of disaster.
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We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.
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Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy’s failed promises.
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What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?
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The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.