We shopped at Fernwood Gardens in Montville and got a few new hostas for a new garden in the triangle by the deck where we shovel huge amounts of snow in the winter. Let's see if the hostas show the usual gift for going zero to 60 in two weeks after lying under a ton of snow.

After the recent rulings of the supreme court giving guns more rights than women, I keep my sanity by concentrating on tasks at hand. I've never cleaned out my car before, but I scrubbed it within an inch of its life. And I keep cranking out flyers for events at the library. My hope is that the dog has finally caught the car and that a massive turnout in November will lead to ditching the filibuster and expanding the supreme court.

Yesterday we had sea shanties under the tent. Most of the children created their own game hopping on the granite blocks behind the tent. Self-made spontaneous games are the best of all. An Amish buggy drove into the full parking lot and found a spot in the shade at the back. Amish adolescents arrived by bike; one wanted to trade me a smart phone which he is not allowed to have for a flip phone. Trade done, and then another guy borrowed the smart phone until Tuesday. Melissa thinks they have terrible social skills, but I think they have trouble getting the tech help from a woman. They are kind of secretive about using the tech, but are drawn to it big time.

In preparation for her reading at the library in July, I've started in on Elizabeth Leonard's biography of Benjamin Butler. I never read biographies and I hate the Civil War, but this is very engaging and the parallels to our current crisis will make for good discussion. Elizabeth is Colby College's emeritus Civil War historian and is very active in Waterville protests.

The deer tracks through the newly raked sand garden at Asticou said all that needed to be said. And Jordan Pond House is not what it used to be. How do you explain to someone that the teapots need to be green? And that the popovers should release steam when you break them open?
Here are some quotes from Piketty's A Brief History of Inequality:

Concretely, we will see that since the end of the eighteenth century, the march toward equality has been based on the development of a number of specific institutional arrangements that have to be studied as such: equality before the law; universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy; free and obligatory education; universal health insurance; progressive taxes on income, inheritance, and property; joint management and labor law; freedom of the press; international law; and so on.
.....
Without the pressure of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, it is not at all certain that the Western property-owning classes would have accepted Social Security and progressive income taxes, decolonization and civil rights.
.....
Like the quest for ideal democracy, which is nothing other than the march toward political equality, the march toward equality in all its forms (social, economic, educational, cultural, political) is an ongoing process that will never be completed.
.....
the march toward equality over the past two centuries has taken the form of a profound re-equilibration of the law in favor of those who are not property owners. Property is always a relationship of power, and not only when it is a question of owning the means of production.
.....
The current distribution of wealth among the countries of the world and within countries bears the deep mark of the slaveholding, colonial past.
.....
Almost everywhere, the equality of rights proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century is above all an equality of White men, and especially of property-owning White men.
.....
The march toward equality and dignity with regard to work is an ongoing battle that now requires a profound transformation of the world economic system.
.....
the establishment of a radically egalitarian way of financing political parties, electoral campaigns, and the media is not only justified but indispensable for being able to speak of a democracy that is truly based on a principle of equality.
.....
The march toward equality is full of revolutionary moments when political institutions are redefined in order to make it possible to transform social and economic structures.
.....
new form of democratic socialism: self-managing, decentralized, and based on the continual circulation of power and property. This system differs entirely from the kind of centralized, authoritarian state socialism that was tried within the Soviet bloc during the twentieth century.
.....
nearly everything remains to be invented.