A Weekend Post

 

I thought I would stop in and write a post. I maybe should be out working in the garden and the flowerbeds. The air quality is so bad, I shrink back from being out in it.
We have a terrible fire in one of our mountain communities. They are calling it the Erskine Fire and it has already burned 30,000 acres and 100 homes. It is only five percent contained with 800 firemen fighting it.
Fire is always a bad thing, but this one is so close to home. It hit so fast and grew almost overnight. My heart aches for the people who have lost homes and the fire fighters and their families who are putting themselves on the line.

 

I have to share with you this quote that I found in a very old book. I have been going down rabbit trails this week. I wanted to read my copy of Wind in the Willows. I thought I knew where it was on my bookshelf.
I ended up going out in my shed and going through boxes of books that I have out there. I had been thinking of these books as well as I moved books around a week ago. I brought in and started reading these books.

1. In The Days Of Poor Richard---Irving Bacheller, copyright 1922

2. A Man For The Ages---Irving Bacheller, copyright 1919

3. Out of Africa and Shadows on The Grass---Isak Dinesen copyright 1937

The quote I wanted to share is from A Man For The Ages. That book is about Abraham Lincoln.

"Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself,
thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

Abraham Lincoln.
March 21, 1864

I thought about this quote a lot this week. In light of Brexit and the coming U.S. election. I thought that if Abraham Lincoln and Soloman Binkus, would be shocked at the way our country and the world has become and they would be sad.
 What is interesting about these books, is that the stories are told, through letters that the author was given the privilege of reading and holding in his hands.
Irving Bacheller was known for being an American journalist and who started the first newspaper syndicate in the United States. He was a prolific writer and he was a journalist that loved liberty and his country.

 I only knew of him through my Grandmother and in the days before the internet, I had met a man who lived back east. I have no idea how I even found his bookshop, but I would write him letters and he would find books for me. Then I would buy them from him. I would send him checks I think.

   My grandmother would give me titles of books that she had loved and of authors she remembered from her girlhood and he would find these books and I would get them in the mail and I would take them to my grandmother to read. She spent so many hours reading them and then she would give them to me then I would read them. We would talk about each book like they were friends. As she began to get sicker and her mind couldn't keep track as well, she began to put marks in these books where she left off after she stopped reading. I remember how alarmed I was when I noticed it. I am sort of a book snob and some of these books were first editions.

 

Then I noticed that she no longer read. She said she was too tired as she would sit with the book on her lap.
Then my friend, the far away book seller died. His wife sent me a letter one day in the mail to let me know he has passed away suddenly. I was so lost with out that correspondence with someone I only knew though letters and our shared love of books. I am reminded of all of this, now when I open one of these books and I find the little check marks at the end of a sentence. Things that aggravated me so much then, has turned into a reminder to me of a sweet little window in time.
I still haven't found my copy of Wind in the Willows.

 

 We have a new heat wave coming. Starting tomorrow. Ron was outside just a bit ago and he said that ash is covering the cars now and the air smells of burning trees. I guess I am tired from painting. I sewed one day. Then spent the evening ripping out everything I had sewed. I tried it the next day, and spent that afternoon ripping out. If I get up the nerve to try it again, I am not ripping it out a third time.

I hope you have a lovely weekend, who knows what I will end up doing, but I do know I am not painting.

~Kim~

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

Isak Dinesen---Out of Africa