3/24/12 TEXAS!

WHISTLERS IN THE FOG

KIDS

TEXAS BARBECUE

TEXAS REDBUD

INDIAN PAINTBRUSH

Saturday, 9:00 AM.  40 degrees F, wind NW, calm.  There is dense fog again this morning and everything is seeping wet.  The barometer predicts rain.
        Whistling swans are migrating through to their far-northern nesting areas, and there was at least one large flock on Chequamegon Bay off Fish Creek at Ashland yesterday, the great white birds almost invisible in the rather dense fog.
        As we went further south on our recent trip we encountered many signs of spring…spring bulbs and other flowers … but most obvious and welcome were the flowering trees, particularly red bud (Cerciis canadensis) and also flowering pears and cultivated peaches, and native cherries and plums along roadsides and in hedgerows.  Another sign of spring was burnt prairie and pasture, the spring fires set to promote succulent new vegetative growth and eliminate cool season, non-native  grasses.
        Our first actual destination was Weatherford, Texas, west of Fort Worth, home to our son Dutch, daughter-in-law Leslie and four year old granddaughter Allison Eleanor, as well as Leslie’s folks.  The big event of our too-short visit was the birth of baby goats, which were amazingly cute and sturdy at one day  old.  The horses couldn’t compete with everyone’s interest this time, but their pasture yielded a real treat…Indian paintbrush flowers (Castilleja coccinea) which I hadn’t seen in years.  By all accounts this is the best spring for Texas bluebonnets in years, but we had no time to go looking for them in the Hill Country and beyond.  Texas barbecue, as always, was yet another treat. It  rained a good deal while we were in Texas, hopefully putting an end to their extended drought and consequent range and forest fires.  All too soon we were off to Denver, Colorado.
    An aside: I am not a particular fan of the TV personality Bill O’Reilly, and I had thought the title of the new book by himself and co-author Martin Dugard, “Killing Lincoln,” rather distasteful or even disrespectful. 
        I read the book anyway, and do not hesitate to say that it is the most exciting, eminently readable history book I have ever encountered (and I have read a lot of history).  And, it is true history, well researched and documented.  Its accounts of the last battles of the Civil War are exciting and vivid, and the porrayal of Lincoln’s assassination deeply moving. The assassins’ plot unfolds like a murder mystery and the capture and demise or sentencing of the perpetrators reveals stories seldom told in history books.  It is so well writen that it is a quick read, a few evenings at most.