Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 3

T. Swift Vs. that Old Deluder Satan

It’s back to school time in my corner of the world, which means a couple of things: 1. It’s time to hit the Dixon Ticonderoga pencil sales and stock up 2. I’ve pretty much given up on watering my garden. And 3. I will (hopefully) be blogging more consistently every week.

It’s possible I have a tad obsession with these pencils.

Thank you to those of you who have still popped in to say hello through the summer as I followed a more casual posting schedule. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been pretty inconsistent about visiting the blogs of others, but I have high hopes of scooping up that dropped ball as well.

Even though my kids are no longer small and in need of constant supervision and entertainment through the summer months, there’s still something satisfying about beginning a new, regular schedule. My youngest son is a senior in high school this year, my oldest is beginning his second year of college, and I will be working at school in a full-time capacity for the first time since my college boy was a baby.

It feels good and right to all be participating in the wonderful tradition of pubic education that began in the United States in 1647 as a way to thwart the schemes of the Devil. That’s when the Massachusetts Bay Colony crafted a law firmly stating the guidelines necessary to ensure that its young people would be able to read the Bible and wouldn’t be susceptible to tricky demonic scheming.

All the desks have been scrubbed of bubblegum and graffiti, ready for the new year. Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay

The law, known colloquially as the Old Deluder Satan Law because it begins with the words: “In being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of Scripture . . .” was a more specific version of a similar law put into place in 1642.

The earlier law claimed that the responsibility to educate the young fell to the community. It’s replacement expanded on that by instituting firm guidelines, stating that a community of at least fifty households must appoint a public educator. If there were a hundred households, then there needed to be a qualified master who could prepare the young folks for Harvard where they could take Satan-fighting classes like ENGLISH 183:”Taylor Swift and her World,” GERMAN 260: “Writing the Body in the Posthuman Age,” or GEN ED 1090: “What is a Book?”

These are actual course offerings from the current Harvard catalog. Take that, you old deluder!

Take that, you old deluder! Image by from Pixabay

Of course our public schools are more secular these days, but there’s still some truth to the assumption that an educated public is one that is more analytical and is therefore less susceptible to being mislead by those with nefarious intentions.

I’d like to think that’s true, though the tone and quality of much of our public discourse leads me to believe we still have a lot of work to do. And so, I guess it’s time to get back to it. I’m armed with a stockpile of Dixon Ticonderogas, and I am ready.

Bring on the school year!

Wrong-Way Angleton

Recently, the hubs and I returned, via the back roads, from a quick getaway to commemorate our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was a lovely, relaxing couple of days. We hiked and swam and ate well and just generally enjoyed the kind of meandering schedule that’s hard to follow when you’re toting around bored teenagers.

And so it felt right when the hubs asked me if on the way home I’d like to explore the back roads where not so much as a single bar of GPS-supporting data signal can be found. It was a suggestion he made almost apologetically because he assumed I’d be more comfortable sticking to roads I know better.

That was a considerate thought, because I have been known to lose my way from time to time and it has occasionally been a traumatic experience. The truth is, though, I have pretty much accepted that this disadvantage is just part of who I am, and if I have the time, I’ve even enjoyed getting a little turned around, because one never knows when you might end up somewhere better than you’d intended to go.

That could have been the case for one pilot who has gone down in history for going the wrong way. Eleven years after he helped ready Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis for its famous nonstop flight across the Atlantic, mechanic Douglas Corrigan made headlines himself as the last of the great aviation transatlantic daredevils. For his efforts, he was inducted into the Burlington, Wisconsin Liars Club and his pilot’s license was suspended.

On July 17, 1938, not long after landing in New York in a rickety modified aircraft salvaged from the junkyard and held together by little more than the audacity and ingenuity of its pilot, Corrigan took off again to make the return trip west across the country. Then to the surprise of onlookers, he turned and headed east instead.

When he landed twenty-eight hours later in Dublin, he asked the locals where he was and explained that he and his unreliable old compass had gotten turned around in the clouds.

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, looking pretty happy to be wherever he is. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course not everyone believed the man who quickly became known as “Wrong-Way Corrigan,” possibly because his tale came with a wink and a grin. Also maybe because he’d already attempted to file a transatlantic flight plan in New York and had been denied since his plane was (I’m paraphrasing here) a hunk of junk.

The the public loved Corrigan, most likely because it’s kind of fun to root for an antihero who thwarted the rules and got away with. I have to assume, too, though, that there were a few sympathetic souls out there who thought there was a chance he was telling the truth.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who believed him was a gullible fool. I’m suggesting that they may have been the type who live with the condition I have come to know as directional insanity. As a fellow sufferer of this terrible malady, I could sympathize with a person who accidentally, delightfully, ended up in Ireland instead of California.

I’m not alone, either. In fact, there is a growing number of us. While I have been so afflicted since my earliest days of childhood, long before the era in which we all carry GPS devices in our pockets, the habitual use of such gadgets has been shown to negatively affect our spacial memories.

It’s also true that most of us have a harder time navigating as we age, so there really was never any hope for this gal who at one time went the wrong direction on an interstate she traveled regularly and didn’t realize it until she’d driven the amount of time that it should have taken her to get home and instead arrived at a town she’d never heard of.

This same gal, maybe a year ago, ended up about two hours north of where she was supposed to meet her sister for lunch because she got confused in a construction zone and took an exit she never takes from an interstate she travels regularly. The worst was the phone call to said sister who has never experienced a moment of directional insanity in her life, and rarely relies on GPS. Said sister wasn’t the least bit surprised.

So, card-carrying Wisconsin Liars Club member Douglas Corrigan would have had my sympathy had I been alive to see his possibly accidental triumph. He stuck to his story for the rest of his life and didn’t really get in very much trouble over it. His pilot’s license was revoked for about two weeks, the length of time it took him to make it back to the United States by ship, and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by where he ended up.

Stolen Olympic Dreams

In 1903, David R. Francis, former mayor of St. Louis, former governor of Missouri, former US Secretary of the Interior, and then president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, had a couple of big problems. 

David R. Francis, whose impressive resume could include “Olympics Stealer” under Special Skills. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Under his leadership, the City of St. Louis was attempting to carry off the grandest world’s fair yet. It was set to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase land deal in which Thomas Jefferson bought from France the rights to be the conquering power in a gigantic territory that was inhabited already by quite a few indigenous people. It was a giant leap forward in the Get Really Friggin’ Big Destiny of the young United States. 

But it turns out that pulling off the largest world’s fair in history is something of a logistical challenge and the whole project had to be pushed to 1904. That still worked because the famous explorers Lewis and Clark didn’t set off into the Louisiana Territory until 1804, so with some minor fudging, that was good enough. 

Another big problem, however, was the fact that in 1901, the Olympic Committee in charge of determining the site of the third modern Olympic Games in 1904 had chosen Chicago. This would be the first Olympic Games on US soil and, though the Games didn’t yet garner nearly the attention they do today, it was still a world event that would compete directly with St. Louis’s moment in the spotlight.

Though founder of the Modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin didn’t attend the St. Louis Olympiad which he feared “would match the mediocrity of the town” (ouch), in 2018 the IOC did finally allow the city to install Olympic rings (not a thing yet in 1904).

The two cities already had a strong rivalry going because the proud, historic City of St. Louis, Gateway to the West, on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi River had been usurped as the preeminent western city by some swampy upstart village to its north that became important only because someone decided to dig a ditch from the Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes. Whatever.

Francis wasn’t about to let the swampy upstart ruin his fair which, in case anyone is keeping score, was more than double the size Chicago’s little exposition had been in 1893. He saw to the planning of numerous athletic events and even managed to contract with the Amateur Athletic Union to hold their 1904 track & field championship as part of the fair. Presented with the very real possibility that this could spell failure for the burgeoning tradition of Olympic world competition, the Olympic Committee begrudgingly agreed to move the Games to St. Louis.

If you want to explore another, non-Olympic aspect of the 1904 World’s Fair, you can check out my newest historical mystery. https://sarah-angleton.com/paradise-on-the-pike/

Some Olympic historians have suggested that this was a blight on the history of the Games, but given that the whole concept of the Modern Olympics was still fairly new and in a bit of flux anyway, I’m not convinced that’s very fair. Yes, only twelve countries were represented and more than eighty percent of the athletes represented the United States. Yes, fair organizers tended to refer to every sport played on the fairgrounds as “Olympic,” which caused quite a bit of confusion. Yes, there was a deeply problematic “Anthropology Games” competition in which indigenous peoples were paid to compete in events in which they’d had almost no training in order to demonstrate the general superiority of western athleticism. And yes, the gold medal in the marathon was very nearly awarded to a man who’d completed much of the course in a car. 

But it was also the first Olympic Games in which gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the top competitors, hurdler George Poage became the first Black athlete to win a spot on the Olympic podium, and competing with a wooden prosthetic leg, George Eyser won multiple medals in gymnastics. Also, there was not a single allusion to menage a trois in the opening ceremony. Nor was there an opening ceremony.

In the interest of not making every reader from Chicago completely hate me, I should clarify that I actually really like deep dish and think that it is infinitely better than the Provel and cracker crust garbage St. Louis likes to pass off as pizza. Chris6d, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One could even argue that because the Games were part of this gigantic fair, which welcomed nearly 20 million people and became the only Victorian era fair to make a profit, this boosted the visibility of the Olympics, which were already a little bit of a hot mess with an uncertain future at this point. 

So yes, David R. Francis and the City of St. Louis were a little bit sneaky and underhanded and totally stole the Olympics from Chicago, which still hasn’t hosted the Games. The city does have a lot going for it, though. They have a river they’re fond of dying green every St. Patrick’s Day, an interesting cheese casserole dish they refer to as pizza, an alarming number of murders, and a somewhat irrational, now mostly friendly rivalry with a tiny little proud city to the south on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi.

Not bad for some swampy little upstart.

Boredom Busting and Sportsball History

It was one of those long boring afternoons in 1965 when thirteen-year-old Frank  Pritchard and his siblings were in a pickle. They had nothing to do and were getting a little cranky. That’s about the time their dad, then a Washington State Representative, Joel Pritchard arrived home with his buddy Bill Bell after an afternoon of golf, and made sportsball history.

I suspect every great sport has a vaguely ridiculous origin story. Image by Nils from Pixabay

The two men jumped in to solve the problem by suggesting that the kids make up a game. Frank, apparently a typical 13 year old, turned it around and challenged them to make one up themselves. The two friends readily agreed and set out to see what they had handy.

The property had an old, little-used badminton court, but a quick search of the family’s sportsball equipment yielded no rackets or shuttlecocks. What they did find were some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball. 

The ball bounced surprisingly well on the asphalt court and once they’d lowered the net a bit, the two men got the kids playing a made-up game that was a little bit like badminton, a little bit like tennis, a little bit like ping pong, and at least at first, a lot like Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that two decades later would introduce the world to the greatest game to never have the same rules twice.

Also, this new made-up-on-the-spot sport was evidently pretty fun.

The family played the next weekend as well, and Pritchard and Bell introduced the game to another friend named Barney McClallum. Together, the three of them decided to write down some rules to their new hodgepodge sport that made Joel’s wife Joan think of pickle boat races in which the leftover or mismatched rowers team up and race just for fun. 

It was probably only a matter of time until someone decided a wiffle ball would be more fun to try to hit with a racket. Image by 기석 김 from Pixabay

So the game became pickleball. Whereas most sports that fall into the category of made-up-because-someone-was-bored fade into obscurity after a family reunion or two and someone has inevitably broken an ankle (which could maybe, possibly be an absolutely true story from the depths of Angleton family lore), pickleball became an official thing in 1972.

That’s when its inventors established a corporation to protect the integrity of their burgeoning, accidentally-kind-of-super-fun sport. By 1976, the game started getting some national press, and in 1978 it was included in a book titled Other Raquet Sports. 

By 1990 pickleball had made it to all fifty states, and in the mid-nineties, it was my favorite sport to play in my high school P.E. class, even though I was pretty sure my P.E. teacher Mrs. H. had made it up one afternoon when her kids were bored. 

Of course now, nearly thirty (thirty?!) years later, it seems like everyone plays pickleball. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association boasts more than 70,000 members, there are organized leagues and tournaments, and there’s even a restaurant in my part of the world called Chicken N Pickle where you can, get this, eat chicken and play pickleball. Brilliant.

Move over tennis. There’s a new game in town. Stephen James Hall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hubs had a birthday recently and he got a couple of rackets, so we decided to hop on the bandwagon and give it a try at a local park converted in the last few years from a baseball diamond (because who would ever want to play baseball?) to generally busy pickleball courts. Neither of us remembered precisely how to play, but after a YouTube video or two we were ready to go.

I vaguely recall being pretty good at the sport in high school. It turns out that thirty (thirty?!) years is plenty of time to get a little rusty. The hubs hadn’t played the sport in several decades either, but he does have a much more impressive background in tennis than I do, which gave him a definite advantage. Still, the game really is super fun. 

Like the kind of fun one might expect to have on a long boring day when the family goes searching for something to do among the sportsball castoffs in the garage. And a great game is born.

Pomp, Illuminations, and the Hard Work of Revision

So, today we celebrate a pretty big holiday here in the United States. We follow in the footsteps of John Adams who wrote to his wife Abigail that Independence Day should be recognized with “pomp and parade, with [shows], games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

It’s a little rainy today in my corner of the world, but most of us will have all that pretty much covered. Of course, we aren’t really celebrating the anniversary of the day the Continental Congress first declared independence, nor the day one of history’s most famous breakup letters was drafted. The holiday doesn’t fall on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it doesn’t mark the moment when King George III read it and decided to sing a love song about sending an armed battalion.  

John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s July 4th celebration does commemorate all of that, but what it actually marks on the calendar is the day of the final pen stroke of the final draft of the document that spurred a war that birthed a nation.

As a writer who recognizes that first drafts rarely amount to much and that most of the best writing occurs in the rewriting, I find this pretty satisfying. It seems John Adams would not have agreed with me. When he wrote of his future nation’s Independence Day, he was referring to July 2, 1776.

I get it. He was excited. He’d had a hand in the original draft, working with Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman, and of course Thomas Jefferson to get it just so. Like a student who waited too long to start his final term paper and stayed up all night before the due date, assuming that in his push to get it finished, he’d written the most brilliant words ever penned by any student in the history of students, Adams was probably anxious to get it turned in to the Continental Congress, send it on to the king, and sit back to watch the fireworks.

Image by Johnny Maertens from Pixabay

Not surprisingly, however, Adams and his fellow committee members weren’t the only ones who had something to say about the wording of the Declaration. The debating began. In some ways, this important American document was improved by a few tweaks here or there, a little tightening of language or nuance of phrasing. And in other ways, it was made worse, like in the removal of all references to the immorality of slavery.

It’s still possible to make the wrong decision in revision, too, which is one of the things that makes the process so difficult. But the Continental Congress figured out where they had to compromise in order to make the declaration work enough for all the representatives in the room to move forward. The final draft would be signed nearly a month later on August 2. The date at the top of the document, however, remained July 4, which became an officially declared federal holiday in 1870.

The date is pretty ingrained at this point and I think, all things considered, it’s the right one to celebrate, though with the a full day of rain expected, and much to the frustration of my poor dog, I suspect many of my neighbors will celebrate with illuminations on the 5th and 6th this year.

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

But in my mind, the 4th is the day the United States truly embarked on the notion that freedom and liberty sometimes require compromise and consideration of those who don’t agree with us, and that revision is painful, difficult, and necessary work.

The United States, such as it was imagined by the Second Continental Congress, wasn’t a perfect nation, nor was the vision of it perfected yet. That would take many, many years. So many, in fact, we’re still counting, and I suspect always will be.

But the best work comes in the difficult, painful revision process in which debate and compromise occurs. No matter how politically divided we may think we are, or how we as individuals may feel our nation is doing in this moment, I hope that’s something every American can be proud to celebrate.

If you are celebrating American Independence today or perhaps in the coming days, please be careful with all your pomp and illuminations, and have a wonderful holiday!

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I originally posted a version of this a few years ago, but it’s a holiday and the post still feels pretty relevant

For the Bragging Rights

On October 4, 1986 the Missouri River flooded its banks and damaged the stretch the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad track that stretched between Sedalia and Machens, Missouri. This in itself wasn’t particularly unusual. The area is prone to flooding and had proven a problem for the railroad company since the earliest days of the route. What was unusual about the 1986 flood was that the company decided to abandon rather than repair the route.

This is the last remaining signal from the MKT Railway.

This turned out to be good news for the biking and hiking enthusiasts of the Great State of Missouri. With help from a generous donation from Ted and Pat Jones (of the Edward Jones Financial Investment Company based in St. Louis), the Missouri Department of Natural Resources purchased the abandoned right-of-way to use as a trail. 

The first section of the crushed limestone MKT trail, shortened to KT, which became simply “the Katy” opened in 1990 around Rocheport, Missouri. Today it officially extends from Clinton in the western part of the state to Machens in the east, comes in at about 239 miles, and is the longest recreational rail trail in the United States. Several spurs offer additional distance, including a 47-mile Rock Island Spur that runs to Kansas City.

Sock Monkey Steve came along as well, but his skinny little monkey legs weren’t much help.

My sister and I were happy enough last week to hop on our bicycles and crush the route between Clinton and St. Charles. That’s officially 12.7 miles from the end in Machens, but St. Charles is a better place to stop and get picked up and taken out for celebration barbecue and cookies. Also, if we add in all of the spurs into towns that we took along the way, we more than made up the difference.

It turns out a lot of cyclists (and some hikers) tackle the whole Katy. We met quite a few cyclists, some of them traveling the same direction as us, some day riders who had done the whole thing on previous occasions, some with light loads and dedicated sag wagons, and others carting their own camping gear. Some riders do the full length in as little as three days. Five to six days seems to be the most common. 

We reached the high point of the trail on the first day, but it definitely was not all downhill from there.

We did six, which was good enough for us. And we stayed in hotels and B&Bs along the way, because we couldn’t imagine that sleeping on the ground was going to be restful enough for us after forty-plus miles of biking on crushed gravel to then be able to get back up and do it again the next day. We did carry our gear with us, though, which was enough of a burden. 

The trail, though straight and flat-ish, requires a lot of work. Some patches are very well groomed. Some not so much. After one stormy night, we had to dodge quite a few downed branches. There are some stretches where large gravel and washouts make the riding all the more challenging, and the western portion of the trail all the way to about a mile outside Boonville is often slightly uphill, just enough to be a slog.

A train tunnel near Rocheport.

But the trail is beautiful, with much of it running between the Missouri River and gorgeous bluffs. It crosses over numerous creeks on pretty truss bridges, through tunnels, forest, wetlands, prairie land, rolling farmlands, and past historic remnants of the railroad.

As challenging as some days were, as sore as our bodies ended up being, and as tired as we were by the time we lugged our bikes from the trail to our stops each night, I’m awfully glad we did it. I don’t know that I learned anything profound from the experience, though someday when my backside is less sore, I will probably think of some way to turn the experience into a terribly moving and deeply reflective personal essay. For now, it’s enough to have crushed the Katy for the bragging rights.

Slathered in BBQ Sauce

In 1698, a Dominican missionary known as Pére Labat did what all good cooks throughout history have done—he wrote down the tips and tricks he learned from better cooks. Labat was in the French West Indies when he observed the use of a mixture of lime juice and chili peppers to season meat slowly cooking outdoors over indirect heat. When he wrote about it he possibly became the first person to record the use of an early kind of barbecue sauce, and I’m guessing, made a lot of people a little bit hungry just reading about it.

We had barely started at this point.

Barbecue had been around at least a couple centuries before that, originating with the barbacoa of the Taíno People of the Caribbean, and introduced to the Western world by Columbus’s voyages. Because whether you found the part of the world you were looking for or not, when you smell the roasty deliciousness of barbecuing meat, you want to share the experience.

Over the next several hundred years, the love of barbecue spread and was embraced most enthusiastically by the Southern United States where it became particularly a part of Black American culture. That’s when a broader variety of rubs and sauces really began taking it to the next level. Barbecuing became the quintessential American thing to do, making its way into political campaigns and into backyards across the country.

Ok, technically not barbecue, but I’m not going to turn my nose up at it.

Today, barbecue is pretty much synonymous with summer in the United States, and this year, at the Angleton household summer has arrived. Now, I will admit that like many careless Americans, I’m a little loosely goosey with the term barbecue. I am well aware that the term applies specifically to meat that is cooked with indirect heat and not on a grill, and that some of you are probably pretty persnickety about that definition. It might even make you a little mad that I’m about to use the term barbecue interchangeably with grilling out, which is apparently not the same at all.

But here’s the thing. This year we had a record crop of sweet cherries, largely because the birds we would normally fight for them were stuffed full already of a million cicadas. So we had to get a little creative. We jammed and pied and dried and salsa-ed.

Mmm. Tastes like summer.

Then we made sweet cherry barbecue sauce. And it is really, really good.

So now that the late spring days are starting to feel an awful lot like summer, we are cooking outside a lot more. At some point I’m sure we will legitimately barbecue in a smoker or in a pit. Most of the time we grill and call it good, because it doesn’t take as long to grill up a St. Louis pork steak as it does to smoke a Boston butt. 

And whether I’m using the word right or not, both taste amazing slathered in barbecue sauce.

Happy (almost) summer!

Song of the Cicadas

On April 15, 1791, the first of four stones marking the corners of the Federal District in Washington DC was laid by surveyor George Ellicott and his team, which included brilliant mathematician, astronomer, tobacco farmer, and free-born Black man Benjamin Banneker.

A representation of Benjamin Banneker, who for the next few weeks will be known primarily as the naturalist who documented the seventeen-year brood cycle.
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/aia/part2/2h68b.html, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Banneker is known in the history books not only for his role in the laying out of Washington DC, but also as the man who compiled one of the earliest American almanacs. He provided a copy to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson as a counter to Jefferson’s assessment that Black men did not possess the mental capacity of white men. Throughout Banneker’s life he did what he could to fight this unjust assumption and advocate for freedom.

There’s a lot of big and important stuff Banneker should be remembered and celebrated for, but today I find myself only wanting to really talk about one of them—a topic that is at the forefront of the thoughts and conversations of millions of people in my corner of the world. Because according to Morgan State University researchers Asamoah Nkwanta and Janet Barber, Banneker is also one of the first people to have calculated and recorded the seventeen-year life cycle of the periodic cicada.

I admit that among insects that I give regular thought to, cicadas usually rank pretty low, somewhere way behind mosquitoes, ticks, and the carpenter bees that try to eat my deck every year. Recently, though, cicadas have claimed the top spot. I’m not alone, either, because the most frequent Google search topic over the last week in Missouri has been cicadas.

That’s because we make up part of the map covering two large broods of periodic cicadas. To give some context to that, there are some different varieties of this particular insect. One lives out its mating ritual for a few weeks every summer, molting and abandoning its creepy exoskeletons on tree trunks so that big brothers can stick them to the tee shirt backs of unsuspecting little sisters throughout the Midwest.

Top Google searches make great blog topics. Image by Ashlee Marie from Pixabay

Then there are the periodic variety that emerge from the ground to spend a few weeks molting and singing and mating every thirteen or seventeen years. This year, there are two large broods of periodic cicadas singing their way through Missouri’s trees. These particular broods have not been seen at the same time since 1803 and it will be another 221 years before it happens again. There are allegedly billions of them in the state right now. I believe it.

Their high pitched buzz, which peaks between 10 AM and 6 PM every day, was kind of pleasant at first, but has grown into an ever-present eerie drone still audible over the car radio and in every corner of my house. They drop onto sidewalks, hurl themselves into innocent passers by, cling to every rough surface they can find, and people on my social media feeds keep sharing cicada recipes as if I am going to start eating them. I assure you I am not.

Benjamin Banneker didn’t quite know what to make of the periodic cicadas the first time he encountered them either, and didn’t have the luxury of Googling for information. When he was seventeen, a large brood emerged in his corner of the world in rural Maryland. He initially thought they were locusts that would destroy the family’s tobacco harvest. He waged a fruitless war against them before coming to the conclusion that not only was he fighting a losing battle, but that the insects really weren’t doing much harm. And then, because he was a much better observer and record keeper than I am, he eventually mapped out their extremely extended life-cycle.

This is pretty much what the underside of every leaf in my yard looks like right now.

Our cicadas aren’t much of a problem this year, either. They may cause a little damage to trees while feeding on sap and laying their eggs in slits they make in the trunks, but unless the trees are young, it’s not a big deal. And the cicadas have been great for our cherry harvest because the birds have been so busy eating the big loud bugs they have more or less ignored our fruit.

Despite my best efforts, my dog eats the cicadas too, even without including them in a stir fry or dipping them in chocolate as so many of my disgusting friends have suggested. It’s given him a little bit of a belly ache, which kind of serves him right, I think.

I am looking forward to a few weeks from now when the billions of periodic cicadas will be gone, their eggs safely deposited for the next thirteen or seventeen years, and we can all go back to thinking about and discussing all of the many other much more important things going on in the world.

In the meantime, I’m trying to appreciate them the way Banneker came to. In his journal, he wrote “that if their lives are short they are merry, they begin to sing or make a noise from the first they come out of the Earth till they die.” Okay, I guess their singing isn’t THAT irritating. But I’m still not eating them.

Lobsters, Lemons, and Plain Ol’ Meatloaf

The countdown to summer is in full swing here in the Angleton household with one son already finished with classes and moved back home, mini-fridge and all, and the other heading into final exams and ticking off the the hours until the end of the semester.

I mean if I cooked that, I’d probably take a picture. Image by Mogens Petersen from Pixabay

The brothers have already been busy making plans to earn money, spend time with mutual friends, get fit, and learn to cook more. I’m not sure what exactly inspired this last goal, but they each mentioned it to me separately and I couldn’t be more delighted, not only because I am happy to turn over the task to them, but also because I would like them to be able to feed themselves when they get out into the real world.

Both of my boys do have some cooking skills. They just might lack a little confidence in the kitchen. My youngest took a culinary class at school and has a good base of knowledge. His older brother spent the school year living in a frat house as the low freshman on the totem pole who got stuck with cooking for the house when an ice storm cancelled classes and prevented their cook from reaching them. And then there are a few favorite recipes they each have learned over the years.

Okay, yeah, it’s not beautiful, but it makes for a pretty good family dinner. Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay

So they aren’t starting entirely from scratch, but they also don’t necessarily want to learn to prepare the typical meals that have graced our dinner table since they were small. My sons are, after all, part of the Instagram Era, and if it’s not worthy of a picture, it probably isn’t worth making in the first place. #foodstagram

Sharing a picture of one’s food isn’t unique to the age of social media of course. For centuries food has been depicted in works of art, and about eight years ago, it even inspired a study from Cornell University that looked at whether food depictions in art can tell us anything about what people ate during the corresponding eras.

The short answer to this question is no. We know this for four reasons:

Historians do have a pretty good idea, from many other sources, of the kinds of foods people frequently ate in the time periods and regions studied, and it doesn’t really match up.By far the most common meat gracing tables in paintings is fish and shellfish, and the percentage increases in nations with relatively little coastline. #crablife #GettinMyLobsterOnArtist’s runaway favorite fruit over the five hundred year period looked at is lemons, which for much of the times studied, was a pretty uppity, expensive fruit that wouldn’t have been widely available to just anyone. #making lemonadeNo one painted pictures of plain ol’ meatloaf. #JustLikeMamaUsedToMake

It turns out that the artists of the previous five centuries weren’t all that different than the social media #foodies of today. Paintings depicting family meals from the Era of European Exploration through the Industrial and Post-Industrial years don’t typically showcase the everyday fare of most families.

I do draw the line at some ingredients. Now that we are inundated with cicadas, the boys have mentioned trying out some of the recipes floating around the internet. #NOPE Image by Noël BEGUERIE from Pixabay

Instead, paintings feature celebration meals, status dishes, symbolic foods, and fancy choices that might best highlight the skill of the artist, like textured lemon skins and bug-eyed lobsters. They were the kinds of food that could be labeled with #foodie #yummy #foodporn #eatwell #dinnerinspiration or #foodgasm, and that might inspire numerous likes and shares.

Such paintings are definitely not representations of the meatloaf recipe your mama’s been making since since you were old enough to stuff crumbled bits of it into your mouth with a slobbery toddler fist.

Whether they will be taking photos or not, my sons are not looking to make mama’s meatloaf. They’d prefer less familiar ingredients and Instagram-worthy results. This doesn’t really bother me. I’m just glad they’re excited about cooking and I get to spend a summer learning new recipes along with them. But sometimes we’ll probably still eat plain ol’ meatloaf.

Eggs, Months, Disciples, and Blog Years

Earlier this week I received a congratulatory notice from WordPress that I had been at this blogging thing for twelve years, which feels like a pretty significant milestone. As I reflected back on the winding road of ridiculousness that this space has taken over the years, I recalled that not many months into the adventure I wrote about another significant anniversary in my life when my husband and I celebrated twelve years of marriage.

Good things come in twelves. Image by Jean Christophe Baux from Pixabay

In that post, I lamented that between kids’ schedules, work schedules, and the generally tiring pace of life, we put off actually celebrating. We were in a busy time of life then, and twelve years, I suggested, didn’t really feel like a special number. Then I argued that it really should.

So, twelve years after I posted for the first time in this space, a few months before my husband and I will celebrate twenty-four years of marriage, I’m revisiting the case for year number twelve, bloggiversary style.

Because great things come in twelves, things like eggs, months, and disciples, hours on the analog clock, signs of the zodiac, tribes of Israel, drummers drumming, and years of the Practical Historian blog: your guide to practically true history. We regularly bake cookies, cupcakes, and muffins in multiples of twelve, and twelve even has its own special nickname, placing it on par with other rock star numbers like 3.14… and 6.02 x 1023.

Image by profivideos from Pixabay

The word dozen comes from the French douzaine, which is a derivation of douze, the Latin word for twelve with a collective suffix tacked onto the end. Of course it’s perfectly possible to tack the same suffix onto the end of other numbers and get, for example, quinzaine (a group of fifteen) or centaine (a group of one hundred), but at least in English, we typically don’t.

Because twelve is particularly special.

Speaking mathematically (and if one feels so compelled) there’s a pretty good argument for counting in a base twelve system, rather than the base ten system in which we normally operate. We do it already when we tell time, measure in inches, or order a gross of cocktail umbrellas. In the field of finance where calendar months are often an important part of the calculation a duodecimal or dozenal system (that’s what math nerds who actually do feel compelled to argue about this kind of thing call base twelve) could make sense.

And if we think in terms of factors, which are the kind of things math nerds really geek out about, Twelve is a lot more versatile than ten. Ten factors to 2 x 5, whereas twelve factors to 6 x 2, 4 x 3, and 2 x 2 x 3.

So, thank you WordPress for the heads up, because twelve really is a thing worth celebrating:

6 posts about aliens x 2 Gravitar photo updates = 4 novel launches x 3 posts about vampires = 3 anti-censorship soapboxes x 2 summer blog breaks when my kids were young x 2 more posts about my dog than any history blog has a right to post = 12 years of spilling history and nonsense into this little corner of the blogosphere.

Here’s to another twelve years. And maybe another twelve years after that. I might even suggest that I’ll still be at this twelve times twelve years from now. But that would just be gross.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!