It's Not in the "Average"
As I write this note, we're a day from the official beginning of summer. Yet, the digital gauge outside the family room window boasts unsummer-like, mid-morning heat of 48 degrees. The average high for June 20 is a sunny and comfortable 81.
We sit at about 6,000 feet in altitude, on a high plains desert that averages about 15 inches of rain a year. Much of our precipitation comes from quick, often-times powerful, summer afternoon thunderstorms. June is one of our wettest months, averaging just below 2 inches of rain. Yet, it's been raining constantly since last night, and my informal rain gauge (the squirrels broke the official one because it was mounted on a fence post and got in their way—they kept throwing it to the ground till they were sure it was cracked and I'd never again post it) notes that we're getting close to an inch and a half of rain in a storm that began yesterday well after dark.
"Averages" tend to hide some of the meaningful realities and experiences of life. So, the unexpected happens—a hard-working Bach is born to capture and catalog the Baroque; an obviously ambitious Washington refuses to be a king and chooses to leave office after only two terms; a Lincoln, with brilliance, patience and "charity for all," arrives on the scene just in time to shepherd a country safely through its best effort to self destruct. If we average out everything in our history and our lives, we forget the beauty, the deepened meaning and the crucial course corrections that come from the unexpected, and, most importantly, we overlook the divine hand shepherding us not to where we want and had so long planned and prepared to go, but to some more exotic and salvific shore. I cannot look at the American Civil War and not see all of that.
Likewise, this book and the experiences in my life that prompted its writing and now its publication were unexpected and have enriched my life experience in ways I could never have imagined. Romance, adventure, and consideration of how we look back at the Civil War: I've tried to include them all, and I hope you'll enjoy it.
