What a week this has been, from Monday's horrendous event in Boston to today's news with the gigantic fertilizer plant explosion in between. Our sole information source is the Nashville NPR affiliate and it is a good station, although I must confess I miss Kathy Werzer in the morning! Our innate preoccupation with weather is not shared down here, so we are grateful when we can simply get the morning's temperature. But we can report to you daily on the traffic "heading north on I 24 just past the Highway 96 entrance" or any other such chatter.
At the risk of offending you all still in winter's grasp, I do apologize, but I will give you a brief update on spring in Murfreesboro. It arrived this week. Redbuds, magnolias, and fruit trees are in full bloom. Hillary has pictures to upload so you get a sense of our view out the Visitor Center. The 84 degree temperatures of this past week broke last night in a heavy rain and this morning we awakened to 44 degrees with a predicted high mid-50s.
Tomorrow morning we have pulled extra duty; we are usually off on Friday and Saturdays, but 120 volunteers are expected to roll in by 8:30 for "Park Day." Grounds clean-up is the objective, and we have been recruited to supervise a group of some 20 younger volunteers to clean up the entrance landscape beds at one of the offsite areas. We had our own field trip on Wednesday morning for a brief introduction to what weeds are to be removed and what are local plants needing to be saved. The Tennessee coneflower is the state flower and they are just showing up in the gardens so they cannot be weeded! Hillary will post a photo she has taken of them; they do look much like our kind of coneflowers, but because of location they have a different species name. For our efforts we are being given an extra day off next week - so we will enjoy Thursday - Saturday!
New book alert: Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, has just published a fascinating read: This Republic of Suffering, a look at how the Civil War radically affected the American view of death mid 19th century. As you know, death and dying was essentially a family event, and the preparation for and actual burial was often a family activity in the early 1800s. As the Civil War grew to exceed its expected ninety day duration and the number of dead and dying increased, it became apparent that the process of dying and burying and identifying was a battlefield event. Initially, unit comrades tended to their fallen brothers, but with increasing numbers, that wasn't possible. Ultimately, the US government did create national cemeteries; about 1863 initial legislation was passed but it took until much later for the final legislation to be set in place. Even so, the burying of Confederate soldiers was a separate, and private, event. Faust's book reckons with all this change and provides an incredible insight into just one of the myriad effects the CW had on American culture.
Other books we have read include James McDonough's Battle of Stones River and Larry Daniel's 2012 release The Battle of Stone River.
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