Connecting Threads

The picture is of 1600 yards of hand-dyed Tencel embroidery thread, work that has occupied me for the past couple of days. Absolutely shimmery! Now, to other work.

The radio is filled today with talk of war and peace, of dead soldiers and remembrance, it being Memorial Day and all that. Memorial Day belongs first of all to the Civil War, a war in which the state of Washington definitely did not participate as a state. It was organized as a territory in the 1850’s, but was not admitted to the United States until 1889. I think, because that is typical of most of the western states, the Civil War has very little purchase here. I know that in the South, for many people, it’s not forgotten because it’s not over. But for many of us out here, it never exactly even started, at least once they and we got here.

My maternal great-grandfather left his Illinois home as a 14-year-old in 1862 and joined the Union Army. He ended up with little glory, I suspect, in Andersonville Prison which, obviously, he managed to survive, a testament to the strength of youth. After the war, he moved west, to Utah, where he found a happier career as a copper miner and, eventually as the mayor of Park City, Utah. My great- grandmother’s Virginia-born father fought for the South and at the end of the war, he and his family moved to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where he worked as a freighter. One of the grandchildren of this Southern soldier and this Northern soldier was my mother, and I guess the Civil War ended for them there, if it hadn’t actually ended a lot sooner by their decision to move West.

The West is where you went to get away from the problems of the East and the problems of farming in the Mid-West. The West is where you went to get away, period. So here we all are, out here, away, but with no further West to go to now, and back in the middle of some new Civil War, although we might perhaps better think of it as the Uncivil War. The Internet permits and even encourages a lot of incivility. It’s better than guns, though. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be generous in a period in which the coin of the realm seems to be who is patriotic enough, who stands in the right position for the national anthem, whose hands are where for the Pledge of Allegiance with its deist demand, whose lapel sports which pin. In a time when we cannot seem to find little discussion of or even a modicum of agreement about what constitutes the national interest, it’s hard to think well of the country, or at least of the country’s people. Nobody argues that earmarks, or farm subsidies for wealthy farmers who aren’t farming anymore are in the national interest, at least.

Oh, well, better to think today of all the war dead in all those endless wars, and of the thousands (some 300+ thousand already) of injured military men and women in our current wars. Sorry for their (and our) troubles, as my Irish-born great-grandfather’s family (the parents of the Andersonville survivor) would have said, and sorry for a lot else besides.