Spring is the season of water. The world starts to wake up as the sun beats down stronger, but the buds and the leaves wait for rain. We finally had a good soaking storm announce the arrival of the season with thunder interrupted sleep just the other night. Saint Paul is waking up to the water. But how that storm gets here is a story in itself, the story of planet that defines itself by life and the movement of water from one Spring to another.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Confederate History Month
Confederate History Month is not an ancient tradition. The practice of declaring April, the month of surrender at Appomattox, to be a month set aside to remember this sorry war appears to have caught on only in the 1990s. Why would such a thing take off as recently as it did?
I think that the answer lies in the way I learned a lot about the Old South. His name was MacMullen, and by the time he settled into a lawn chair in front of the Perrine Ace Hardware store nearly every day he was a very old man. It was the early 1970s, and old MacMullen had seen a lot of changes take place. He eagerly told to a young white boy who was willing to listen to what he had to say.
Three Years On
Today is the third anniversary of Barataria. I have written at least three times a week, MWF, without a single miss, and with a few extras have over 500 posts. This is as good of a time as any to stop and mark what we’ve accomplished over the last year and answer the eternal question: What is this blog about? Please allow me a little indulgence as I look back at the last few years to find some coherence.
Elián
One month before Christmas at the dawn of the millennium, a child came to us. Having come from an atheistic nation, his baptism probably came in the salt water on that day when his mother gave her life trying to raise her son in a free land. That child was Elián González, and ten years ago this week he was returned to live with his father in Cuba. It seems so simple at a glance. The convolutions of his story may not make any sense to most people, but that winds up being the point of it after all.
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Multiple Intelligences
Today the kids have to be roused early and move themselves through the morning with purpose because Spring Break is over. It cuts many ways. The weight of routine is lightened for them by a sunny green day with a crisp snap to it, as lively as we can expect in early April – but they’ll have to spend the day inside. They’ll get to see their friends again and tell stories about what they’ve been up to, but there will also be work. For all the different seasons mixing in their heads and around them what it always comes down to is that they really like to learn, they really like their school.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 