Summer along the C&O

A blue heron on the lookout for fish in the C&O
Canal near Swains Lock, Potomac, Maryland.

Wednesday morning, before the heat and humidity became a deterrent, Pris and I decided to take a walk along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that hugs the Maryland side of the Potomac River.  We began at Swains Lock.

The southernmost point of the C&O begins in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. and snakes north and west within the state of Maryland until, 185 miles later, it ends at Cumberland, MD, near the Pennsylvania border.

We try to get in at least three-plus miles of scenic exercise when we visit our daughter's family in Potomac.  Swains Lock – sixteen miles north of D.C. – is a short drive away from her home, down a narrow, serpentine access road.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Draws Many

A view of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
sculpture near the Tidal Basin,
Washington, D.C.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving Day, the most visited of the memorials that we came upon near the Tidal Basin in the nation’s Capital was the one recently dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., the peaceful, yet forceful advocate for civil rights in America.  For his approach, as has happened to others of his period, he was rewarded with assassination. 
 
Upon entering the Memorial’s site, you will pass between two towering blocks of stone, before you walk past another two of the same size.  From one of the four carved blocks of stone juts the full, imposing figure of a sculpted MLK standing resolutely, his gaze steadily focused ahead.
 
What you may not immediately observe until you have passed by the four stone carvings and then turn around is the granite wall which slopes behind the four stone monoliths, and extends from both sides of the Memorial’s entrance, to its left and to its right. 
 
It is reminiscent of the Vietnam War Memorial, and each of its panels has inscribed in it an aphorism from the writings of MLK.
 
There are many of them, but one of my favorites is the one carved into the first panel on the right side.  It reads simply, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

A Touch of Global Cooling

(The following post was made ready for publication early Saturday morning, seconds before the power went out for a second time, preventing me from getting it on the Internet!!)

I don’t know if Mother Nature is making a political statement, or if the data reported by the United Nations’ committee on global warming used the wrong noun in its report, but this sure isn’t feeling like global warming.

Nor do I yet know what the official snow depth is in Potomac, MD, where we are temporarily snowbound at the home of our hosts; but a yardstick placed in the snowpack this morning on the deck just outside the window walls to the back yard registered a smidge under 29 inches. And that wasn’t in the deepest spot.

Weekend activities here are either cancelled or postponed to another day. All of the Protestant churches are scrolling cancellations of Sunday services across the TV screen, and the Roman Catholic Archdioceses of Washington and Baltimore have exempted their flocks from Sunday Mass, while encouraging them to tune into Masses on their TV sets.

It will be a great day for the Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, providing the power doesn’t fail again, prompting all of us to bundle up once more, as we might do for a ski expedition.

It is not supposed to happen this way! I called family members in New Hampshire this afternoon, and not a single snowflake fell up there, the usual destination for all this fluffy stuff.