Winter Morning

‎"I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone..." Alice Paul, legal scholar, valiant suffragist, jailed and tortured b. 11 January. 1885.... at this link, you'll find a splendid image of Ms. Paul.

So, yesterday, I never got around to writing, not one little word, here anyway, but I did note on my Facebook profile [for what it's worth] that the 10th of January marked the anniversaries of the births of Mrs. Wilder's charismatic, fiddle-playing, wander-lusting dad, in 1836, in, I think, Cuba, New York; and of her enigmatic, patient, older sister, in 1865, blond, blue-eyed Mary. I didn't even note that it was late on the 10th of January, 1980, over in West Germany, that my brother Paul was thrown out of a car, going too fast on a road too icy, driven by Paul's friend, who'd had too much to drink as had Paul, who was passed out, a PERFECT condition to be in if you're going to be thrown into a tree & into the next world. Had this not happened, he'd be 52 yr. old now. So. There it was; there it is.

No, yesterday I fussed with the 3rd or 4th revision of a twice & properly rejected fictitious story - a day well spent? pretty much. Then I set the story aside, seeing as I had company coming [Bill & Brenda, two doors up, to join me in assembling a jigsaw puzzle, of one of the images created by one of the best illustrators ever, Jessie Willcox Smith] to stir up a batch of SCOTCH GRAHAM ROLLS from a recipe I got from Natalie Kinsey-Warnock of northeastern Vermont, who got it from her foremothers. Here 'tis: Heat up your oven to 400º. Get out your muffin tin w/ the 12 little cups in it. Butter/oil/spray-lube/or otherwise grease them. MIX together

2 cups of milk

2 cups of whole wheat flour

[I substituted 1/3 cup of that w.w.flour w/uncooked oatmeal]

2 cups of white flour

1 cup of brown sugar

2/3 cup of melted shortening

1 tsp. of baking soda

1/2 tsp. of salt • It seems to me I baked them about 12-15 min. You're going for nice & puffy. Very good on a winter morning with butter or as I had them with Natalie, warm applesauce, made by her mother, Louise, just down the road.

Failure Was Impossible

"Failure is impossible." So wrote Susan B. Anthony, but there had to have been days when it seemed pretty goddamned impossible: Woman Suffrage

It was in 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, NY, launched the Women's Rights Convention, this radical confab being the first of its kind. Not until the spring of 1851 later does Lizzie Stanton [short & round & curly-girly radical whose tough mind crackled with ideas and revolutionary opinions on nearly] meet tall, spare Susan B., known as "Aunt Susan" to the legions of suffragists. Fifty years the team would write, agitate, organize, petition the U.S. Congress, and otherwise plug away at trying to wrench the Vote out of the government's tight fist. "I forged the thunderbolts," said Mrs. Stanton of her writings, and Susan fired them, riding "the [railroad] cars" thousands of miles to speak, to state the cause, lay out the argument to audiences around the country. Countless women [and men] paraded in the streets. A few, including the valiant Alice Paul, endured arrest and cruel treatment behind bars for daring to stand silently with their banners outside the White House fence.

Of course neither Lizzie nor Susan B. lived to see the day, August 18, 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified, thanks to a narrow vote in the Tennessee state house. Almost 72 years after the Seneca Falls convention and 90 years ago today.

i"Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving." Elizabeth Cady Stanton