Morning News, July 26

 I started this a week or so ago.  

 

It was a sparkling morning. After weeks of dryness with browned grass and wilted flowers, two periods of heavy rain yesterday covered the thirsty trees and shrubs with drops that caught the emerging sunshine that 7 a.m.  Everything looked and felt refreshed and new. The air, damp and promising dense humidity and heat later on, still had a coolness and slight breeze that reminded me the Georgia heat does lead to autumn breathability.

 

Crepe myrtles. How I love those. Are they shrubs, or trees, or are there variations of both? Who invented them? How did they come to surround us in July in the East? They do not look natural, really, because they are so orderly. The oaks and pines around here, and even maples, are arbitrary in their placement and size. The crepe myrtles stand on display where humans wanted them; borders to property, landscaping, along picturesque roads. I remember thousands of them in coastal Virginia on the way to the bridge that takes one across the lower Chesapeake to southern Eastern shore Maryland.

 

 Like so much, we take for granted what surrounds us. It is, so it must have been. That is why I love history, why it scratches an itch to know how we got here. That doesn’t mean I live in the past, but that I live with a heightened sense of what the now is and represents. 

 

_____

Yesterday I checked two books out of our college library:  Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and Appalachian Reckoning, a compilation of essays and poems responding to Vance's book.  I usually read introductions and forewords to books, and I read Vance's. In it, he confesses to changing the timeline for his own purposes. Well, that's interesting. So it's a memoir that is perhaps constructed memory as much as factual happenings? Perhaps all memoir is that, but it says something. 

Try as he might, the book does not explain or investigate Appalachian poverty and other problems. I confess, I read to chapter 8. It's not that I was mad and had had enough. I usually don't read nonfiction completely through because 1. I don't have time and 2. my philosophy of nonfiction is that it doesn't need to be read completely unless a. you are writing a book review for (paid) publication and b. you are in need of all the information. I am doing neither. I saw the movie, I've read articles about him, so I know how his life ended, and I had already established he did not know much about the history, cultures, and sociology of Appalachia. The v