A Peaceful Long Weekend

Writing about peaceful, joyous things is more difficult for me than writing about things that annoy me.

Must be because I’m a natural born complainer. But this past weekend contained nothing for me to complain about. Mostly Ginny and I sat in our garden talking, reading or just being in silent love together.

She potted a few flowers and I vacuumed the pool, but mostly we just got re-acquainted as we talked about faith and politics, children and news articles, future plans and distant memories.

Nothing ruffled our feathers or clouded our horizons.

Sunday the sky misted rain as we drove about 15 miles out to Baldwin for a country breakfast at Everybody’s Restaurant. Customers there must tip well because our waitress told us it was her first day back at work from having taken her family for a vacation in Hawaii.

Around us local customers talked about buying new pressure washers, and what the preacher said, and what might be wrong with a sick cow. I love eavesdropping on such conversations and hearing the speech cadences of pure Southern language.

On the drive out, we had seen a sign to a historic preserve at Camp Milton, a Civil War fortification where in 1864 our brave Southern boys attempted unsuccessfully to defend Jacksonville and the Homeland from barbarous invaders from the north.

After breakfast we returned to the cutoff and visited the site. Because of the rain and early hour not a single other person was in the park. We strolled through the ancient battlefields and along a boardwalk to view the ruined earthwork ramparts.

One interesting feature of the preserve is a typical Florida Cracker homestead; this house, which is being restored, reminds me of my grandfather’s farmhouse in Graham, Florida:

Oddly enough, though I’d once worked at the adjacent Whitehouse Oil Pits (which may relate to some of my physical problems today years later) I had never been to Camp Milton before. Whitehouse is the name of a small rural community now mostly absorbed by Jacksonville.

For some unfathomable government reason Jacksonville’s Mosquito Control Board was partially responsible for cleaning up the oil pits. When I worked there the place, a Superfund Site, was a vision from Hell — except it was too toxic for demons.

Odd that with my interest in history, I never realized that the huge Civil War fortification was so near.

Anyhow, Sunday morning Ginny and I strolled alone in misting rain through lush swampland and spring meadows. We spotted numerous bird species we could not identify but we enjoyed them too much to really care about which kind of bird they were.

So from the turmoil of ancient war, we strolled in happy peace.

And now we turn away from the real world and back to our normal daily activities.