Vermont, Thunderstorms, Walt Whitman, and Nelson Mandela

Hello again!

It's a Monday night here in Vermont.
And it's super muggy.
Today and this past weekend has been wonderful. My brother was home and we all did a bit of hiking, swimming, kayaking, eating, drinking and plenty of laughing.

Here's a sibling photo from the weekend. We shared a small very early surprise birthday celebration appropriately titled '25/21'.

This morning I woke up in New Hampshire and renewed my license. I drove through a few small towns I had never explored before and when I arrived in Claremont to renew my license -- a town  right on the Connecticut River, the humidity was heavy but it was a beautiful setting.
Work today entailed a department picnic/BBQ in Morrisville, Vermont at the location in the first  photo posted above. I drove from Claremont to northern Vermont and passed plenty of Quebecois tourists and families along the way. At the picnic, my co-workers and I ate together and played a game of horseshoes. When a thunderstorm rolled in, we all ran for our cars and zoomed away.

 

Back at Saint Michael's, my evening was spent with two of my best friends, Katie and Amanda. The three of us haven't been together since December, and it's been so fun. The laughter and non-stop conversations continue. As I worked on a research paper earlier and Amanda read a book for her Spanish class, Katie joined us and watched the Boston Bruins game on a giant projector with surround sound. When another large thunderstorm rolled through
(and successfully relieved us of the humidity) we remained in our classroom shelter and watched the storm hit the surrounding ivy-lined brick buildings through the windows.The stories, laughter, memories, and plans for the future continue to dominate the discussions.

I began reading Walt Whitman's Civil War-themed poetry and prose last week and it's been so captivating. The detail, power and realistic influence the words have despite being written in the nineteenth century is amazing. 'Vigil I Kept on the Field one Night' might be one of my current favorites with the lines of
'Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night'
and
'Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you, my son and my soldier, as onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole' as two pretty fantastic combination of words.

Lastly, I like Nelson Mandela a lot. I've written on him before, but I feel that reading about his life has allowed me to see and learn about the world in it's most unfair yet beautifully forgiving and progressive journeys. I've long been interested in the American Civil Rights movement, but South African Apartheid is a wholly different topic to tackle and understand. I think I've shared most or all of these before, but because I love them so much and feel that they've greatly influenced me in a positive way, a few words by Nelson Mandela are below:

"As we entered the new decade my hopes for South Africa rose once again. Some mornings I walked out into the courtyard and every living thing there, the seagulls, the wagtails, and even the stray blades of grass seemed to smile and shine in the sun. It was at such times when I perceived the beauty of the even this small, closed-in corner of the world, that I knew that some day me people and I would be free."

"In judging our progress as individuals, we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education...but internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being: honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, purity, generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve your fellow men -- qualities within the reach of every soul."