Equality, do you want it? You're not getting it for Christmas

[sovay]

Despite feeling especially weird and fractured and furious with a country and now it seems a state that would like me to die conveniently off (bureaucracy, finances, doctors, catch-22's), I managed to get out of the house this evening with spatch and a camera.



The heart of a clematis looks like a sea anemone. Or an alien.



Rose season gives way to daylily season.



A couple of roses are still giving their best Georgia O'Keeffe.



I could not manage to take a picture of these hydrangeas that made them look like as much of a Tiffany pattern as they did in three dimensions.



Remember last year when I discovered that we live across the street from slaveholding ground? There's the monument to prove it. History in this country is like tripping over a branch and finding it's bone. Six hundred acres of land and, to begin with, three human beings.



We walked on. We applauded this unknown plant at the end of Governor Winthrop Road.



The foxgloves were blueshifting.



The texture of the petals as much as their color fascinated me.

I am beginning to feel that my life has become a perpetual process of discovering damage I knew I had taken but didn't understand the depth of and I have to say it's a lot more wearying than any process of discovery has a right to be. My brain just stalled out this evening trying to assimilate the idea of people having loyalty to me. That's terrible. I'm not even sure it's Tiny Wittgenstein. It's just stupid.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

There is a real sense in which the Royall House and Slave Quarters museum is a memorial to the people enslaved there and in particular, in terms of "tripping over a branch and finding it's bone," there is a stumble stone on the sidewalk in front of the house, in memory of one of the enslaved residents. (based on the Holocaust ones in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein)
Phillis Wheatley is one of those in the Boston Women's Memorial.
https://www.boston.gov/departments/womens-advancement/boston-womens-memorial
I had remembered seeing a statue of Elizabeth Freeman (MumBet), but it's not in New England, even though she was in Massachusetts when she became famous for her lawsuit to become free. The statue is in DC, at the NMAAH. And there's the about to be removed statue at Park Square of Lincoln standing over chained people, which is supposed to commemorate Emancipation.
Of course all the Viking things are white-supremacy based, although it might not have been articulated exactly that way in the past.

[sovay]

There is a real sense in which the Royall House and Slave Quarters museum is a memorial to the people enslaved there and in particular, in terms of "tripping over a branch and finding it's bone," there is a stumble stone on the sidewalk in front of the house, in memory of one of the enslaved residents.

That is good to know. I am familiar with the Stolpersteine, but didn't realize there were any in the U.S.

Of course all the Viking things are white-supremacy based, although it might not have been articulated exactly that way in the past.

I wouldn't call a Nordic claim superseding a Mediterranean claim to the discovery of America exactly subtle.

[lauradi7dw]

*its*

I admire the purpose of the Stoplersteine, but knowing that they might actually make someone stumble and fall, I think there must be some better way.