It is the Fourth of July, and I am having trouble concentrating.  My setup for a dinner party to begin at 6.30 is complete—beer and wine cooling, the New York Times’s Juneteenth peach-molasses chicken soon to be grilled, the salads made and strawberry-rhubarb cobbler baked.  I’ve prepped the staging area for fireworks later, and loaded the cd player with Americana—Danny Barker, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing the Songs of the North my daddy always sang along with, Samuel Barber’s heartbreaking setting of selections from James Agee’s prose poem Knoxville:  Summer of 1915.  That last is closest to my mood:  tearfully nostalgic, longing, somewhat lost in saudade, that profound melancholy yearning for what can never be again.  I look forward to celebrating the company soon to arrive, if not the State Of Things.

I’ve been back at home for four days and a month, and my travels through the south, confronting the past, both personal and national, are partly responsible for this current state of mind.  More forward, however, are the wrenching changes SCOTUS has imposed over the last week before the Court’s summer recess, a week historian Heather Cox Richardson notes in her 1 July posting of Letters from an American “will certainly show up in the history books.”  Maybe that’s why I’ve put Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Civil War songs on the playlist:  what’s been called the current cold civil war no longer seems cold or civil.  And just now there’s news of another mass shooting in Chicago. Happy Independence Day.

Things have changed so much in the past three years since my husband David’s death:  I long to hear his take on what the great American experiment has come to in this moment; I compose mental lists of these changes, from the macro to the micro:  the pandemic, the Biden presidency, the attack on the Capitol, the Supreme Court’s taking the nation back to the Articles of Confederation; my trip to India, my retirement, the water damage to our library ceiling, my new car.  I look for commonalities emerging from my most recent journey:  time spent with dear friends, some grieving spouses, some grieving lost children, all concerned by the state of academia, the country, their own families.  All the promise inspiring those civic-minded titans of the gilded age–Grove building the Arcade in Asheville, Schenck restoring the Guildford Courthouse Revolutionary battlefield in Greensboro, Barnes in a Philadelphia suburb devoting his wealth and energy to making art accessible, believing that an aid to democracy–feels impossibly naïve in light of the structural racism underlying the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, qualifying our admiration for the “enlightened” Thomas Jefferson, and seemingly resulting in the resurgence of white supremacy movements like the Patriot Front who paraded through downtown Boston yesterday.

Our country’s natural beauty is astounding, its promise equally so.  My local surroundings are beautiful, as these photos from nearby Wagon Hill Farm illustrate.  Here in Madbury I have a resident turkey hen, who the other morning took care to teach her two chicks how to take a dirt bath in the corner of a mulched bed a snapping turtle had earlier scooped out for her eggs.

I’m looking for profundity in the mundane—and almost, almost finding it.