Sleet and Photos

Today, it was sleet and snow in Dixon, Illinois and it was worse farther north.  Gary had plans to leave for Seymour today, leaving me here to tend cats and visit his aunt, but instead we had a day of napping.  I needed that, but I am tempted to drive south tomorrow instead of north to Rascal and home.

I begin the process of sorting out my thoughts about the trip. I almost never have a trip that doesn't glean a treasure of stories.

I begin with photos. For instance, the Coca Cola museum:

The museum behind the Grenada City Hall is full of Coke glasses, Coke toys, Coke platters and more.  The clerk who showed me the place told me that it was just a place for people to dump their stuff.  There were no real treasures here.  When there are hundreds of Coke glasses, one of them isn't worth much. Museums are great depositories when you are clearing your garage.

One nice thing about southern cemeteries is that the marble tombstones don't wear down the way our northern ones do.Early on, Wisconsinites switched to granite. At the Yellow Fever Graveyard in Grenada, I found this tombstone of someone who was born in 1792, but the name of deceased was broken off.  After the yellow fever epidemic in the 1880's, the cemetery was abandoned. 

At the Confederate Soldiers Cemetery, I walked around the graves wondering about the boys who lie there. There are 180 graves, none of them marked. Stan Rogers wrote a song with the line, "not one in ten thousand knows your name."  In this case no one knows their names. Oh, the futility of war, but come the next one, boys and now girls will volunteer, pumped up with patriotism and anxious for a great adventure will enlist and there will be more cemeteries. 

But nature endures. In spring, the wild buttercups poke through the leaves and arbutus.  Later in the summer the grass will be mowed so these early flowers are the only flowers laid on the graves.

In the course of my drive, public radio programs were repeated over and over.  One was about the XLerator hand dryer that dries much faster than any others...but is also noisier.  I finally found one at a service station and tried it out.  It was incredibly noisy.  Given a choice of an XLerator, a more common model, or a paper towel, people go to a fourth option.  They dry their hands on their pants. 

In a Missouri rest stop, I found another option:

It is an automatic hand washer/dryer.  Hands go in the center of the thing and are sprayed with soap and water continually for the requisite 20 seconds. Then the dryer finishes the job. I tried it out of curiosity but gave up on the dryer and finished by wiping my hands on my pants.