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Posts Tagged ‘guns’

Laborious

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Hip hip hooray, it’s Labor Day! A day of sales, and grilling outside, and saying a final farewell to summer. As I was pulling on my white pants, I had to thank all my coal-mining, union-creating Irish ancestors. All the farmers, and mill workers, the women who cleaned rich people’s homes, the women who washed their clothes. We Americans are an industrious lot.

I mean why hire someone to string a gym full of streamers for a BatMitzvah when we could do it ourselves?

The good news is Bob and I received our flu shots, and we have an appointment to get the new Covid booster. It’s almost like the government was reading my mind, except they thought in a very Trumpian way to restrict its distribution:

“The new shots from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax are approved for all seniors. But the Food and Drug Administration narrowed their use for younger adults and children to those with at least one high-risk health condition, such as asthma or obesity. That presents new barriers to access for millions of Americans who would have to prove their risk — and millions more who may want to get vaccinated and suddenly no longer qualify.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/fda-approves-updated-covid-19-shots-with-some-restrictions-for-kids-and-adults

After hearing about the latest school shooting in MN, the week after a bomb threat at the Grands’ school, I had a thought. What if ALL the teachers in America went on strike? Public school, Catholic school, private school teachers; what if they all said sorry but we refuse to come into your school buildings with your metal detectors and locked doors, we refuse to carry guns ourselves, we cannot in good faith put your children at risk. What if their one simple demand was to ban assault weapons?

Hell, I would support them. I’d go to every single picket line in town and bring brownies and coffee. How did we get stuck in this gun culture when a majority of Americans do not even own guns? It’s sad to just shrug our shoulders, to think that nothing will change, to chalk up our children’s lives as the cost of doing business. We’ve raised a generation of schoolchildren who have learned to run and hide for active shooter drills, in the same way we had to line up and walk outside for fire drills or crawl under our desks in case of atomic bomb attack.

Last night we had dinner with cousin Peg and Paul. In Bob’s inimitable way, he said he’d like to make the argument to any 2nd Amendment zealot that he thinks he should own an RPG! I mean, if it’s OK to own a military-style assault weapon… If you’ve never watched the movie Red, an RPG is a huge Rocket Propelled Grenade! “This is a shoulder-fired weapon that launches a rocket with a shaped-charge warhead to destroy targets, often tanks.” So of course, Peg asked how a MAGA person would respond to that, which led us into arguing with ChatGP about military uses and individual rights.

Today we celebrate workers’ rights – an 8 hour workday, child labor laws, protections against discrimination, and in light of school shootings most importantly of all, THE RIGHT TO A SAFE WORKPLACE! 

Oh and about not wearing white after Labor Day? I looked it up, and that custom came from the aspiring middle class. Since only the wealthy could afford to leave the city for a summer of cooler air and beaches, we wanted to emulate their wardrobe choices which switched from lots of whites and pale colors, “resort wear” if you will, to darker tones after Labor Day. I’ll let you in on a little secret, beige is the new white!

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The Minneapple

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on June 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Minnesota, the land of 11,842 lakes. Where the children are all gifted but the lakes don’t freeze over quite so much anymore. When the Flapper was living out her golden years on Lake Minnetonka, I loved visiting her in the summer and seeing my brothers and their families. Mike called it “the Good Life,” hosting epic Fourth of July parties at his waterfront home with his wife Jorja. I once tried talking Bob into moving there. But the Twin Cities couldn’t compete with the twin states of NY and NJ – even though their marketing slogan, Minneapple, begged to differ.

On Saturday, I was holding down the fort while my Nashville family attended the “No Kings” march. I was armed with a lawyer’s number, just in case, but I was particularly worried because of the news from Minnesota. I texted my brother Dr Jim, who said he was sheltering in place. We were just hearing about this psycho killer, disguised as a cop, on the loose targeting Democratic officials. And like any good terrorist plot twist, nobody knew if some extreme, right-wing, white-nationalist, militia group was planning to disrupt the marches around the country on our would-be king’s birthday.

It was a feeling I’d forgotten, like post 9/11 when I couldn’t find the teenage Rocker and unbeknownst to me the Bride had left her federal building in DC and I couldn’t reach her, and Bob ran to the Highlands dock where the injured and dead never came.

Only this time the terror has come from within. A list with over 70 names of Democratic legislators and Pro-Choice advocates across many states was found in the perpetrator’s fake cop car, along with more assault rifles. I refuse to name the murderer, but the woman he gunned down, Representative Melissa Hortman, was in many ways what we would all like our elected officials to be – someone who could work across the aisle. She died alongside her husband Mark.

“Over the years, she gained a reputation as a workhorse, skilled at getting difficult objectives accomplished and at collaborating effectively across the aisle. “She always did her homework,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, who met Ms. Hortman in law school at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s. “She was steely and strategic and savvy and yet so likable as a person because she always remembered people’s humanity, even and especially if they were on the other side of the aisle.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/minnesota-slaying-melissa-hortman.html

Thankfully, this madman has been caught. I read that we Americans may just have to accept politically motivated violence, in the same way we’ve come to accept school shootings. This gave me pause. Because if that’s true, well, what does that say about our society? A culture that glorifies guns at all costs?

Senator Mike Lee (R – Utah) chose to make fun of the senseless killing spree over No Kings and Father’s Day weekend, writing on X, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” with a photo of the killer at Ms Hortman’s door. Then doubling down following that post with a joke aimed at Gov Tim Walz. Lee is a disgrace to his office.

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Where’d Ya Go Kate?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

We were all sitting around the Bride’s sunny porch, when someone asked, “Can anorexia destroy your stomach?” Well, the doctors on the porch reluctantly shook their heads ‘Yes,’ while the rest of us began speculating about the health of a princess far, far away. And this wasn’t the only social gathering IRL this past weekend that turned into a royal sleuth fest. Bob and I saw our Germantown friends at a St Patrick’s dinner where most of the talk was about local politics, but eventually we waded into the Case of the Disappearing Princess.

Where in the world is Kate Middleton? My bet was on a hysterectomy, Bob just shrugged, and lots of us ran with plastic surgery of one kind or another… with complications… but who books a pre-planned hospital stay for TWO WEEKS? I mean you are in and out in 5 DAYS after heart surgery in this country! You’re lucky to get 3 DAYS after a C-section! It doesn’t add up. And since the Palace released a picture of Kate with her children for Mother’s Day in the UK, the firestorm has only increased. My reaction was – honestly, who doesn’t do a little editing now and then?

After all, we edited the Groom into a holiday card during the pandemic because he had to work in the ICU. We just placed him in his hospital-issued, PPE space suit right next to his wife, a mere centimeter off the ground.

Here in Nashville we have a real mystery to unravel. A 22 year old college student from Missouri, Riley Strain, was kicked out of a honky tonk the night of March 8 never to be seen again. Except: homeless people have reported seeing him; he was spotted on CCTV stumbling towards the Cumberland River; his bank card was found on the river bank; he spoke with a police officer in passing who asked how he was doing, only to say “I’m good how are you?” https://www.yahoo.com/news/newly-released-video-shows-interaction-200326733.html; and his last outgoing text to a girlfriend made no sense – “Good Lops.”

So how does a 6’5″ guy just disappear?

It’s been over a week and I’m afraid the outcome looks bleak. Why didn’t a fraternity brother follow him out of that bar? Why didn’t that cop stop him and talk to him for awhile? And my final question about our right to privacy (Kate Middleton) and a society’s need to surveil its citizens for safety (Riley Strain) is:

Why can our Congress pass a bill banning TikTok and NOT pass a bill banning assault weapons? Admittedly I am not on TikTok, nor do I want to be. But if the App is a national security threat, I would counter that assault rifles are a national health crisis and have no right being in the hands of ordinary people. Leave these weapons to the armed forces, they do not belong on our streets or in our schools.

Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are frequently used in the violence that plagues our nation. From 2015 to 2022, mass shootings with four or more people killed where an assault weapon was used resulted in nearly six times as many people shot, more than twice as many people killed, and 23 times as many people wounded on average compared to those that did not involve the use of one. Some states and Washington, DC, have enacted legislation to prohibit assault weapons.”

https://www.everytown.org/solutions/assault-weapons/

If we really want to keep young people safe…

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Staining Fences

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on August 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It was the best of weeks. Mornings were cool, low 60s, and no humidity. There was a strange hint of Fall, in mid-August, in the south. So my handy husband Bob decided it was time to paint our six month old fence. A cedar fence can be allowed to grey gracefully over the years; OR you could preserve its beauty by painting it a color (like the black fences that dot Virginia) OR if one prefers, staining it with a natural wood pigment. And so the hunt began.

After much searching and trips to Home Depot, Lowes, and our local Sherwin Williams (SW) store, we picked a stain in its natural cedar color – an oil-based, transparent brownish/red. Bob power washed the fence in preparation and made a deal with a college neighbor to help. We bought 10 gallons of stain, pads, rollers, and all the accoutrements. On Thursday morning we drove to SW to pick up the stain, only to learn from a helpful young salesman named Hunter that a 40% off sale was starting the very next day! Believe me when I say I pleaded with him to sell it to us then and there at the reduced price, but Hunter said, “No can do.”

Meanwhile, in Maui, the death toll was rising from a horrific wildfire. I watched online interviews with people who escaped the inferno by jumping into the ocean and dodging embers for hours. I couldn’t turn away from the drone video of a charred, barren landscape; the historic town of Lahaina looked like the end of the world. In my lifetime, I’ve experienced a flood in NJ, an earthquake in VA, and right before the Covid lockdown, a tornado in TN.

But I’ve never experienced a fire, wild or otherwise. I thought of Hawaii as a uniquely American paradise. I loved climbing over black lava and watching the volcano on the Big island. I loved its people, its food, its culture. I felt a kind of existential, primitive grief for our Mother Earth that triggered my limbic system. Is climate change accelerating – was safety just an illusion – what state/country would be next?

And sure enough, in the middle of staining our fence, a once in a century hurricane was headed for Southern California.

The Grands came over to help Pop Bob for a bit, I frog-taped the iron hardware and ran back to SW since we needed double the amount of stain for our 2,700 sq ft backyard. Ingeniously I picked up a dozen donuts on the way back. Waiting, wondering if the torrential rain heading toward LA – toward my son and his wife, their dog and two cats, living in a beautifully renovated home, on the precipice of a hill overlooking a canyon in LA – might precipitate a mudslide.

Bob and I met our rollers dripping with stain in the middle of the fence on the east side of the yard Sunday morning. A job that was supposed to take a day, took three. But the fence is finished, the fence that can only protect us from prying eyes and not natural disasters. Our Mark Twain weekend ended with an undertone of terror. Did you know there is a name for the kind of wind that can boost heatwaves and spark wildfires? The wind is called FOHN.

It’s a word that, in German, also means “hairdryer”. And that’s just what it’s like. A hot, dry wind that sweeps down a mountainside, baking everything in its path. It is powerful enough to raise air temperatures by many degrees. This is the strange, and sometimes dangerous, weather event known as Föhn. This year, it has cropped up many times, including during heatwaves where it has pushed temperatures up to unbearable levels in local, literal, hotspots.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230817-the-weird-wind-that-can-supercharge-heatwaves-and-wildfire

This week we will see record high temperatures in Nashville, and the humidity is returning. No rain, all sun for our fence to dry. I will return to my meditative daily pool workouts, and I will listen to our Governor try and change a gun culture by focusing on everything but guns. Can we save our schoolchildren with bullet-poof backpacks? Will this be the best of weeks?

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Pesach is Coming

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , on April 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »

And I’m starting to forget. And then I get down on myself, for forgetting her smile, her voice. Although I do sometimes hear her words in my head – “Don’t wait to be asked; Always go with an open hand; He’s having a good day.”

The Bride asked me to make the tzimmes, which is basically Jewish for roasted carrots. And then I remembered that Ada would add dried fruit and some beef ribs, but I forgot what it was called. I’m bringing the brisket and the Kosher wine but my daughter is graciously hosting again midweek at her big farm table. She’s gathering friends and family to eat and talk about the Great Escape from Egypt. And she is making the haroset, which thrills me to no end.

There are some other lessons too, like which child is getting good at reading Hebrew, and who will be the master sleuth and find the missing matzah. Then I remembered, I have Adala’s “Jewish Home Beautiful” book copyright 1941! I have the cookbook she gave me when Bob and I married; a kind of How-To-Be-A-Good-Jewish-Mother guide sprinkled with recipes for celebrating all the holidays around your table. It’s a smallish blue book, its pages turning a brownish yellow.

IT’S FLANKEN! If you know, you know.

And then I thought about the seven families who will have an empty seat at their Easter table this Sunday in Nashville. Has the pastor lost his faith? He must have been in the chapel when the alarms went off, when his daughter was shot in cold blood. The other two children gunned down in their primary school were children of physicians in town. The Bride’s good doctor friend had sent her kids to Covenant, but then switched schools as the pandemic gained force.

Nashville is really just a small town in big city drag.

And since I’m not one for prayers, I joined the protest at the state capitol.

Bob and I left early Thursday with the Bride to march for all the laws that might help regulate guns in this state. Thousands of people gathered. Sure a “red flag” law may have stopped the shooter from purchasing seven guns in just as many months because she was being treated for a mental illness. But do you really think that would help? In Tennessee? The person trying to purchase an assault rifle would have to tell the store, oh btw I’m thinking of harming myself and others but don’t worry I’m under a doctor’s care…. Or wait, maybe they’d do a background check.

If I sound cynical it’s because I am. I watched a local business guy demonstrate a kind of glass film that stops bullets from shattering glass windows. Although the bullets DO go through and leave a hole, the window doesn’t implode. And the more I heard from Republicans saying, “It’s the doors, lock the doors, it’s the drugs, it’s a mental health crisis, we need more guns in schools, every teacher must carry a gun, more guns, more guns, guns, guns….” I say,

IT IS THE GUNS. Guns are the problem.

We must bring back the assault weapon ban. It worked in the past and there is absolutely no reason why our police should have to go up against these guns of war. It’s the one thing that will work immediately. Sure people who are determined to kill other people will find a way, but they won’t find killing so many that easy anymore. They won’t be able to spray bullets over a country music crowd in Las Vegas. Or into another school. There have been 376 school shootings in this country since Columbine.

There have been 376 school shootings since Columbine

“The federal government does not track school shootings, so The Washington Post has spent years tracking how many children in the United States have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since the Columbine High massacre in 1999…

Across all such incidents, The Post has found that at least 199 children, educators and other people have been killed, and another 424 have been injured.

Even as the list of incidents has expanded, however, the trend lines have remained consistent.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/

I don’t understand why our whole country has not decided to go on strike like the French. Today, schoolchildren in the city were going to walk out at the exact same time the shooter opened fire last Monday. My generation walked out of school to protest dress codes, and as a precursor to sit-ins over the Vietnam War. Schools don’t have to be a war zone. What would happen if teachers walked out tomorrow and police the next day? Imagine if nurses and doctors all went on strike. Why are we tolerating this?

Have you actually seen what an AR15 does to a nine year old child’s body?

If we cannot or will not protect our children, what kind of cowards are we? I will continue to cause good trouble, as I know many of my readers will until we fix this public health epidemic of gun violence. We have to change. It’s time to clean out the pantry and color eggs.

Or we could build a moat around every school in the country.

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Duck, Duck…

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , on June 6, 2022| 4 Comments »

Goose!

Guess what? Bob and I celebrated 43 years of marriage this past weekend. We survived the stress of many moves, launching two children into adulthood, and actually building a house together with a gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge. We joke that we rarely agree on anything, except the big things in life, like religion and politics. Our old VA Senator Tim Kaine Tweeted this morning:

“Virginia requires magazine limitation for duck hunting—no more than 3 rounds in a shotgun. Why? It’s not fair to ducks. Yet when we try to limit magazines to 10 rounds in Congress, we’re blocked. If we can limit magazines to protect ducks, we must do the same to protect people.“

This of course presumes that we want to protect our people, our children.

Bob and I agree on ONE thing for sure – that guns ARE the problem. The Republicans are trying to compromise on guns, but they are still blaming pure “evil,” and mental illness for our country’s outstanding deaths due to… Wait. For. It. GUNS. They would like to arm our teachers, the same teachers they don’t trust to pick out books for their own classrooms. I am trying to imagine my guidance counselor, Miss Toye, with a gun.

I wouldn’t call this compromise, I’d call it treachery.

It’s treating our kids like ducks in a pond, in a war zone. Early in our marriage, we agreed never to buy toy guns for our children, not even water pistols. My husband doesn’t like to play games because he didn’t grow up in a competitive Irish Catholic home and try to win best all around athlete at Camp St Joseph every summer. I OTOH love to play games of any sort!

But do you want to play Hunger Games with your children’s lives? Maybe they could outrun a madman with a rifle if he could only buy 10 rounds of ammunition? How many young lives are we willing to sacrifice for three rounds? I remember all my childhood games – duck, duck goose, hop scotch, red light green light, spin the bottle.

I remember being a young mom, moving back to NJ when the Rocker was two and the Bride was seven years old. I had wanted to stay in the Berkshires. Strangers would always ask me WHY we moved, implying that no one would want to actually move to the Garden State.

I was trying to bloom while my roots were being transplanted.

I resisted the new protocol of having to make a “play date” if my child wanted to play with someone on our street! A play date. That was the first sign that this move would be different, there was no going back. There were rules to these new suburban games. I volunteered to coach the Rocker’s little soccer team, and I drove the Bride to cheerleading practice. I tried to fit in, we all try our best to fit in, don’t we?

Unlike my generation, my children didn’t grow up with an internalized fear of nuclear war. There was no such thing as a cell phone, no social media. Bullies were confined to the school bus ride. No one had ever heard of an “active shooter drill.” Like my Catholic school in the 1950s, only the occasional fire drill could pierce the solemnity of the classroom.

When will the party of the right with blood on their hands, reinstate the assault weapon ban? Ban them for good! No time limits, no concessions. It’s puzzling why a leader on this front hasn’t emerged.

I brought a burnt orange jacket to our anniversary dinner, but it was too hot to wear on the patio. Bob didn’t have anything to wear in orange. Wearing orange is also a start, but we cannot stop the momentum. No one needs an AR-15. No. One.

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#ClimateStrike

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, Climate Change, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »

The birds are disappearing!

North America has lost a quarter of its bird population in the last 50 years! That’s a loss of nearly 3 Billion birds in just half a century, and according to the National Audubon study, it’s not the exotic types that are vanishing:

“…the most ubiquitous birds have been the hardest hit. “The common wisdom was that we’d see the rare and threatened species disappearing and the common, human-adapted ones taking over,” Rosenberg says. Instead, his team found that 90 percent of the missing birds came from just 12 families, and that they were all familiar, perchy, cheepy things such as sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, finches, larks, starlings, and swallows… It’s as if all birds are canaries, and the entire world their coal mine.”  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/america-has-lost-quarter-its-birds-fifty-years/598318/

Now most of you know that I love birds. I used to feed them all the time until we moved to the mountains of Virginia and decided they had enough food in the wild and I didn’t need to attract bears to my backyard.

I’ve recently hung a hummingbird feeder on the urban farmhouse porch without much success, but I’ve been told by a friend they are currently migrating and I might have better luck luring those tiny, iridescent, super fast babies in the Spring. For now, we listen to mourning doves coo to each other in our garden.

When we lived in the Berkshire Mountains, and the kids were little, I’d have wild guinea hens under my feeder, and whole families of cardinals would romp around our home on the edge of an actual bird sanctuary. While Grandma Ada was collecting blue birds in all shapes and sizes, I started collecting glass cardinals as my lucky, totem bird.

Grandpa Hudson carved a cardinal into the top of our family totem pole when we moved back to New Jersey. And though I could hear them foraging in the early morning hours, I became a fan of the abundant shore birds I saw migrating over our swamp wetlands. Herons and egrets sailed like ships across our low-slung Rumson ranch house out to the river at daybreak and dusk.

Woodpeckers performed like precision drillers across our Virginia valley when we built a small house with a view of the Blue Ridge. Their rat-a-tat noise would ricochet between the ridges as they searched for food. One day I sat in my car for an hour watching two pileated woodpeckers attack a log in the driveway. We knew them by the singular way they would fly, as if their substantial heft made them descend a little bit with every wing stroke. They skipped across the sky.

I would never keep a bird in the house, in a cage. Don’t judge me, I just couldn’t.

Today, if you are walking out of school or work to protest our climate crisis I salute you! Because it’s a world-wide problem that is calling for some extraordinary solutions.

It’s not just about carbon – though we must address that. We are living comfortably with just one car, walking more isn’t just healthy for us, it’s helping the environment. But deforestation causes 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, equal to vehicular emissions. https://www.conservation.org/stories/11-climate-change-facts-you-need-to-know

It’s not just about the sea rising and glaciers melting – a significant reason for human migration. Where will Miami be in 10 years, or Sea Bright, NJ for that matter? In our Southern city, government has decided to pay property owners to move out of flood zones! Which is good, cause my grand dogs were swimming in their flooded basement when the Bride and Groom first moved here in 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/climate/nashville-floods-buybacks.html

And it’s not just about the birds and the bees!

Thank you to Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old Swedish climate activist who saw what Parkland students did to mobilize gun reform after a massacre at their school. They started a revolution because gun violence in our country is an URGENT problem. And just look what they have started with AR-15 manufacturers, Colt suspended rifle production for civilians! : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49766257

We also need to sign the Paris Agreement now. Greta asks us to listen to the scientists, because Climate Change should be a global, URGENT priority!

Republican tactics of denial, delay, and disinformation will no longer be tolerated. But don’t just walk out of school this morning – after your #ClimateStrike today students, register to vote if you will turn 18 by next November. Our birds and our fish and our future are depending on you.

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Are You Hungry?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on January 5, 2016| 2 Comments »

If you grew up in a certain type of household, you would never enter or leave your home without being offered food of some sort. The usual response from my stepfather, the Jewish Judge,  would be, “I *could* eat!”

Fast forward to now, and just try to get out of Great Grandma Ada’s house without a bag of snacks for the journey. Seriously, she will tackle you with Buffalo Cake! It doesn’t matter how long you’ll be on the road, you *might* get hungry, right?

Well who whoulda thunk that the Oregon militiamen would have saddled up their pick-ups with guns and ammo to occupy a federal wildlife sanctuary gift shop and – wait for it – forgot to bring provisions. I mean really? Obviously there are no white guys in this group of Middle Eastern or Italian descent! Here is the tweet that one guy named Blaine sent out, expecting the US Post Office to deliver a package to their well-armed doorstep.

“ATTENTION…SHARE…ATTENTION…SHARE!!!! Anyone that wants to send any supplies (or snacks) can send them to General Mail, Burns, OR”

Here is my solution. You’ve got guns, so go use them as God intended. Shoot a pheasant and roast it outside, on a fire, you guys know how to make a fire right? Make squirrel stew, forage for greens and berries (I know it’s January, but try) and once you run out of soda from the vending machines, melt some snow.

Pundits are saying this would never be tolerated if a bunch of Muslims or African Americans took over a federal building. Let’s see, first of all they would have thought ahead and brought food. And most importantly of all, they would not have brought GUNS. The whole point of a Gandhi/MLKing type protest, or school sit-in like we Boomers used to do in the 60s, is that you sit down and don’t move.

The point is the non-violence part! You bring your own snacks and wait to get dragged out by those police or the national guard. This is what makes a good visual on TV or your nearest hand held device. This is what changes hearts and minds! Not a guy in a cowboy hat with a gun saying he doesn’t want to die here. Guess what, we don’t want you to die there either.

On second thought, maybe we should send him food?

We lived on the border of a bird sanctuary in the Berkshires. And I’m just guessing, but if these guys came to Canoe Meadows in MA, the whole town of Pittsfield would have run them out in a heartbeat. With picnic baskets from Lenox.

Rough-Meadows-credit-Alan-B-Ward

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