If You See Someone Crying on a Civil War Battlefield It's Me. Or I Guess It Could Also Be a Ghost.

If you see TWO people crying on a Civil War battlefield, then it's me AND a ghost!

In some ways, I'm finding this second school year of a completely empty nest to be easier than the first. I'm not sobbing in the shower every day, and I'm definitely not in that baffling state of mourning humans who are very much alive and well that seems specific to early days empty nesters. Yes, I maaaaaybe cried on a Civil War battlefield, but 1) I'd just finished dropping off the second kid less than 24 hours prior and wouldn't see her again until Fall Break, and 2) Civil War battlefields are sad! So many people died!

I've got my little autistic daily to-do list that I make for myself that keeps me busy all day, every day, both with productive things like, you know, work, and with less helpful things like painting that last damn family room wall that the entire family convinced me not to paint over the summer because it was too much hassle and didn't need to be done. Well, jokes on them, because when 2/3 of the people telling me not to do something moved out, I did it anyway! 

And when the years start looming over my head and I remember that my job, while fun and intellectually rewarding, is tenuous and also high-key evil, and I wonder what on earth people are supposed to be DOING with their lives when they don't have, like, some kind of noble calling or pursuit or whatever to dedicate themselves to, I just shove those thoughts back down where they came from and see what's next on my little autistic to-do list. Ooh, I need to scoop the litter boxes!

ANYWAY, look at this sweet little moth that stopped to rest on my partner's hand at Harpers Ferry:

You can tell it's a moth because it holds its wings flat while it's resting.

Just between us, I wasn't real revved up about visiting either Harpers Ferry or Antietam, but my deluxe national parks passport book is just another kind of little autistic to-do list, so obviously I've got to visit every national park site I can make an excuse to get to. AND back in May I bought myself a whole entire America the Beautiful pass so now I'm obsessed with getting my money's worth from it, and that means detouring to find all the national park sites that have entrance fees.

I saved forty bucks in entrance fees on this trip, and you don't need to ask how much I spent on gas or a hotel, because it's none of my business!

Harpers Ferry wasn't quite at Grand Canyon levels of crowded, but it was a LOT more crowded than I thought it would be, considering how not super revved up I, personally, was about it. I mean, just last year the big kid and I were literally the only visitors to Johnstown Flood National Memorial when we were there, and Johnstown Flood is objectively AMAZING!

To be fair, it turns out that Harpers Ferry is amazing, too, so I am SUPER glad that my little autistic to-do list brought me there!

And there actually IS a ferry! Or, at least, a bus that ferries you from the parking lot/visitor center down to the historic old town. If I'd had the whole day there we would have walked, but the plan was to hit up Antietam in the afternoon, so ferried by bus it was!

I sometimes wheedle my partner into reminiscing about a particular family road trip he took when he was a kid. He describes the trip as hot and muggy, and mostly consisting of battlefields, many of which he refused to get out of the car to look at. It's hilarious getting him to tell all the things he actually remembers from the trip, especially when you make him separate out the memories solely about baseball cards and road snacks and fighting with his brother from the memories of actual sightseeing.

He has no memories of whether or not he went to Antietam on this trip (although he must have--it's right there!), but he remembers exactly one thing about Harpers Ferry: there was a sign that showed you the heights of a bunch of old floods.

Here, then, is the only memorable thing about Harpers Ferry if you're a ten-year-old kid on a road trip across the Great Battlefields of America:

1985 was already on the sign by the time he visited, assuming they engrave their flood dates in a timely manner, but those 1996s are certainly new:

There's plenty of room for new floods in the middle, but if something happens that exceeds the big flood of 1936 they're going to have to add a new board!

Here's why they get so many floods:

Harpers Ferry is at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and there's not much of a riparian buffer zone between the rivers and the old part of the town. But that does mean that you can stroll along right next to the water, and it's especially pleasant on a bright summer morning:

Here's a nice view of the piers of an old bridge in the foreground, then the original site of Robert Harper's actually ferry, then a railroad bridge and a pedestrian bridge that's also part of the Appalachian Trail. 

We kept to the outskirts of the old town, checking out the fire engine house where John Brown and his followers barricaded themselves during their raid:

Here's my partner embodying the mentality of domestic terrorism for a righteous cause:

That's not its original spot, though, because the "fort" went on something of a national tour for a few decades, and while it was gone the railroad built up the site where it had been located into an embankment. But you can climb the embankment to the original location of the armory and find a monument marking where the fort was when John Brown used it:

I was trying to get a shot of the monument in the foreground and the fort in the background, when this group of youths arrived and started picnicking across half my photo. They looked so cheerful and wholesome that I bet they were Girl Scouts.

There's another lovely view over the river from the armory site:

We checked out the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, then sort of sideswiped the edge of town to hit the Appalachian Trail for a bit. 

This is a very picturesque rock overlooking a picturesque view that was apparently written about by Thomas Jefferson:

I'm looking at the website right now, where it tells me very firmly NOT to climb this rock, but in my own defense, there was zero guidance, either written or verbal, about this at the site, and also everyone else was doing it.

Anyway, it IS a really pretty view if you stand exactly where you're not supposed to:

I really wanted to walk the Appalachian Trail in the other direction for a bit, too, mostly because you get to go on this pedestrian bridge right next to a working railroad bridge across the Potomac and it looked like it led right into a super creepy tunnel where there are definitely zombies (I later learned that the pedestrians don't get to go through the tunnel so I'm glad I didn't blow up our afternoon plans for it)--

--but the afternoon was already wearing on, and we had to make time to go here!

As always, Visitor Center (and the gift shop and passport stamps) first!

The museum inside the Visitor Center was just two rooms and most of the artifacts were off display, but as someone coming in cold, with only my AP US History knowledge of the Civil War (great for the politics and economics and human geography aspects, but not so much for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when), it was a super helpful grounding, with actually a lot more context than I thought I'd get:

I thought that this explanation of the two sides of the slavery issue as evidenced by two Maryland citizens was an insightful way to approach the conversation:

And this display piece simply cracked me up:

Okay, NOW it's time for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when!

I don't usually love the start and stop, hop in and out of the car style of battlefield tours, but Antietam is so thoughtfully preserved and restored that it drew me in immediately. There's the self-guided tour with the specifics of who did what where, of course, but my favorite thing by far was the placement of structures that tell the story at an almost sensorial level. For example, wherever you see a split rail fence, that represents where an actual fence was on the day of the battle. And there are 30 acres of corn planted there on the site of the Millers' 30-acre cornfield where the bloodiest fight of the bloodiest day of the Civil War occurred:

Conveniently, the existence of the cornfield and the surrounding fencing probably keeps people from traipsing all over that spot and hunting for artifacts. There were a couple of volunteer docents staged at a few sites around the tour, and I sort of wondered if they were positioned at the spots most vulnerable to artifact poaching. 

Cannons, like the one here at West Woods, are placed on the sites where actual cannons were placed during the battle:

The barrels of the cannons are also from the Civil War. 

The West Woods itself is in the long-term process of being reforested to look more like it did during the battle, but you can hike into it kind of at the front of where the Confederate line was:

It's crazy, though, to think that on the day of the battle, the only trails in these woods would have been ones made by deer, and so everyone would have been dodging and hiding behind trees and the visibility would have been so low. I don't know if this would have been an old-growth forest at the time, though, so they may or may not have also been getting tangled up in every type of underbrush and briar. The woods on my property was partly cleared and farmed once upon a time a 100+ years ago, and it's still got a lot of tangly undergrowth around the slower-growing trees. 

Although there's a lot of more contemporary wayside signage, if you want a real deep-dive into exactly who did exactly what exactly where and exactly when, there are also these VERY thorough signs strewn around the battlefield:

They were created within the same generation as the Civil War, the brainchild of a Union general who was so interested in getting every exact detail that he essentially created a letter-writing campaign to survey all the surviving soldiers. He was only interested in the tactics and so didn't do anything interesting with the other stories they told him about the tragedies and horrors of war, BUT the circumstance of the correspondence alone worked to get those extraneous stories they told into the public record. 

I liked this view from the West Woods, in which you can see the Millers house and their cornfield. The Confederate survivors from the cornfield ran this way into the West Woods, and Union troops followed them, but what the Union soldiers didn't know was that there was another whole group of fresh Confederates coming into the woods from the south. They outflanked the Union soldiers and it got so chaotic that Union soldiers were literally shooting at each other as well as at the Confederates:

Meanwhile, just southeast of the cornfield and the West Woods was a farm lane that went along between two properties and led from the turnpike to the west to a gristmill over by the creek. Generations of wagons full of grain and flour had worn down the level of the lane so it was a few feet lower than the surrounding land, kind of like a buffalo trace only wider. on both sides, there was more corn--

--and more fencing:

In a strategy reminiscent of the following generation's trench warfare, Confederate soldiers were stationed here to "hold the line." But as the Union soldiers in the West Woods were being massacred, more Union soldiers came in from the northeast to attack the Confederates holding the Sunken Lane, and there was a simultaneous massacre of Confederates.

Eventually, the Union soldiers captured the lane and the Confederates retreated to a nearby farm. The Union followed them but couldn't take the farm so they retreated, too. At the end of the day there was essentially no gain of ground by either side, but in the process over 5,000 people were wounded or killed just from that set of skirmishes. 

Here's where I was all, "Wait, WHAT are they all doing right here?!? Was Antietam a major supply depot? It wasn't a port city. Did some famous politicians set up shop here?" I finally figured out that it was all because Confederate General Robert E. Lee was trying to invade Maryland, and Union General McClellan was chasing him down, so this was basically just the spot that Lee picked to stop and try to kill off his pursuers. So all these skirmishes aren't even necessarily *about* gaining ground or whatever--these two armies were literally just trying to kill each other. It's really easy to get lost in the weeds when you're touring a Civil War battlefield!

Meanwhile, in a completely different spot south way southeast of all of this, Confederate troops were holding this one bridge that spanned Antietam Creek and kept the Union forces coming from the east away from the town of Sharpsburg and the rest of the battle:

This is from the Union side.

There weren't a lot of them, but the lay of the land and the relatively narrow bridge crossing meant that they held the line for a few hours, slaughtering any Union soldiers who tried to cross:

Eventually, though, some Union soldiers finally got the idea to try crossing downstream from the bridge where the Confederate weapons couldn't reach them, and the Confederate soldiers were starting to run low on ammunition, anyway:

This is looking downstream.

So when the Confederates got outflanked AND outgunned they finally retreated, but they'd held the line so long that more Confederate reinforcements, marching up from their battle at Harpers Ferry, had time to get to them.

This sycamore by the bridge is famous because there's photos of it as a little sycamore in the aftermath of the battle:

There were a couple more spots on the driving tour, but as we were navigating to the next one we got turned around a little, and then we were all, "Hey, is that a WINERY right next to the battlefield?!?"

It WAS!

So, since we figured we knew how the Civil War ended, and since the afternoon was getting on and pretty soon we'd have to head out on the rest of the drive to our overnight spot well west of here, we decided to close out our tour of Antietam with a shared flight of wine:

In conclusion, Antietam was kind of a stupid battle and I can't believe they killed or wounded over 23,000 people over it, and then left a huge mountain of rotting corpses for the innocent citizens of Sharpsburg and the surrounding countryside to deal with.

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Sometimes the Care Packages are Blue

Do not even try to imagine how tickled I was when I figured out I could send each of my kids a corny, pun-themed care package that matched the color of the college merch that I could make for them, because your imagination will not even come close to how tickled I actually was.

The big kid's first care package this year (We al-RED-y miss you!) contained not just Twizzlers and Pringles but a decorative pillow for her apartment couch complete with a handmade appliqued red and white school logo on it. The little kid's care package, however, looked like this:

--and in it she got cookies and cream Pocky, seaweed snacks, blue shark gummies, and the result of a lot of careful fussy cutting with my Cricut, a lot of careful applique--

--and then a lot more of even more careful applique on top of it:

Because I always wanted more daughters and because this kid and her freshman year roommates are still as close as puppies in a pile, I obviously thrifted three hoodies and made three versions of the school applique so that they could each have one.

Two sets of applique are on these sort of off-white hoodies--and honestly, if you're buying hoodies brand-new you're playing a sucker's game, because there are five billion like-new hoodies out there in the thrift stores to be had for just a few bucks each--

The loose threads are a feature, not a bug. I was going for the raw edge look, but I also interfaced the snot out of every piece so nothing is going nowhere, fingers crossed and knock on wood.

--but my own girl is still going hard on the mostly black wardrobe (I suppose that on a granular level it's a very far cry from her preschool years, when she insisted upon wearing only a succession of thrifted party dresses, but since her taste in her wardrobe is still exactly that specific I kind of see it as overall pretty much the same thing), and so whenever I make them their triplet gifts, it's always two creams or pastels and one emo black:

She can just tell her classmates that she's embodying Lantern Night every night!

But an outfit for her first May Day? Now THAT was a pickle to figure out...

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In Which I Violate the IP of My Kid's College To Make Her Custom Merch

So yes, I DID violate the IP of the kid's college by recreating their school logo in fabric and appliqueing it to a decorative pillowcase, buuuuuut I also own several pieces of properly licensed merchandise purchased from the school bookstore, AND by the time she graduates I'll have paid the school far more than my own personal net worth in tuition.

So let's just call it fair, yes?

I cut and assembled the patchwork applique D during my mending group's monthly volunteer day at our local public library, in between mending holes in several pairs of leggings, teaching a child a couple of different hand-sewing stitches, and patching holes and rips in what I believe to be every pair of ripped jeans in the county:

I finished satin stitching the pieces of the D later that night at home, forgetting that I still had a heavy-duty jeans needle installed in my sewing machine until I was halfway done so that now I'm rightfully paranoid that the pillowcase is going to rip at the edges of the satin stitching, sigh:

The stitching looks so tidy and the colors are well-matched, though! And if the fabric does split where the heavy-duty needle was punching through it, well... the kid knows when and where our local public library's Mending Day happens!

I also made the envelope-back pillowcase from scratch:

I perhaps shouldn't have trusted the label on the pillow form that indicated that it was a perfect square, 16"x16". I crafted my pillowcase to match, and the vertical measurement of the finished product seems to agree with the label, but the horizontal measurement clearly does not. Look how snug it is at the sides, dang it!

Whatever. Maybe it just needs to be punched some more to redistribute the stuffing... as long as that doesn't cause the fabric to rip at the satin stitching.

Gentle punching, then.

On the long drive to drop the younger kid off at school this August, I amused everyone in the car by reading them posts from the various college parent Facebook groups that I lurk in. There are a LOT of moms crashing out on public Facebook groups about their crippling grief and loneliness, y'all. And there are a LOT of college freshmen, apparently, calling their parents crying and asking to come home before their parents can even finish driving back after dropping them off. One mom reported that her daughter called an Uber and came knocking on their hotel room door in the middle of the night and telling them she didn't want to stay. Like, Baby, they JUST dropped you off! Unless your roommates are actively worshipping Satan, and by that I mean not just putting on the robes and painting the pentagrams and lighting the black candles but, like, actually calling up a physical incarnation of the Prince of Darkness himself and offering you to him as his bride, you really need to sit with your discomfort for at least a semester. And if you can hold out for one semester, see if you can try for two. 

Honestly, even if the kid's entire college looked exactly like that abbey from The Nun, I'd still be all, "Honey, you can stick out a demon nun for four years. She's the leading researcher in her field! See if you can TA for her and get her to write you a recommendation letter for your grad school application."

Anyway, all that to say that I am now following a Facebook group devoted to sending themed care packages with punny slogans to one's college kid:

And along with the Twizzlers, spiced apple foaming hand soap, snack-sized Pringles, and Stranger Things-themed Chips Ahoy cookies, a decorative pillow with a half-red school logo fit in just perfectly!

Now to figure out what pun I want to use for this month's Halloween-themed care package...

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This Disney Children's Cookbook is Exactly the Right Level for My Kitchen Skills

The Disney Villains Cookbook by Walt Disney Company
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am 49 years old, with what is apparently the cooking skill of someone at least 40 years younger, because this children's cookbook was EXACTLY my speed.

And I didn't even know that it was a cookbook for children when I checked it out of the library. What that says about me, I do not care to explore. But although I am mostly disinterested in cooking (if someone ever invents a middle-aged human chow with all the vitamins and nutrients needed by a perimenopausal woman, sold in 50-pound bags with instructions on the side about what size scoop you should dish out per meal, I will be incandescently happy and my life will immediately become 1000% easier), I DO love myself some thematically-appropriate novelty foods, and I thought this book might snooker me into actually, you know, using my stove this week.

Especially with the excuse to eat my dinner in front of a movie!

Alas for that last part, because this book's only flaw for me is that the recipes are VERY loosely associated with the Disney villain each claims to represent. I'll give it a point for the Spotted Scones to represent Cruella de Vil, because okay, chocolate chips are a cute idea for dalmatian spots and the book/movie IS set in England... but they don't actually represent Cruella, just the concept of the film. An actual Cruella recipe would be something like a black and white cookie. And the Black and White Bean Salad that comes later in the book and is also supposed to represent Cruella doesn't work, either, because black beans aren't really black.

The two recipes that my partner and I tried have even looser connections to their Disney villains. You're supposed to cut the Baguette Breakfast Beaks into triangles to represent Maleficent's raven familiar, but other than the fact that it's kind of gross to make an egg dish to symbolize a bird, cutting it into triangles is literally the only connection. And a baguette cut into triangles doesn't look like beaks? Captain Hook's Stuffed Shells is even worse, because even though the description notes that "Captain Hook and his crew would no doubt appreciate a warm plate of this ocean-themed dish," the absolute only ocean-themed part of it is the jumbo pasta shells. No nori, no seafood, no ocean colors, no crumbly textures to represent sand... just baked pasta with jumbo pasta shells.

Y'all, my grown-up autistic ass can barely accept this as even remotely on-theme. There's no way you're going to get a kid with any kind of neurological pathways to buy into it.

HOWEVER... the two recipes that my partner and I tried were DELICIOUS. And SIMPLE. And infinitely repeatable in a menu rotation. And super easy to riff on with whatever ingredients you have on hand.

The best part, though, is that the recipes are so clear and intuitive that you just have to make them while looking at the recipe exactly once, and then you can make them forever. The baguette bake is just beaten eggs, whatever veggies sound good, and a bunch of cheese baked in a hollowed-out baguette. I threw in some diced peppers and onion and chopped spinach and halved cherry tomatoes, my partner added bacon because otherwise he wouldn't be able to recognize the meal as food, and he and I killed an entire baguette's worth between the two of us. The stuffed shells is just a carton of ricotta, a beaten egg, whatever veggies and herbs sound good, and a bunch more mozzarella and parmesan layered casserole-style with cooked pasta and marinara sauce and baked. I threw in a ton of sauteed kale from my garden along with scallions and a shocking amount of fresh parsley, my partner added sausage, and my only regret is not going even harder on the greens because my partner and I FEASTED!

Seriously--if this is what cooking is actually like, then I can actually do it, and I actually enjoy it!

We watched Ted Lasso while we ate our stuffed shells, though, because that recipe is absolutely NOT Peter Pan-themed.

P.S. View all my reviews

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