Gettysburg to Philadelphia to Columbus to Home

The battle ended and the armies moved on, leaving over 7,000 corpses and several hundred amputated limbs lying wherever they'd fallen or been tossed. The civilians came back or came out of hiding and put the place back together again, burying everybody and everything wherever they could be buried, in shallow graves and mass graves and here and there anywhere there was a spot, sometimes marked and sometimes not. A local lawyer, David Wills, organized the creation of a national cemetery for the Union dead adjacent to the local cemetery, and over the next few months all the corpses who could be found who were Union soldiers (and a few who probably weren't but got caught up in the mix) were moved there. 

Meanwhile, the Confederate corpses stayed in their various shallow graves for several more years, until a local doctor organized the exhumation of whoever could still be found and had them sent to proper consecrated cemeteries back in the former Confederate states. If you want to see a couple of people who have Big Feelings about this and are willing to say so with their full government names, you should check out the Comments section of this blog post from the sadly now defunct Gettysburg National Military Park blog. In it, some guy named John Eady Simmons, Jr. says that the Union soldiers were "misled by Lincoln!" That's not something that you want on the first page of a Google search of your name!

Anyway, a few months after the battle, when the corpses of the Union soldiers had been more or less settled into the brand-new national cemetery, it was officially dedicated and consecrated. Abraham Lincoln came and gave a speech. He stayed with David Wills, and likely wrote some of the speech in his house. He asked to meet John Burns, and they hung out for about an hour and by all accounts had a lovely chat. 

And on November 19, he gave this speech:

Back in our homeschooling days, it took my eight-year-old six months to fully memorize that two-minute speech (So many big words! So many relative clauses!), and I'm still chuffed at her accomplishment.

Also, she managed it in 1:23. She can talk faster than Lincoln, woot!

It was a beautiful day to walk around the national cemetery--

--and see Lincoln's handwritten speech in the place where he'd read it--

--but eventually we had to get back on the actual road, since the Battle of Gettysburg was meant to be by no means the main event of this week.

Okay, one more detour...

At our dinner at Dobbin House the previous night, Mr. Craft Knife had a local cider so delicious that he looked to see if 1) the cidery is open to the public, and 2) if it was reasonably on our path. It is, and it was!

Okay, now we're REALLY on our way!

Because we can be productive and efficient when we need to, by that evening we were enjoying a walk around the little kid's college campus after packing most of her stuff into the car (these knock-off Frakta bags are the BEST things to pack in! They hold a ton, they've got handles so they're easy to carry, and when they're empty they fold up flat and can be thrown in the top of a dorm room closet until they're ready to fill up again):

By the next morning we'd packed up the rest of it and were on the road, by that evening I was in Ohio, dancing to a band that, after an hour of trying to play the music they wanted, had submitted to the crowd and was indulging all the parents of the next day's college graduates with covers of classic 90s songs (the lead singer had to literally read the lyrics for each song off of her phone, and WE DID NOT CARE!), by the morning after that I was snagging seats inside a college gym--

--and by that afternoon I had myself a brand-new college graduate!

And then we packed her, up, too, and drove another four hours back home.

This big kid has grown up so much from that tiny little moppet with messy blonde curls who loved dinosaurs and baby farm animals and interesting rocks. For a while, I really longed for that little kid again--not because I wanted her instead of my own grown-up daughter, but because in retrospect, those days were so magical, and, it turns out, so fleeting. Tangential, but now I, too, have become the person who tells parents of young children in a slightly too intense tone to cherish the present because it's gone before you know it, and the parents always nod and agree but I know they're rolling their eyes because why do all older women keep telling them that but SOMEDAY THEY WILL KNOW WHY.

But anyway, yes, I still miss that little kid, and the best day of my life would be to somehow be a time traveler and get to babysit her and her even littler sister and see those little faces and hear those little voices again, but I wouldn't trade that little version for my own grown-up daughter for anything in the world. It's excellent to have a kid who's all grown up, and you can see that they're thoughtful and kind, they're generous, they're funny, they're happy to be alive and excited to see and do everything they can, but they're still also your kid who will hang out with you and listen to all your boring stories and tell you much more interesting stories in return. And obviously, they still love dinosaurs and baby farm animals and, most of all, interesting rocks.

In related news, if you know of any great job openings for early career environmental scientists, please send them my way!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!