After seven months of horrifying war, the last few weeks have been inspiring as the Ukrainian Army, with the help of western weapons and local courage that no weapons could provide, have reclaimed swaths of occupied land. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is not one to give in, though, and his speech today makes that point, if anyone was in doubt.
Autumn doesn’t begin until Thursday night — Friday morning if you’re a few time zones east of here — but recent events led me to begin a regular fall pastime a little early this year.
It was beautiful. It was sweet-smelling. It was deadly. For quite some time, I had ignored lovely, white-flowered vine that had begun to entwine its way around my backyard fence. Gardening has never been a hobby of mine. In contrast to my mother —- who has been known to happily steward anything from ferns to palm trees, bringing them tenderly back from the brink of death and into lush contentment —- my thumbs have always been decidedly mahogany.
It was expensive as mute buttons go. That seems clear to me, but anyone else might need a little explanation. For the last number of years I have had in my bedroom what was the cheapest little flat-screen television that WalMart had to offer in about 2015, so it wasn’t much good seven years ago and today no one would purchase even a telephone with its low video specifications and lack of inputs.
Everyone loves to show off some photos of their latest trip or family party. So, here I’ll share some to start off this week’s column. Never mind if you would rather not see my family’s party or my vacation — these aren’t those anyway. I’ve been under-the-weather and keeping my distance from folks. Here’s another secret though: they aren’t anybody’s.
It happened again, dammit. I was headed to the store when, out of the woods on my left, a deer appeared. Again. It ran in front of my car, again, and I slammed on the brakes, again. There’s always that moment, magnified by the mind’s ability to slow time so that every second is a million instants, of wondering if the deer was fast enough, or I was, and I’d manage to avoid hitting it. Usually it’s a narrow escape.
Two ruckuses that have occupied our society the past couple of weeks have gotten me thinking a lot about truth. One came from the Left and one from the Right. One was Liz Cheney’s loss, one student loan debt forgiveness.
He who sits upon the throne in Revelation has a patent complaint against current events on Earth. “Behold, I make all things new” is how it’s put in Revelation 21:5. There’s another way of looking at it. The notoriously non-revelatory Karl Marx noted that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. As with most everything else (we have no reason to doubt that he spelled his name correctly), Marx was wrong in the particulars, though the general idea, that history repeats itself, has evidence in its support.
A friend recently asked me to chime in on a Twitter conversation in which someone was asserting that Jesus’s disciples did not die over their belief in the Resurrection. Sometimes Twitter arguments can be completely useless, but this one seemed to include some genuine discussion and, as obscure as arguing over why someone died millennia ago may seem, in this case, it means quite a lot.
The mowing is finally done, at least for now, and the whole area carries the invigorating scent of newly mown grass. My amazing Swisher mower pulled through like a champ yet again. They make ‘em good in Missouri, except that when a friend overseas asked me about it, I checked and learned that it is no longer manufactured, which is a shame.