2019 SANTA FE TRAIL DAY LAS ANIMAS COLORADO

This year's theme was TRAILBLAZERS & STARGAZERS

For 85 years this has been an annual celebration on the last weekend of April in this little town on the Arkansas River in Colorado.

Celebrating the cultures of the area makes for a fun day. Indigenous Folk, Spanish/Mexican, Mestizo, Black, Traders, Homesteaders, Ranchers, Farmers, Town Folk ... and somehow it all just worked.

If you take a drive in this area now, you'll see cattle of all types, goats, sheep, llama, horses, lots of dogs, some cats, hog operations south of town, crops of corn, wheat, oats, sorghum, melons, onions, peppers, alfalfa, beans, and who knows what all else, people who represent all of the above list and some new-comers, plenty of churches, folks who open doors for one another and say "How ya doin'?" to all and sundry ... and watch out for each other. 

The emergency response teams are top of the line. We had a fire east of town recently that started in the river bottom of the Purgatoire River (called the Picketwire locally) and burned its way south to the Arkansas River bottom and then east along it. Took about 600 acres and would have been so much worse had it not been for all the area firefighters coming to help, and the National Guard's helicopters dumping water on it in strategic spots. When push comes to shove True Colorado Folk stick together and get the job done.

Our family's ranch was run by my grandparents; before that our great-grandparents homesteaded down south of town too, east of where Grandma and Grandad ranched. Before that, there were a couple of generations in west Kansas. Our lineage came to America in the 1600s (Quakers) and followed what has come to be known as the Traditional American Westward Trek. We had to stop going west when we got to Alaska and Hawaii.

Las Animas has been 'home' to us for six generations now. Most of us have gone in all the directions of the compass from here - but we know our way home.

Here are a few photos of the parade - there were many many horses and riders, too! 

For a Small Town USA event, it was mighty fine! 

"We have seen His Star and come to worship Him"

A homestead couple

This group later danced in the intersection

Bent's Old Fort was first a trading post

A man and his horse

Just a few of the MANY riders in this parade

Gotta love the Hereford cattle !! 

RICIMER is not necessarily patient ...

On the other hand, we're making progress.

It should come as a shock to nobody that the life of this one man is not going to permit itself to be told in a single book.

Rather than argue the point or write a massive missive we're back to splitting a single Story into segments.

The first one:

RICIMER

The Tears of Anna

(I)

ought to be ready for print very soon.

It's got some background and Ricimer's Youngling years. At the end is more 

'background' that you may or may not be interested in.  Gauge it for yourself, my friend.

 History has judged Ricimer - we have a bit of a different perspective of history from our own time, so we'll make our own calls regarding this man who seemingly changed the course of History all by himself. 

Of course he did no such thing - the 'all by himself' part of it at least. That he contributed enormously to setting (advancing) a course is without a doubt true. That he did it alone ... not true, as nobody has ever had that sort of power.

One thing after another after another has interrupted both the research and the writing of RICIMER. I cannot and will not blame anyone, least of all the Character Ricimer, for becoming impatient. The set of RICIMER books are a work in progress, but this one at least can be an introduction.

The Ricimer Character does not spring into existence out of a void, as Ricimer the Historic Person did not. We come into his story already biased in his favor because he's kin to our fictional family.

*laughing*

So is his brother Rechiar, but while we like the heck out of Ricimer we do NOT feel the same about Rechiar. So it's not just the family connection ... 

At any rate, being the grandson of our own Wally of the West (Mamm of Dunnottar's younger brother), Ricimer belongs in our Story.

2nd Amendment

*sigh*

Once again, for those who are slow on the uptake.


The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: 

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Period.

It's written in English, grammatically proper, spelled correctly, and doesn't even use any words that are unclear in definition.

So what part of that one relatively short little sentence do people not understand?

The federal government does not have the authority to regulate, legislate, or any other kind of '-ate' anything to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

The Constitution of the United States of America and the attached Bill of Rights (first ten amendments for those who might not know) delegates and restricts the powers of the branches of our federal government and it addresses those of the states and the People.

Here's a Legal Link to some background, going back to the Federalist Papers and the ratification of the Constitution itself.

Here's a bit of what you'll find:

[note:  it's a bit like reading Shakespeare - you have to read it three times. Once just to get used to the language; once to get the general gist of it; and finally to understand. Be patient with yourself and take your time - it's worth it, trust me.]

The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist, No. 29, did not view the right to keep arms as being confined to active militia members:

What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen...The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious if it were capable of being carried into execution... Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped ; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.

James Madison in Federalist No. 46 wrote:

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments,to which the people are attached, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

Here, like Story, Madison is expressing the idea that additional advantages accrue to the people when the citizens' right to arms is enhanced by having an organized and properly directed militia.

The Federalist Papers Continued – "The Original Right of Self-Defense"

The Founders realized insurrections may occur from time to time and it is the militia's duty to suppress them. They also realized that however remote the possibility of usurpation was, the people with their arms, had the right to restore their republican form of government by force, if necessary, as an extreme last resort.

"The original right of self-defense" is not a modern-day concoction. We now examine Hamilton's Federalist No. 28. Hamilton begins:

That there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force cannot be denied. Our own experience has corroborated the lessons taught by the examples of other nations; that emergencies of this sort will sometimes exist in all societies, however constituted; that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government) has no place but in the reveries of these political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.

Hamilton explains that the national government may occasionally need to quell insurrections and it is certainly justified in doing so.

Hamilton continues:

If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual State. In a single State, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair.

Hamilton clearly states there exists a right of self-defense against a tyrannical government, and it includes the people with their own arms and adds:

[T]he people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate. Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. How wise will it be in them by cherishing the union to preserve to themselves an advantage which can never be too highly prized!

Thus the militia is the ultimate check against a state or the national government. That is why the founders guaranteed the right to the people as opposed to only active militia members or a state's militia. But of course, via the militia clause, the Second Amendment acknowledges, as well, the right of a state to maintain a militia. (For more on militia see: http://guncite.com/gc2ndmea.html.)

Hamilton concludes, telling us the above scenario is extremely unlikely to occur:

When will the time arrive that the federal government can raise and maintain an army capable of erecting a despotism over the great body of the people of an immense empire, who are in a situation, through the medium of their State governments, to take measures for their own defense, with all the celerity, regularity, and system of independent nations? The apprehension may be considered as a disease, for which there can be found no cure in the resources of argument and reasoning.

Again, it is the recurring theme of the people's right to keep and bear arms as individuals, enhanced by a militia system, that (in part) provides for the "security of a free state".

See, THIS is what our education system seems to have been neglecting for a very long time. EVERY American citizen should know this stuff. It would avoid a lot of conflict if we all knew what the heck we were talking about.

Something Happened

Part One 

(Click)

Roughly 12,800 years ago, give or take a couple of thousand, Something Happened and life on Earth changed dramatically.

This is a book of fiction and not intended to be exactly a textbook about either ancient times or quantum physics.

But Something really did Happen right about that time, back in the long-ago days, and it was darned dramatic.

I almost stopped writing the book when I found out where all the inexplicable research I had been doing was leading me. I write fiction. I don't write 'actual stuff'. 

But our Characters ... well ... if you know them you know they generally have good reasons for what they get me into. And they're notorious for the phrase 'Never Give Up and Never Give In'. Arguing the point is a waste of time so I may as well just write the Story as it comes.

This particular one started just after I got Danann written almost a year and a half ago. In between the Younglings and a couple three books of short stories and poems, the research kept taking me in the totally wrong direction - back and back and back instead of ahead like it was supposed to go. I was too fascinated (and curious) to quit the Search.

There had to be a reason I was looking at really ancient stuff, so I started actively looking for something that had to do with ancient North America. 

Learned a lot, I did, as 'new' findings were coming to light even as my research was carrying me along that path. There were people here before there were supposed to be people here, did you know that? I hadn't either, except rumors. They were here a LONG time before our Native Tribes arrived across that Bering Land Bridge from Asia. In the days of the mammoth, not just at the tail end of those days. Some of our Tribes have ancient legends about the people who were here when they got here. Hadn't known that, either. 

And just exactly who were the Clovis people? About all we have left of them are some spear points - which are nothing like anything Asian or Native. The closest anyone has been able to come were a people they call the Solutreans, in France. 

Then comes the question: where did the Clovis people go? And what about the ones who were here before them, the really Old Folk?

See, the thing is that archaeologists and such have a fairly clear picture of the past few thousand years, and they have a pretty good idea about the Dinosaur Days and right up to when the large mammals like the mammoth and mastodon went extinct. 

But there's this thing in between the 'newer' days and the 'older' days. 

They call it 'The Black Mat' or 'Brady Soil' and it's a layer of compressed carbon that represents maybe a thousand years worth of carbon based life forms. In some places they've found bits of burnt bone embedded in that Black Mat - burnt at temperatures that indicate a heat source a whole lot hotter than a cook fire or a forest fire. 'Something Happened' back then.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents a pretty clear explanation of the Black Mat, Younger Dryas, etc. Here's a quote:

"Of the 70 sites in SI Table 2, 56 (80%) have skeletal elements of the Rancholabrean megafauna directly underlying the YD black mat (Table 1). Approximately 38.6% have mammoth remains, 37.1% bison, 8.6% horse, 7.1% camel, 2.9% mastodon, and 8.6% other extinct-species remains, all on the Clovis-age surface, and only bison remains appear in the overlying YD black mat."

Nature Geoscience has a bit about Brady Soil. Look it up; here's a quote:

"We identify high levels of black carbon, indicating extensive biomass burning. In addition, we found intact vascular plant lipids in soil organic matter with radiocarbon ages ranging from 10,500 to 12,400 cal yr BP, indicating decomposition was slowed by rapid burial at the start of the Holocene."

Again, 'Something Happened' - for example in southwestern Nebraska.

Loess is super-fine dirt, maybe ground to 'powder' by glacial movement, that's carried by winds and then falls and accumulates when the winds die down. It shows up mainly in the form of dunes. It brings to mind a horrifically more extensive version of the notoriously horrific dust storms the people who lived through the 'Dirty Thirties' (few and far between now, those folk) tell us about. Extrapolate from that to the tune of at least several hundred years, maybe a thousand. No wonder nobody can seem to find much of anything from right about then. There ain't nothin' left but burnt carbon in/under the loess.

Meanwhile, other scientists were developing better ways of obtaining and assessing things like core samples of ancient ice. Core samples are cylinders of ice (in this case) that go back a very long time; the deeper you drill, the older. They can date and test the ice samples to see what was going on in the world, a sort of timeline of temperatures and 'events' that left residue in the ice and such.They found some interesting stuff, including the fact that 'Something Happened' around about 12,800 years ago, give or take a couple thousand.

Erratics are rocks located sometimes far from their point of origination. 

North Dakota Geological Survey has a good description of erratics. They are deposited by glaciers - but (fictionally speaking for the moment) might also have been carried in a flood ... Something Happened to get them from where they were to where they are.

And I'm learning new stuff as we go along here. Bear with me or click out; I'm gonna see where this takes me.

GeorgiaBeforePeople is a WordPress blog mentioning the effect of Lake Agassiz's ice-melt on the east coast of North America.

While that's significant, for our purposes the southern 'outlet breach' is more so. 

Lake Agassiz was a glacial lake, forming at the foot of the glacier that covered pretty much everything north of it. The lake was bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined. 

Fictionally speaking for the moment, think of the effect of 1) breaching the southern shore of that lake, combined with 2) massive additions of glacial ice-melt triggered by unimaginably hot asteroids exploding into the glacier. The equivalent of an over-land tsunami would have been a not-good thing. The impact of that much water moving that fast would have been plenty, but there was stuff in that water besides H2O.

Our (fictional) city of Phi (which we've 'located' near Kearney Nebraska on the Platte River) would have been directly in the path of both the fire spreading from 1) asteroid impacts throwing burning debris and starting fires; and 2) the powerfully over-heated atmosphere itself igniting everything in a kind of spontaneous combustion - and that mega-tsunami flood from both the breaching of the southern outlet area of Agassiz and the ice-melt from the glacier.

Uffda.

Yes.

Uffda.

And I'm not even Norwegian unless from over a thousand years ago or so, that I know of.

Catastrophic Glacial Lake Outbursts are discussed by Kehew and Lord at a site about geomorphology.

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Figure 5. Exposure of coarse gravel deposited by glacial lake outburst flood. The deposit lacks bedding and large clasts are surrounded by sand-size matrix, suggesting hyperconcentrated flow conditions.

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• Catastrophic glacial-lake outburst spillways: form and process relationships.
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Just looking up all this stuff is enough to give a person chills.

I live in central North Dakota USA, although I might move to Minnesota one day, or Colorado. Right now I'm in North Dakota.

The Red River Valley was part of the lake bed of Agassiz - it's got maybe the richest darned dirt in the world, very deep and very black. Amazing stuff. Then there's us - breaking equipment every which way from Tuesday on Canadian rocks. One of these days I'll take a little road trip around our county and take photos of some of our rock piles. A lot of them have gone as rip-rap to protect the shores of our lakes and rivers, but ... you know ... there seem to always be more rocks. Now we know how they got there. Something Happened to put them there. On the positive side, we've got some great gravel pits.

Not to change the subject or anything, but I just found something I hadn't really paid attention to before, not being all that interested in SLOTHS to be honest. But the link has information that I find handy. Here's a quote:
"A well-preserved ungual of a pes documents the presence of Jefferson's ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) at the end of the Wisconsinan in North Dakota. This is the 1st report of M. jeffersonii in North Dakota, and one of few records from the upper Great Plains. An accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon age of 11,915 ± 40 years ago was obtained from the specimen, suggesting that the sloth resided in North Dakota during the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age, just before extinction of the species. Palynological records from sites near the sloth occurrence and of the same age indicate that it resided in a cool, moist, spruce-dominated forest habitat in a riparian setting along the Missouri River. Its presence in that setting corroborates the notion that Jefferson's ground sloth was a browsing inhabitant of gallery forests associated with rivers. It is likely that M. jeffersonii used river valleys, such as the Missouri River valley, as migration routes. ...  Kihm (1987) noted the scarcity of Ice Age mammalian fossil records in North Dakota and listed mammoth, horse, stag-moose, and bison as being present in the North Dakota Ice Age megafauna. A recently discovered skull of the giant bison (Bison latifrons) from Mountrail County near New Town with an age of >47,500 years ago was reported by Hoganson (2003)."

And now we know, kind of, what it was like around here back in the day.

Kinda makes me want to dig a really deep hole in my back yard just to see what I can see.

To make a long story even longer, at the same time I was going back and back and back in time I was also studying quantum physics and learning about stuff like entanglement, and nano transistors, and particle vs wave vs both, and possibly inhabitable planets 'nearby', and the meaning of PHI (1.618...) and what shows up when you take a picture of two of the tiniest bits of 'matter' we can isolate whamming into each other at breakneck speed (phi) while our space vehicles are sending back photos of the immensity of our universes (shaped like spirals - phi again), and lunar/solar 'clocks' that are twice as old as any such thing is supposed to be (let alone where no such thing was supposed to have been possible), and that Canadian kid 'locating' an ancient site using logic and star maps and site maps, and the Progression of the Equinoxes, and yada yada.

It was both encouraging and kind of creepy to get scientific 'validation' for concepts I'd already written into our story lines but I'm getting used to that so I'm not quite as freaked out by it as I used to be.

Eventually the disparate lines of research came together, fictionally speaking. I first designed the city of Phi's physical lay-out, with its circles of out-lying Settlements and thought Hey that makes sense. Then I ran across Atlantis stuff and had to scrap that design as it had already been kind of taken - too close for me to want to use mine, that's for sure. 

I wasn't looking for Atlantis or even thinking about it, but when a person runs multiple searches for both ancient days and advanced technology type stuff ... eventually the two are going to meet if there's any kind of possible connection at all. So Atlantis popped up, along with a bunch of other weird stuff involving stone carvings and such that I might or might not use.

The point is that obviously I'm not the first one to think that there might have been 'advanced cultures' a long time before our own. The concept was well in place clear back in Plato's time for cryin' out loud. It's not a new thought by any means.

Neither is time travel. Neither is the colonization of other planets. Neither is blinking your eyes and being somewhere else, or sometime else. Neither are a lot of the things our Characters do. For me, the fact that I was getting 'new' scientific information that directly relates to that stuff is what almost made me just drop the whole thing.

Then I ran across another time that 'Something Happened' and I really wanted to just stop right there.

Apparently it wasn't enough that Alianora and Drustann had traveled back in time and found themselves in the ELE that took out the large mammals.

Noooooooo.

So I have to write the Story. COME  HELL AND HIGH WATER, I have to write it.

So be it.

What has been will again become; what now is has been already and will be again ... the wheel goes 'round and 'round ... and our world is founded, maintained, and progresses under the rule of PHI - the Spiral and the Perfect Balance.

Again I'll say it:

Uffda.

All because the next Keeper of the Faith was born.

Good grief.

Short Stories,Tall Tales, and Such : Live on Kindle : Amazon

CLICK

(or get it on Kindle!)

Rua and the Brownies take on some Pesky Pixies in this book of short pieces.

*laughing*

Got that one finished and thought,'Well, this book is about ready to go now!'

Then had a horrifying thought: I had promised somebody a Tall Tale about Paul Bunyan and Babe - and it wasn't written, let alone in this book. 

So I tagged it on at the end of Rua's story since that file was already open and fomatted for this book. Hurried to get it in, and went to work getting it published.

It was only during the final on line editorial preview that I found I had put Rua's story in twice and Babe's love for salted herring and subsequent thirst was nowhere to be found.

*sigh*

So back into the book's working file I went, got it straightened out, changed the name of the file to avoid confusion, and re-submitted it.

This little book has a lot in it, truth be told.

Elves, 

the first adventures of Renegade, Rebel, Rogue, and Riley 

(and introducing Reckless and her horse Roger), 

thoughts on religion, spirituality, and mysticism, 

a bit of family history, 

some Shakespeare, 

a modern day Sass doing what Sass does, 

a couple of esoteric pieces, 

Giant Worms and Skeeters, 

some French History presented by Sass, 

a bit of an introduction to the PHI Line when Brann meets up with Danann of Perth on the Spiral ... 

and of course Rua's Pesky Pixies!

I'm finally getting a few of these projects filed into the 'Finished' folder, trying to clear my desktop for what's coming up next.

Being as I have a couple of days off from shift-work here, now's as good a time as any to get on with getting on!

And so back to editing I go ... this time I think the poetry book. I keep putting it off because I keep writing poems. That's not really a sensible reason to not get a book published when it's ready to go, you know. There are ALWAYS going to be poems coming, one after another after another. I may as well go with what I've already got, and let the new poems go into a book of their own. What the heck. 

I'm just about back 'on schedule' ... getting closer!

Anyway, look for poetry next I think. Then maybe SNARK if I can come up with enough Snarky things to go into it. I hope I can because the next books of SONG (all of the rest of them, when it comes to that) have to have bad guys in them. Seriously bad. I'm not used to writing such things but ... all I can do is the best I can do with what I have to work with at any given time. I'll give it my best shot.

History Lesson? History Doesn't Teach Lessons

Look here

And Here

Then there's This - and many many more history sites that tell the story of England.

"449 40 years after the Romans have left, Vortigen a local ruler in Kent, invites Jutes from Jutland Denmark, as mercenaries to fight against the invading Picts and Scots.

455 Having beaten the Picts and Scots they turn on Vortigen ... "

These two scenarios are by no means lonely.

#

Even I am aware of the consequences of certain choices made by people a long time ago, choices that impacted their world and contributed to the development of the one we now live in.

I found on line a video that kind of touched on the concept I'm thinking of, although not exactly in reference to history.

The two instances that are on my mind today are not new ones by any stretch of the imagination. I've yammered a bit about them before. 

Current events have brought them again to the fore of my mind.

What happened when the Roman Empire hired and depended on others (mercenaries) to do their fighting for them?

What happened when England did the same thing?

Just sayin'.

You're not going to get a history lesson here. 

Apparently History doesn't teach lessons.

Think about this

(it's a camel's nose)

And This

These represent some of what you'll hear all over the place if you listen. Whether or not you happen to agree with them, these sentiments are among us. I suppose how you take them depends on your perspective.

Whoooop!! Gotta Love OSHA Training!

As the time draws near for me to begin stocking firewood for this coming Long Dark I went down to my cutting and storage space.

Yep.

I should have taken a 'before' photo. I had a lot of sawdust and wood chips to sweep up.

This little pile would have been long gone if I were adept at splitting wood. They're too big around to fit into the firebox of my woodstove. I'm lucky there are so few of them.

I think these four lonely little logs will fit when I cut them to length. They were hiding under the big logs.

These average a couple of inches in diameter - they're a great size for cooking.

No shortage of kindling!

Here's my work area for firewood. I don't know what that blur is. Since I had just swept I'd not be surprised to find some little circle dust mote images - but that's not what this was - it was moving.

Whatever it was, it isn't in this shot. What the heck. Strange things happen in this old world of ours.

At any rate, clearing out the firewood room BEFORE adding anything to it is the direct result of old OSHA training ... clear your path before you go to use it. Almost all of that stuff was practically smack in the middle of the floor, not to mention a pretty thick pad of dust and bark and bits and pieces.

Now that my path is cleared, I can begin my gather of firewood - deadwood from a shelter belt on a friend's farm. 

The 'shelter belts' are wind breaks for farmsteads and in this neck of the non-woods are often the only trees to be found in any number. Some of them are generations old. Many have been cut and cleared away as old abandoned farmsteads are razed and turned to cropland. 

So if you ever visit the Great Plains ... no, the trees do not naturally grow in straight lines. Naturally speaking, few grow at all here. In this area the 'Tree Claim Act' of the pioneering and settlement days pretty much failed. People came all right, but they had a darned hard time getting their required trees to survive. Very hot summers, bitterly cold winters, harsh winds ... some trees don't do well in those conditions. We've learned much since then and plant trees all the time. But the old shelter belts from generations past are dying out.

That many of our local farmers still have them is a definite bonus for me. I get firewood; they get rid of deadwood and have healthier shelter belts as a result.

When it comes to the actually gathering of firewood, OSHA training again comes in right handy I have to say. In many ways, but in particular it sticks in my mind to be sure I'll be able to get that deadwood out of there. It behooves me to make a clear path as I go along.

Local Couple Brings a Bit of History Home to Share

Photo by Shelly Weigelt

Frank Hockridge knows what he's talking about as he explains the photographs reproduced on this unique quilt.

The first photo is from 1902 and shows a band of Native Americans at the North Dakota State Fair, then held in Mandan, ND.

The State Fair apparently moved around a bit back in the day before settling itself in Minot in the 1960s. There are photos from both Fargo and Grand Forks, who took turns hosting it for years.

There are photos of County Fairs from the early 1900s on through more recent years.

Too many of the photos have sad endings ... 'doesn't exist any more' ... 'went bust' ... 'no longer there' ... 

The photos are enchanting, but some of the Fairs they represent will only ever live again through photos such as have been preserved in this quilt.

On the bright side, Frank and Glenda Hockridge have been collecting Fair things for quite a while. One of the photos of the Quilt they found in Iowa. Glenda laughs and says, 'You just never know what you're going to run across!'

And just exactly WHY is this local couple so fascinated by Fairs?

Oh. Well. It's what they do, you know.

Both of them were brought up in the industry, love it, and love to share with others (like us!). They had businesses facing one another at the State Fair in Kansas lo these many years ago, became good friends, and eventually married. Their kids are carrying on the family tradition, the fourth generation to do so.

Locally, the pair is well-known and well-loved.

Frank is our go-to person about anything having to do with our fair, and now we know he can also be our go-to person about much of our state's history as well! Glenda's big smile and happy laugh can often be found at our local (and internationally famous, made so by anyone who's eaten there and gone anywhere else in the world) Rosa's Pizza where she gives a hand when she has time.

Their affection for one another is palpable in the air around them. You can't see them, together or apart, and not grin. And they've brought us a most wonderful gift, besides their own selves.

The ND Fair Quilt is currently hanging at Close to Home, a shop that carries gifts of local origin. Owned and operated by Deronda O'Neill of Deronda Designs (also known all over the world for her 'OMG I can't believe you MADE those!' lampwork beads, enamel pieces, and metal-worked jewelry), Close to Home has expanded to include the work of other locals or people with local connections - all unique and individualistic pieces. So it's a great place to hang this ND Fair Quilt. 

Close to Home is located in the old Quarve Building at 97 South Main Avenue in Fessenden, ND USA - the same Fessenden of the book called 'Small Town USA' written by another local, Shiela Branson.

If you happen to be driving Highway 52 in ND, swing in and grab a coffee (or any of the creative beverages the Coffee Shop is becoming noted for). The town of Fessenden is located smack at the end of Highway 15, which begins near the MN border at a little town called Thompson near Grand Forks, ND. If you're traveling from the Forks to Bismarck, give yourself a treat and take 15 for a lovely change of scenery - and stop in Fessenden along the way for yet another treat! Shelly Weigelt carries an amazing variety of vintage and just plain interesting things; Ann West has clothing and accessories; Eldredge Publishing has an office; Carson's Computer store comes in mighty handy, and Justin's Stuffitorium has antiques and is a dangerous place to visit (very difficult to walk out of without having added something you didn't even know you HAVE to have - don't say you weren't warned); and soon a hair stylist will be joining us in that old Quarve Building. (that building will be getting a story of its own in due course, so hang onto your hats folks - we're in for a bit of a ride here I think).

If you come through before June 1, 2015 you will find the ND Fair Quilt on display at Close to Home; it will then go to other places in the state, including coming back here for our own County Fair in mid-June. It's slated to go to Bottineau, Jamestown, and up to Pembina County before it gets much of a rest. 

AND, best news of all (from my point of view) Frank and Glenda are talking about bringing more of their collection out of storage. They have enough to put together a museum of their own! Hearing about it is fascinating; seeing it all would be a wondrous thing. My personal favorite of the things they talked about (one of the photos of the Quilt has an example) are what they call the Funny ...something or others... (shhh, it's my memory slipping again) ... where different scenes are painted and there are face holes for people ... anyway, THOSE would be tremendous fun, and Frank and Glenda have a collection. For that matter, we could certainly make a few of our own, now that I think of it. Maybe not in time for this year's Fair, but almost certainly for next year! So bring your smiles and your cameras.

To close, here's a photo of the ND Fair Quilt with Glenda and Frank by it. If you zoom in you might be able to see some of the photos better. Or you could wait a few days to give us time to take close ups of them all, pair them up with Frank's explanations, and post them on line! This is one awesome couple and their inspiration has produced an awesome Keeper of Memories for our state. 

Thank you so very much, Glenda and Frank, for everything you do and for simply being the great people that you are. We love you.

Photo by Deronda O'Neill