What an absurd climate!
We seem to be going backward in time. It barely got above freezing today and snowed much of the afternoon. It was wet snow, and it didn't stay on the ground, but we're apparently going to get 5 cm of the stuff before it lets up, and possibly more tomorrow.
Then by Friday, it'll supposedly go back up to 15C with sun.
The war is over, the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery has passed. Much jubilation among abolitionists. Frederick Douglass is starting to think about what he might do now that the end he's fought for all his adult life has been won. There are still political issues to be fought - black suffrage and government assistance for freedmen chief among them - but he anticipates a diminishment of demand for his oratory.
Douglass and another prominent black activist, Mrs. Dorsey, were given pride of place in the audience at Lincoln's second inauguration. And were invited to the reception at the White House afterwards. They were stopped by racist guards at the door but eventually let in. Lincoln marks Douglass out for special notice, begging him to give his opinion of the inaugural address. Douglass demurs at first but Lincoln insists. Douglass in fact thinks the speech a masterpiece of concision. In it, Lincoln made clear the war was about slavery and emancipation. He tells Lincoln he thinks it was "sacred."
And then a few months later, in April, John Wilkes Booth assassinates the president at the Ford Theater. The country and Douglass, who has come to see himself and Lincoln as more in agreement than he ever had imagined, are thrown into mourning and political confusion.
*
I did go out this afternoon, to Bulk Barrel for breakfast makings, it being seniors-discount Tuesday. And I did take the camera, but it was far too wet to take pictures. I had to stow it in my backpack.
I worked on a few more pictures from winter 2012. A lot of the raw files from that winter were corrupted at some point, probably in the course of transferring them from one hard drive to another - or so the oracle suggests. The pickings, as a result, are slimmer than usual, but I did find a few worth working on.
We're in Girona now. The river Onyar bisects the city. On the east side is the old town, built up a hillside, with a surviving medieval wall still running along its eastern and northern edges. On the other side is the modern city.
Our flat was in the old town, on one of the many stepped streets climbing the hillside. The second picture is another of the hill streets. The river, with its pastel-painted apartment blocks, was only a few blocks the other way from the flat.
We took a couple of day trips out from Girona in a rental car. On the first, Shelley, Karen and I drove to France for lunch - the border is only about an hour north.
We headed for the town of Collioure, which Karen and I remembered as a pretty little art colony where we'd spent a pleasant afternoon with Brian and Andrea eight years before when we were staying in a place just north. I'd taken a picture there that Shelley liked so much she had it framed in her apartment for many years. Shelley didn't think she knew the place at all.
But when we drove into town, she immediately said it was a town she had visited with her family a few years before. Karen and I, confusingly, didn't recognize it at all. The confusion was eventually explained.
The town has a rocky promontory that runs through the middle of it and out into the sea. Karen and I and the McCanns had spent most of our time on the north side, Shelley and family, on the south. We eventually found the places Karen and I remembered - which weren't at all familiar to Shelley. Weird.
Anyway, it's a pretty little town. It was a place a lot of famous artists came in the 1930s to get away from the fraught politics of the day - most prominently, Henri Matisse. The town has erected plaques at sites where famous paintings were made. It's still very much an art colony, with lots of studios and galleries.
We explored the hilly streets with their pastel-painted houses, had a great lunch by the harbour - if expensive by the standards of Spain - and drove in the afternoon to another arty French town, Ceret, before heading back to Girona.
The picture Shelley liked that I'd taken at Collioure in 2004.
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