Pre-summer

A stub today - it's pushing 11 o'clock, almost my bed time.

It was a gorgeous day: mostly sunny with a high of 22 or 23. I went for a run up to Gibbons and back, zig-zagging forth and back across the river. 

Fred Douglass was along, of course. Blight was talking today about our man's writing career. After meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin), he tried his hand at fiction himself with  "The Heroic Slave," a long short story included in Autographs for Freedom, an anthology of abolitionist writings edited by Douglass's friend and business manager Julia Griffiths. 

The big writing project of this period, though, was his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), which Blight reckons was Douglass's masterpiece. It was also a modest best-seller.

Much of the rest of the passage I listened to today was about Douglass's - and the abolition movement's - response to the Fugitive Slave Act, in particular their embrace of violent resistance and efforts to rescue recaptured fugitives and help them escape. Douglass, even when he was ill, was part of the Underground Railroad, and helped more than one fugitive make it to Canada.

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In the afternoon, I wandered in the balmy weather down to the river and along it, shooting all manner of pictures. Here's a sampling.

The first blooming magnolia I've spotted

Vine tendrils on cement wall

Old and new: old jail (foreground), old courthouse (1833), Renaissance apartment buildings

Brutalist London: the justice building on Rideout St.

Squill in River Forks Park

Homeless encampment under Oxford St. bridge

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I also continued with my project to reclaim photos from or winter away in 2016. We're settled in Lisbon now. The Lutes stayed with us for another week and then flew home. Today's examples are all about the churches of Lisbon, of which there are many many, most of them gorgeously opulent. I can't identify any of them for certain.