Seasonal

There is one good thing about the cooler, seasonable temperatures we've been having: it's helping slow the trees down so we can enjoy the blossoms longer. I was out again this afternoon, shooting blooms in various stages of bursting forth. Here's my haul.

I also couldn't resist one more go at the brutalist architecture downtown: louring weather meets louring buildings. This one is the downtown federal building (1980s) on Queens Ave. It's the architectural equivalent of a motorcycle cop in mirrored sunglasses. They're incompatible, my current visual preoccupations: blossoms and concrete bunkers. 

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Got out for my exercise in the morning. Frederick Douglass and the rest of the U.S. are still mired in the the "cruel" war. Douglass has gone back out on the road, speaking all across the northern states, arguing that the war must be an "abolition war" and the peace to come, an "abolition peace," with blacks everywhere freed, and given equal rights.

His children have mostly come home to roost. Louis, the eldest, was wounded in the Massachusetts 54th's first action at Fort Logan in Charleston and has become seriously ill as a result. He is eventually honoroubly discharged. Charles the next eldest also sickened, and Douglass petitioned Lincoln to have him discharged as well. Rosetta, the Douglass's surviving daughter has given up teaching, come home to Rochester and married the family's gardener, an escaped slave. 

Only Frederick Jr., the youngest, remains in harm's way, working in the deep south recruiting freed slaves for the Union army.

Douglass considers enlisting himself but is talked out of it, especially by his English friends. Julia Crofts tells him his best weapons are his pen and his voice, not a sword.