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Dec. 21st, 2005 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lisamoeFirst of all, I am posting from my own lighted semi-heated living room from my own computer. Granted, my furniture is still in large part heaped in the middle of all my rooms, but I have rescued the computer and the Xmas tree and a bookcase so far. It's progress. They're through wiring in my house except for the switches by the front door. Now the endless rearranging, sweeping and dusting. I'm telling you though, I have built up real muscles the last few weeks.
So for the shortest day of the year, it seemed long. Happy but long. Mom and I took the kids to the Spiro Mounds (near Spiro, Oklahoma) for a two hour walk around, led by an archeologist who gave an excellent lecture on the mounds and the culture of the people who lived there and showed us how the various mounds line up with the sun on the Solstices and Equinoxes. I had no idea the Spiro Mounds was such an important site, but apparently it is. He said there are thousands and thousands of artifacts from there in museums all over the world. They don't excavate so much there now, I gather, but the artifacts were found back before people thought so much about digging up other people's families. The archeologist told Jack excellent grisly stories of sports contests ending with the worst player's head as the trophy. Jack was fascinated, of course.
After that we drove down to Midland, Arkansas, where my mother grew up, and put flowers on her parents' graves. The vases for such were just installed so this is the first time we had brought flowers since my grandmother passed away in July. She gave us an amusing tour of the town, what's left of it anyway, and then we drove back into Ft. Smith to get some travel supplies and also to go to another graveyard where my Mom's great-grandmother is buried to show Jack the very odd stone, which was possibly carved by her teenage son. It's just a big rectangular stone carried down off the mountain and he carved her name and dates in it by hand with a knife or some such. He ran out of room, so the last name Douglass goes around the corner of the stone, with the "Doug" on one side and the "lass" on the next. My Mom and her cousins went out and put up a proper marker this year, but left the old stone standing. It's a very old cemetary with lots of interesting things like that. Some of the stones are too faded to even read now.
We're back home and the kids are abed. I'm going to get back to my cleaning, but after I hooked the computer back up, I couldn't hardly not use it. :-)
So for the shortest day of the year, it seemed long. Happy but long. Mom and I took the kids to the Spiro Mounds (near Spiro, Oklahoma) for a two hour walk around, led by an archeologist who gave an excellent lecture on the mounds and the culture of the people who lived there and showed us how the various mounds line up with the sun on the Solstices and Equinoxes. I had no idea the Spiro Mounds was such an important site, but apparently it is. He said there are thousands and thousands of artifacts from there in museums all over the world. They don't excavate so much there now, I gather, but the artifacts were found back before people thought so much about digging up other people's families. The archeologist told Jack excellent grisly stories of sports contests ending with the worst player's head as the trophy. Jack was fascinated, of course.
After that we drove down to Midland, Arkansas, where my mother grew up, and put flowers on her parents' graves. The vases for such were just installed so this is the first time we had brought flowers since my grandmother passed away in July. She gave us an amusing tour of the town, what's left of it anyway, and then we drove back into Ft. Smith to get some travel supplies and also to go to another graveyard where my Mom's great-grandmother is buried to show Jack the very odd stone, which was possibly carved by her teenage son. It's just a big rectangular stone carried down off the mountain and he carved her name and dates in it by hand with a knife or some such. He ran out of room, so the last name Douglass goes around the corner of the stone, with the "Doug" on one side and the "lass" on the next. My Mom and her cousins went out and put up a proper marker this year, but left the old stone standing. It's a very old cemetary with lots of interesting things like that. Some of the stones are too faded to even read now.
We're back home and the kids are abed. I'm going to get back to my cleaning, but after I hooked the computer back up, I couldn't hardly not use it. :-)
