Povey Prattle

My Brasilian friend and I drove up to Beaufort, South Carolina on Christmas Eve. It’s about 430 miles away, and it took 8 hours. We stopped every 100 miles to change drivers and stretch our legs. We’d not breakfasted so we, with some foreboding on my part, went into a International House of Pancakes in the north central town of Starke, FL, for breakfast. I was pleasantly pleased with the quality of my food – an omelette with fresh fruit as a “side dish”. Our waitress, Emily was an absolute sweetheart, so I tipped her well. Starke is typical of many small towns in inland Florida. It is an hard scrabble town, with a great deal of poverty. We passed a supermarket – a branch of a chain which I thought had gone out of business years ago the “Piggly Wiggly”. These smaller supermarkets used to be the backbone of rural southern towns, with some also in the north. In many places they are being “done-in” by Wall-Mart. Beaufort is a small, but quite grand town in the Low Country of Sou...

I went to St. Boniface Church, Siesta Key for the Tuesday a.m. Eucharist today. After the Eucharist I went out to the Myakka River State Park. http://www.floridastateparks.org/MyakkaRiver/ It is such a beautiful and peace filled place. I sat for more than half an hour in silence (so hard for me!), simply soaking up the quietness and beauty. It was a joy to listen to the sound which the breeze created as it whisked through the long grasses and the trees. How blessed I am to live so near to such a gorgeous place. We heard human voices from Germany, Russia, Spain and France. The speakers of these languages had travelled many, many miles to be at Myakka. It is a 25 minute drive for me! On Christmas Eve I will drive for about 9 hours to be with my friends the Hauler Family, gathering this year in Beaufort, SC. I was with them last year in Pensacola FL. I am happy that I will be with these friends whom I first met in 1976. The Haulers who met and loved my mother, (and other members of my fa...

The economy and a human face. We are apt to talk about “The Economy” as if it were a living entity, operating beyond human control. So I must remind us that our current plight has to do with people, not with "the economy" We say things like “the economy is bad”, when we really mean that politicians, bankers, economists, manufacturers and the like have made bad decisions, and taken foolish risks. We also forget that some members of this motley crew are crooks. That crew has made such dreadful decisions since the days of Reagan (USA) and Thatcher (U.K.) that we now in a “not so pretty pickle”. The Reagan/Thatcher choices for deregulation, the “free market” (whatever that is), and the like, were rooted in an untested ideology. Now millions of people in many lands are paying the price. And it is a high price. I have a friend. I’ll call him “Danny” to protect his anonymity. He is of my age. Just a few years ago Danny was living in a lovely home on Siesta Key - one of the nicest...

Today my Brasilian friend and I went down to Crescent Beach on Siesta Key, for the regular Sunday evening "drumming down of the Sun". The celebration today had an added flavour for today is the winter solistice - the day on which (in the northern hemisphere)winter officially begins, but also (thank goodness), the day from which daytime increases, and night time decreases. So we were there for the shortest day in the northern hemisphere. Here are a few photo's which I took on Crescent Beach this evening