The Late Arrival

My husband posted a pic collage on social media a few days back to commemorate Loving Day. Admittedly, I was less than enthusiastic considering, uh I don’t know…EVERYTHING. Yay. Loving Day. That’s when Aunt Mag and Uncle John popped up in my memory.  I grew up seeing their portrait on the family’s upright Mason & Hamlin piano; and, in passing at least once, my mom explained: Who Woulda Thought? That's your Aunt Mag and Uncle John. People said he was an old white man, but no one ever really talked about it. I was young enough to remember that and young enough to be puzzled. IT? What was IT, and why was IT a secret? I moved on from my confusion and, I guess innocence, until about FIVE YEARS AGO when I was introduced to Loving Day , and out of nowhere, the light broke like a two-by-four splintering on my head: OMG, nobody talked about Uncle John being white because his marriage to Aunt Mag was ILLEGAL. Aunt Mag was my grandmother’s aunt. Her family – m y family – survived a triple...

Fresh bread, still warm from the oven, freshly fried chicken and perhaps a cooled peach cobbler went into the picnic basket, gently and carefully covered with a red and white checkered cloth. Kids were packed up and toted down to the battlefield for the day's festivities. After all, it wasn't a Civil War back in the early days, it was just a skirmish that'd be over in a few months. The "skirmish" would end up ricocheting States' Rights from one century into the next. Its fruit would blossom into today's racial disparities ranging from prison populations, to history curricula, to economic and housing disparities and... . ..health disparities. (see Covid-19 )   Zoom Meetings weren't a thing back then, so... . I'm a history buff, and in my early fangirling days of Civil War history and all things Lincoln, I remember thinking about families packing up picnic baskets to watch skirmishes as if they were tennis matches and marveling ho...