Here’s my take on this week’s photo challenge – Escape. The door is open just enough to squeeze through and run!
photo by S. Thomas Summers
Posted in Photo Challenge, Photography
Tagged Canada, Daily Post, Dorset, Events, Photography, Recreation, Running, Sailing, Sports, Weekly Photo Challenge
On Saturday, June 1, two weeks from today, I’ll be manning a table at the School of the Soldier Civil War Ecampment at Allaire State Park in Wall Township, NJ. I’ll be signing and selling copies of my book Private Hercules McGraw: Poems of the American Civil War. Hopefully, I’ll also have copies of my second book, The Journals of Lt. Kendall Everly: a Story of the American Civil War. It’s being printed now.
The encampment will also feature all types of Civil War attractions. Visitors will be able to stroll regimental camp sites, talk to soldiers, listen to period music, see battles, and perhaps even talk to President Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States.
Come on out, by a book, and have some fun.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abraham Lincoln, Allaire State Park, American Civil War, Civil War, June 1, Lincoln, Saturday, United States
This week’s photo challenge tasks all challenge takers to “share a picture which means PATTERN…”
Here’s my effort.
photo by S. Thomas Summers
Here is a transcript of a letter written by Y.J. Culbertson, a Union soldier, during the Civil War to his mother. Although it was written before Mother’s Day was an officially recognized day, I though it appropriate to share today, Mother’s Day.
Sadly, Culbertson died while fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg.
I offer my prayers and thanks to all mothers who have lost sons and daughters to war.
Columbia, South Carolina
May the 7, 1861
Dear Mother,
I take my pen in hand to inform you I am well at this time, hoping this letter will find you all enjoying the same blessing. I have had a bowel complaint since I wrote you last but I have got well nearly again. There are some of the boys sick but not very sick. Mother, I want you and Eliza to send me some eggs and light corn bread. Henry Fuller has written Sealy and Hannah. Henry and me are messing together. I want you all to get a box and put my things and Fullers together and send to Columbia, S.C. in the care of Captain W.J.M. Jones.
Mother, I am going to have my likeness taken and send it to you all and let you see me one more time. Tell Eliza I want her to keep my likeness when I send it home. Eliza, I want to see you a little of the worst. Eliza, I want you to take good care of yourself and my little children. I will tell you and the rest about my dream the other night. I dreamed I was at home, I went in the house and Eliza and the children would not look at me hardly. I thought I got right mad, but if it had been so I don’t think it would have been like my dream.
I remain yours truly until death,
Y.J. Culbertson
Sitting in the backyard this evening with my family, I thought I’d snap one more photo for this week’s photo challenge. Yup, we were relaxing around a fire. Beneath the photo, I’ve posted a poem from my book Private Hercules McGraw, a poem that is loosely connected to the photo. My book is available on Amazon.com.
photo by S. Thomas Summers
Testimony
Regiment settled near a little church
one Saturday night – tents speckled
graveyard grass, the wings of sleeping
angels. Every man was listening to
ham sizzle – music we’d soon forget –
on fires that bloomed like angry roses,
but I snuck off with a blanket and granddad’s
copy of the Good Book. Curled in a corner
of the church, I found Psalm 23 – laid my head
on its promises. Grandpa stuck a curl of birch bark
in the pages so I could find it easy. Can’t read
it none, but he said when I went off that Psalm 23
would usher me through blood and hell.
Sunday morning dragged rain off the mountains.
Lord nudged me awake – said it was time to rise.
I asked if He might march with me a spell
before the sun opened its eye.
Posted in Photo Challenge, Photography
Tagged Art, Bible, Christianity, David, Lord, Poetry, Psalm, Psalm 23, Weekly Photo Challenge
I started reading Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child in December of 2012. Now, early may of 2013, I’m just about done. Yes, five months is a long time to read a relatively short novel. It wasn’t a difficult read. Well, the words – they weren’t big words. I simply failed to identify with Ivey’s characters. I didn’t care for them as much as I needed to.
Here’s a book description from the novel’s Amazon page. “Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart–he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone–but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.
This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.”
I was born in Alaska – Kodiak, Alaska – in 1968. I admit my Alaskan heritage drew me to The Snow Child as did the magic and mystery of Faina. Is she really of the wood, of the cold, of the snow – a character stolen from a fairy tale somehow made real? But soon, Faina’s magic flopped. She became nothing more than a girl, then a woman who was more comfortable outside than in. And the other characters, Jack and Mable, as they suffered in the novel’s early pages (Mabel attempted suicide) I cared and worried for them. When they transformed into Charles and Caroline Ingalls (of television’s Little House on the Prairie) I began to suffer.
Still, I will finish the book. I want to see if the snow child, Faina, melts.
The Snow Child gets two out of five stars.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Alaska, Alaskan, Caroline Ingalls, Fairy tale, Ivey, Jack, Mabel, Snow Child
This week’s photo challenge is titled From Above. The challenge reads “Find a subject and instead of taking a picture from in front of, at an angle, to the side, or from behind, take it directly from above!
In a new post specifically created for this challenge, share a picture which means FROM ABOVE to you!“
So, what do you think?
photo by S. Thomas Summers
photo by S. Thomas Summers
photo by S. Thomas Summers
Posted in Photo Challenge, Photography
S. Thomas Summers is a teacher of Writing and Literature at Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, NJ and an adjunct writing professor at Passaic County Community College in Wanaque, NJ.
He is the author of Private Hercules McGraw: Poems of the American Civil War, published by Anaphora Literary Press. It is available on amazon.com.
