Day Twentythree

Another stone in Pickens Cemetery. Frances and Truman are buried in the Rudd plot but they are surrounded by Jesse Powell's family.

I did not take any pictures today.

  It was a nice day for January 23.  Maybe we will not have any winter this winter.

I have been reading.  I tried to read a book by the football player that was on the shipwreck off Tampa Florida where three of his friends onboard died a few years ago but it was way too depressing.  Now I am reading Arabian Sands by Wendell something or other.  He was an Englishman that crossed the desert of southern Saudi Arabia  in 1948 with the help of nomads from the Bedu (Bedioun) tribe.  It is really interesting.  The area is called the Empty Quarter.  I had never even heard that name for a desert.  He writes about the desert, plants and animals but mostly he tells about the people and their way of life.  He had a very high opinion of the Arabs in the desert which is unusual for a modern day writer writing about a primitive people.  Within a decade after his exploration, the life he writes about of the nomads of this desert had largely vanished.  They had lived much the same existence for centuries, protected from civilization by the harshness of their environment.   Motorized transportation, both land and air, took away that protection.

George says he sees a bunch of deer outside.  They are mostly does and babies we see now, but occasionally he says he sees a buck.  We have a heard of a dozen or more that hang out within  a quarter to half mile of our house all the time now.  We enjoy watching them.  I can't tell anymore which ones are our Mama and the twins.   All summer they would come out of the corner where the dogwood tree is almost every evening.  Now, they all hang out in the woods to the right of us on Dan's [the woods he bought from Daddy].  It is odd that I do not remember ever seeing a deer on this place until fifteen years ago or so.  I wonder what the difference is from when we were kids.