Today there is still hope.

It’s Election Day, and I can still pray that God will hear my plea that the voice of reason will win the race. I worry about what tomorrow will bring.

Last week, Dave and I traveled thru Kansas to see if Morrison’s recent repair was a solid fix.  Everywhere we went we saw Trump signs in yards, banners hanging on the sides of parked semi trucks, Trump flags waving on field fences, spray painted Trump slogans on the cement block walls of car repair shops.  It was quite disturbing.  When we drove into Emporia, Kansas, a college town, we were met with a huge Harris/Walz sign displayed on a corner lot.  Attached at the bottom of the banner was a giant homemade sign that said “OBVIOUSLY”.  That raised my spirits.  We passed thru another village at one point where the town’s people were clearly divided in their political views.  Almost every yard had a sign.  For every Trump sign, there seemed to be almost two Harris signs.  It made me feel better, but I was concerned about the obvious discord among those people.  We had thought that this little trip would help to distract us from devouring the daily news and wallowing in the tension of the Presidential race, but that didn’t happen.

 

In Kansas we visited the little town of Nicodemus, the first all-black settlement west of the Mississippi River after the Civil War.  People were recruited to come there from Baptist churches in Alabama.  Settlers paid $5 to join the group and to have access to the town’s 160 acres (the optional installment plan was paid 25 cents at a time).  There was also outlying land that a person could homestead.  In the beginning people lived in dugouts because of the scarcity of lumber in the area.  Later on, public buildings were made of limestone, quarried elsewhere in the state.  Similarly, pasture fence posts in the area were made of limestone and many still stand today.  Descendants of the first settlers still live in Nicodemus and it has a national historic site status and a visitor center in the old town hall building.  In the displays inside the visitor center was a large sign used to recruit people to the “paradise” of Kansas.  It claimed that it was summer in Kansas nine months out of the year.  Having grown up there, I can attest that this is not true.

 

We also revisited the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve.  On a previous trip we had hiked in the fields where bison are kept.  This time the wind was ripping at about 40 mph, so we toured the 3-story limestone mansion and the one-room schoolhouse instead.  The schoolhouse was one of the best restorations I have ever visited.

 

One of our purposes in visiting Kansas was to visit the Gracelawn Cemetery in Howard.  My parents and paternal grandparents are buried there, along with aunts, uncles, and a brother on my father’s side.  We also went to the Greenwood Cemetery near Eureka and found the graves of my great grandparents Jarvis Franklin Harper and Rosa Zina Harper, my Grandma Workman’s parents.

 

The week we had chosen for our Kansas tour was a wild and crazy weather week.  A very strong wind was blasting in from the south.  It was forecast to be extremely windy for several days during the week.  It was so windy that after Howard we drove to Wichita, planning to hunker down in a motel for a couple of days and see some of the sites of the city where I grew up.  We were planning to go to the zoo where a bull from the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve had been sent for retirement.  It was a ridiculous plan, really, as we realized that in that wind it would be miserable trying to walk around the 240 acres of zoo—and the animals would be taking cover in their shelters anyway.  Instead we drove around town, visiting all my childhood homes.  Mostly my parents rented houses in the same school district, and although we moved around a fair amount, we did not need to change schools.  One huge city block contained Caldwell Elementary, Curtis Jr. High, and Wichita Southeast High School (home of the Golden Buffalos).  The elementary and jr. high are still operational, but the high school (which they were enlarging while I attended) is now the Wichita School District Offices.  Another elementary that we attended, Munger Elementary in the Hilltop area, has been torn down.  Driving through the old neighborhoods, I was struck by how huge the trees had become, a clear indicator of the sixty-five years that had passed.

 

We stayed at a motel in an area of town that was farm fields when I was a teenager, east of the Beech Aircraft plant that used to be way outside of town, but is now surrounded by neighborhoods.  Wind reports in Wichita while we were there were for 60 mph winds.  When a gust came up, it banged against the motel windows.  Amazingly, the temperature was 86 degrees, much warmer than usual for late October.  On the third day in Wichita we left because the forecast was for less wind but ugly weather by evening.  At 6 o’clock in the morning it was already 69 degrees.  Wind was still strong out of the South.  Thunderstorm weather was forecast for mid-afternoon to evening and possible tornados because a cold front was moving in from the NW and the mix of cold air with the warm was not going to be calm.  We went North to Salina, with the wind to our back which was good.  But once we hit I-70 we turned West and the wind hit us broadside (about 25 mph at this point).  Further West, at about Russell, Kansas, the wind suddenly dropped.  We were in an area surrounded by giant windmills and they were barely moving.  When I checked the wind map on the weather app, it showed that we were in a spot where the NW wind was mixing with the South wind and with a big swirl was shifting all the wind to head NE.  As we drove further, the wind picked up again and slammed us from the North, colder now.  Further down the road it began to snow.  What a change from that morning’s weather in Wichita!

 

We made it back to Greeley by about 4 pm and were glad of our cozy apartment.  In a week the trees in the park had developed further into a beautiful iridescent orange and the Front Range mountains in the distance are lightly snow capped.  Yesterday Morrison’s windshield was icy and this morning, one of our apartment windows had lacy ice patterns on it.  I think winter is here in Colorado.