Civil War Haiku (2)

My fourth-grade teacher
Had Mosby’s sword on the wall
Segregated schools. 

Civil War Haiku (1)

(For Michael Douglas Jones.)

Burnside told us, Charge
The heights at Fredericksburg
Thousands departed. 

Federal Hill (Part 1)

Later on Friday the 29th (after we taxied past the Domino Sugars sign), Laura and I wound up on Federal Hill, where I sketched this little confection:

Baltimore. Pigment liner pen and watercolor pencil in Moleskine notebook, 3.5 x 5.5.The view is down Montgomery Street, with M & T Bank Stadium (aka Ravens Stadium) on the left, in southwest Baltimore. You can sort of see one raindrop in the ink of the last townhouse and adjacent tree on the left side of the street. I was standing and sketching in the rain while Laura walked around taking pictures ...

Federal Hill is the site of a fort constructed to keep an eye, and a lot of cannon, trained on the pro-Southern populace of Baltimore in the Civil War. More about this when we get to the Westminster, Md., sunset of May 30th.

Sunset, Saturday, 30 May 2009

Westminster, Md. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.This is a suburban sunset – the view is from my brother Steve’s front yard in Westminster, Maryland. But just a mile or so behind me is the pretty little nineteenth century commercial-industrial town itself. What occurred to me about Westminster, after writing about the Confederate sympathies of Baltimore, is that it’s one of the first towns on this side of Maryland, going north, where Johnny Reb might have had to watch his back when dealing with civilians. For me, it more or less marks an entryway into a northern, Union, Yankee feeling. My brother is basically a Southerner and his wife Sandy most definitely is one, but I’m not talking so much about who might be living here now as about a history that you can feel and even see in the old brick buildings. A Barbara Fritchie could just as easily have waved Old Glory from a balcony in Westminster as in Frederick.