Frost heaves, road salt + patterned ground: Burke Street area, Riverside.

One day, early in January, we drove over to Exeter to visit a grave: Mercy L. Brown, who became infamous after her death from tuberculosis in 1892. Neighbors suspected she was a vampire who was staying alive in her casket by sucking the blood of other family members. This was the theory. They dug her up to check, and because she wasn’t as decomposed as she should have been, they cut out her heart and burned it and fed the ashes to her sick brother. It did not help him. Mercy’s grave is in the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102. You walk down a short dirt track, and it’s on the left under some sort of evergreen tree. Her stone is regularly decorated by visitors, just like Jim Morrison’s gravesite in Paris. We found it piled with dozens of pebbles, shells, and coins. The stone itself, a slab of slowly eroding limestone, is bolted into the ground with an iron collar, apparently to prevent anyone from stealing it. One imagines how that might happen. I left a penny. We stopped at the public library, which has a special box placed outside the front door for recycling flags. Then we had lunch down on Nooseneck Road at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, where the baked apples side dish is delicious and highly recommended.

“Already I was considered heterodox if not treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position; nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest Polygonal and Circular society. When, for example, the question arose about the treatment of those lunatics who said they they had received the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying of an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people are always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help occasionally dropping such expressions as ‘the eye that discerns the interiors of all things,’ and ‘the all-seeing land’; once or twice I even let fall the forbidden terms ‘the Third and Fourth Dimensions.'”

— Edwin Abbot, Flatland, 1884

“I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it it shared rather than depreciating with use.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, 2025, pages 90-91

“By ‘capitalism’ I mean the social system in which the means of production — the stuff that makes all our stuff, which includes land, equipment, and also intellectual property, such as patents and the like, and also the stock that gives you a controlling interest in these things — is allowed to belong to individual people, who have a legal right to pass it on to their children, sell it to other individual people, or whatever else they might take a mind to do with it. That’s it. That’s all I mean. It’s not something Christians have to make our peace with because of our fallen nature, any more than feudalism was, or rule by gangsters, or the culling of the left-handed. We can and should severely check it and restrain it, or get rid of it outright. It is the right to property run amuck.” [pages 63-64]

“I am personally a big fan of the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury, to quote a mantra of ecosocialists. A society where nobody has a private swimming pool but there are well-maintained and beautiful public pools every few blocks; few people have cars but public transit is a sci-fi dream; I can’t own the books I covet, but every last little township library has a robust collection and a direct line to the fanciest research libraries in the world.” [pages 66-67]

“One of the most important things about leftism is a rejection of the existing reality in favor of moral values that no society has made concrete yet.”
[pages 162-163]

— Phil Christman, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, 2025

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“It’s not necessarily something that we can ignore as a possibility that this administration, they want to pursue, essentially just stretch the truth, to fit its policy objective, in this case going after left-wing or progressives through the lens of using counterterrorism tools,” Blazakis said.

“The president himself during a roundtable at the White House turned to his senior advisers whose job it is to designate these entities and instructed them to do it, on TV,” [Brzozowski] said. “So yeah I think they might do it. And people are not ready for it. People are not ready for it. If that goes through, I’m telling you, unbelievable.”

As Trump talks of designating antifa a foreign terrorist group,
experts see danger, NPR, 10-28-25

“Everything was still in place in February 1933. Children sledded down hills; shoppers purchased linens at white sales; doctors consulted patients; secretaries opened mail at trade union offices… But the frame of events tilted just a little bit every day after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, and soon things started to slide out of place with greater speed. Opposition newspapers were suspended and political opponents attacked or silenced. Seemingly far-away events that people read about in the papers one week, they suddenly saw happening down the street the next. The Weimar Republic was finished off in a sequence of events over just a week or two in March 1933.”

— Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days:
When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, pages 136-137