Rambling |

Monday, Stephen took me on a ramble. (All following images clickable.)

When we use the word ‘ramble’, we almost alway garnish it with an accent, as it is a term we picked up from our friend Corbett C, who is a courtly and somewhat inscrutable Southern gentleman.

On a tipoff from friends Bruce & Betsy G, we visited the Kettle Creek Battlefield, an American Revolutionary War site in nearby Wilkes County. It is relatively remote, and somewhat difficult to ‘acquire’, so the peace there was one of the selling points, so to speak, of our friends’ recommendation.

Here is the solitary monument on a knoll nearby a somewhat token cemetery. The picture does not do it justice, as it is not as brutal as it might appear here.

Though it may be standard-issue for this kind of monument, ‘picked from a catalog’, I liked the interlaced slabs and capstone construction. The whole thing struck me as almost noble? Maybe? It’s something like twenty feet tall.

My mother passed muster (!) for membership in the DAR, the Daughters of the American Revolution. I don’t know that she ever attended a single meeting.

Also present onsite is a very large slab, a granite record of the men who fought in this battle, names that could be certified through various official records.

Do you know the term ‘Forties Bomber Crew Names’? Here is a slice of ‘Revolutionary War Names’, with a single ‘exotic’ blip: Benijah Noridyke.

Our travels yesterday also took us past the nearby house of great-grandparents Edwin Vincent Arnold and Anna Elizabeth Turner by name. I had never set foot in the house, as it ‘passed into other hands’ a couple of years before I was born.

The new owners — I don’t know how many intervening — apparently people ‘of means’, have restored the house and all the outbuildings. After I gathered some pluck, rang the doorbell and introduced myself, we were invited a short distance inside. The interior has been teased well past any state it would have known in its day. Beautiful light flooding the original switchback staircase, though.

Here is a photo sent to us by the daughter-in-residence, who asked for my email address. Apparently a setup for a wedding, with a hyper-menagerie of chairs. The cynic in me thinks this came from a wedding planner ‘idea book’.