Springfield, Illinois

We recently visited Springfield, Illinois, mainly to see the sites connected to Abraham Lincoln. Our motel was along motel row (Dirksen Parkway). We arrived on a warm spring afternoon and took advantage of our proximity to Lake Springfield. Near the boat launch ramp there is a path that goes along the shore with several benches. We read our books sitting at the lake. Lots of picnic tables in the park itself.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is well worth the time and the expense. Besides artifacts, there are two theater experiences using holographic techniques similar to what Disney uses in its Haunted Mansion ride. I enjoyed the White House façade with Mary Todd Lincoln standing inside to greet you in her ball gown. Because the Lincoln presidency was preoccupied with the Civil War, there is lots of information about that tragedy as well. And of course the assassination is also covered.

 

Mary Todd Lincoln

   

Gowns of Mary’s social “rivals”

 

Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, lived much of his boyhood in southern Indiana, and moved to New Salem near Springfield in 1831 as a young man. In New Salem, he managed a general store and read for his law license. He did survey work and served as a postmaster. In 1834 he was elected to the Illinois General Assembly and thus began his political career.

Reconstruction of the store where he clerked and served as postmaster

  In 1831, New Salem was small and growing smaller. It was a place where people got a start and moved on to bigger and better places.

Today the reconstructed village has a few craft buildings such as blacksmith and coopers, the tavern, a carding mill. The only original building is the cooper shop.

Tavern

There is a nice gift shop. We were surprised to see Whetstone woodenware from Silver Lake, Indiana in the shop. Bonnets in the style of the 1830s were available.

In the summer, they have many college students who intern at the historical site, but this time of year it was the smithy and the tavern lady that answered questions. The tavern hostess did point out the ash hoppers which we had been wondering about. There are 3 community ash hoppers in New Salem. Ashes are collected through the year until hog butchering season when the ashes are used along with the fat to make lye soap.

Besides the museum and presidential library, one can tour the Old Capitol Building where Lincoln presented many cases.

We actually started our tour at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site south of the museum area. Abraham and Mary Lincoln bought a modest cottage at Eighth and Jackson Streets in 1844. As the family grew, they added on. A lot of the original furniture is in the home plus reproductions of carpeting and wallpaper which may surprise you by their busy patterns and bright colors.

The home had been draped in black bunting a few days before we arrived. May 3rd a reenactment of the funeral train will take place. The coffin will arrive at the nearby depot, be transferred to a hearse wagon, driven past the home, and eventually to the burial site.  

We were not allowed to use flash photography. Most of my attempts failed. The room with the most natural light was the kitchen.

  

Apparently, the stove was a top-of-the-line for its time. Mary was worried that the stove in the White House would not compare well. LOL.

Tad and Willie’s room. Robert was away at school. Eddie who was born at this house also died here just short of his 4th birthday from tuberculosis. Willie died in the White House in 1862 and plunged his parents into deep grief. Tad died in 1871. Only Robert survived to adulthood and had children of his own. Robert rented out the house until 1887 when he gave it to the state with the understanding that it would remain a monument to his family. It later was given to the National Park Service.

Backyard of the Lincoln house.

3-holer outhouse

 The National Park Service has restored the outward appearance of the houses in the neighborhood so one can get a good idea what it was like.

  

Besides the Lincoln sites, we stopped at the Cozy Dog which is a Route 66 historical site. The big draw is the corny dogs.

Bustin’ Out All Over

This morning as I drove to the public library there were forsythias in bloom most of the way. My neighbors’ daffodils’ beaming faces greet me, too. I see a few blooming trees with many more in buds. We are about to have a lollapalooza spring. Time for me to take a chair out to my patio and soak up the rays. Hurray for a warm dry spring day!

The reddish stalks are peonies getting a start.

You can see some trees are still bare but the grass has greened up and is growing fast.

 

 

Daffodil Days

The last time I was out in the surrounding neighborhood was Sunday. I saw some green shoots and leaves but no flowers. Today my husband took me to Cerulean restaurant for lunch. We saw lots of yellow daffodils trying to cheer us up on a rainy day. Even saw one group of hyacinths. Our trees have buds, too, especially our maple, and my neighbor’s lilac bushes even have some tiny green leaves. I love spring!

I took this photo in my old Warsaw neighborhood. Too rainy to take photos around here today.

 

By the way, I think I received confirmation that my netting was effective. I took the netting down Sunday afternoon. The crocus flowers had faded and were dried up. This morning all of the crocus foliage had been chomped down to the ground. I will definitely be putting up netting again next spring. I will try planting some more bulbs in the fall as only the yellow ones bloomed.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter!

Christ Has Risen!

Orange Sauce Recipe

We just finished a tasty dinner of baked chicken and rice with orange sauce. I have used this with stir fry chicken before, also. It’s a pretty basic recipe. Spooned a little bit over our tapioca and strawberries dessert, too.

 

Orange Sauce

 

1/4 cup sugar

1 tbsp cornstarch

1/4 tsp orange peel finely shredded (I used about 2 tsp)

2 tbsp butter (I used 1 tbsp)

 

Combine sugar, cornstarch, and orange peel in a small saucepan. Stir in orange juice and cook over medium heat until thickened and bubbly. Cook and stir 2 more minutes.

Remove from heat; stir in butter and serve hot.

Hidden God

I know it has been quiet here for a few weeks. I simply have been swamped with book donations in the library that needed sorting and processing. I was almost done with the 7 boxes of books that came in just before we headed for Alabama when 2 huge boxes of books appeared one day last week. No notification of who donated them. I have a pretty good guess though. Most of them are non-fiction, many about Israel, some on prophecy. One little book was a Haggadah for a Messianic Jewish Seder. God’s timing can be remarkable. Our retirement community was putting on a Seder supper last night led by a Messianic Jew. I processed this little book and put it in the hallway display Monday afternoon. Somebody picked it up right away.

In the evenings I have been reading Mike Erre’s Astonished: Recapturing the Wonder, Awe, and Mystery of Life With God. I had loaded it on my ipad when it appeared in the free Kindle books list several months ago.  It is well worth spending money on though.

He talks about the status of current American Christianity. We like to shrink-wrap God into doctrines, traditions, institutions to make God less mysterious to us. Yet it is the mystery of God that leads to worship. We try to fit Him into labels and categories, to fit Him into our boxes, but He is a God of surprises. Jesus was not what the religious people were expecting in a Messiah. They missed out because He did not fit into their boxes. We miss out sometimes, too, because we fail to look for God with eyes of faith and expectancy outside of our boxes.  Modern Christianity has become the means to give God structure, shape and understandability, but faith requires us to live with mystery and tension and paradox.

Which brings us to the thought that we experience periods when God seems hidden to us. It is true that God sometimes has to prepare us for His moving in our lives. The timing isn’t right for Him to reveal certain things. However, we are often the reason we don’t see God working. There is trouble with our heart (do we really want to see?) or our heads (how we look at the world). We want to see more of God, but in manageable doses. We don’t want disruption to our perceived comfortable and safe lives. We may be hanging on to certain sinful behaviors and thoughts that we know God wants gone.

Desolation (the felt absence of God) is as much a gift to God’s people as consolation. Desolation draws us deeper so that we pursue God for His own sake, not the benefits we might receive. It matures our love for Him. Do we want true relationship which means going through the hard times together with God or are we wanting a Blessor who imparts gifts according to our preferences and agenda?

In our culture we view life with sacred/secular dualism. Sometimes God’s presence and work go unrecognized because we only expect to see Him in what we designate as our sacred places and times, e.g., in church, during prayer and devotional reading. Whenever we predetermine how or where or when He will reveal Himself, we run the risk of missing Him.  We fail to see that God can and does meet us in the everyday, the ordinary, and the common. He is in the mundane as well as the dramatic. Our culture hungers for the sensational and extraordinary and is blind to God’s work in the ordinary events of our lives.

We can also see His working through the practice of remembrance. We need to look back and reflect on His presence and activity in our lives and the lives of others. We can read signs of what God is like by spending time in His creation rather than being constantly involved in the busyness of life. It is our own “blindness” that keeps us from recognizing God’s presence in all of life.

There is so much in this book. The nature of lament; discussion of faith and surrender; what real treasure is and how what we treasure causes fear or confidence. I highly encourage you to read and reflect.