Today I’m joining Thursday Doors, hosted by Norm Frampton, so that I can share with you photos of the following doors + a bit more.
I took these photos when we decided, on a whim, to stop at P. Graham Dunn, a factory + retail store + chapel in Dalton, OH.
P. Graham Dunn makes inspirational home and wall decor, often in the form of wooden signs. Above the factory there’s a humongous retail store in which you can lost looking at all the merchandise.
Interesting barn adjacent to retail store.
Outside the store is a beautiful pond with a path around it that leads to a small narrow chapel, named Anna’s Chapel.
The chapel is by the side of the pond and is like none other that I’ve seen. Inside the chapel the raw wooden walls are almost entirely covered with graffiti that praises Christianity + a few personal messages as well.
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DOOR into Anna’s Chapel.
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Graffiti on inside chapel walls.
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Example of P. Graham Dunn’s merchandise as seen inside chapel.
He was 89 years old, diabetic, and had Alzheimer’s, the long good-bye.
His funeral was a week ago Monday in the city where Zen-Den grew up, a 4 to 5 hour drive from here. We drove there on Sunday and came back later in the week.
The funeral wasn’t a sad or maudlin affair because the person FIL had become was nothing like the person he’d been in his prime; even then, in his better days he was a ‘hale fellow well met’ with some Archie Bunker thrown into the mix– stubbornly clinging to the past.
However, as is the way with people who suffer with Alzheimer’s, FIL deteriorated slowly, forgetting his resentments along the way. He became physically weak, and seemingly ready to leave this world.
The best part of the funeral was FIL’s 3-year-old step-great-granddaughter who stole the show. She was cheerful, of course. Dressed in a sundress + straw hat. Delightfully curious. So much so that at one point during the memorial service she went up front, quietly, to join the pastor, sitting her little self down on a chair nearby him to watch.
Which was cute– and a visual reminder that life goes on.
And on that positive note I’ll end this post. I’m not even sure why I’m telling you this, but some days, occasionally, I write here in a serious way as if this were my journal– instead of a personal blog filled with flapdoodle and twaddle.
PLEASE NOTE: It’s been brought to my attention by my husband that these photos are from Fort Pulaski, south of Savannah, GA. I had my forts wrong. However, considering that Fort Pulaski is named for a Revolutionary War general my idea of posting these pics on George Washington’s birthday still makes sense.
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Today, in honor of George Washington’s birthday, I’m joining Thursday Doors, hosted by Norm Frampton, so that I can share with you the following door photos + a little bit of American Revolutionary War history.
The fort is named for a Revolutionary war general, who, on June 28, 1776, defended Charleston, SC, from the British. Since then the fort has been rebuilt a few times and gone through a few more wars. At the end of WWII the fort closed.
The day we visited Fort Moultrie Pulaski the weather was sunny and mild, lending an unexpected peaceful vibe to the entire well-kept large complex.
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Outer perimeter of Fort Moultrie Pulaski, surrounded by a moat, with visible cannon ball damage on the brick wall.
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DOOR leading into interior of fort.
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DOORS on one small part of the storage area that forms the perimeter of the inside of the fort.
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DOORS in a row leading to storage areas shown with people walking above the storage areas to give a sense of scale.
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DOOR into stairwell that goes up to the area where people were walking.
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DOOR into officers’ quarters.
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Photo of lighthouse in Charleston Harbor as seen from Fort Moultrie Pulaski.
Today I’m joining Thursday Doors, hosted by Norm Frampton, so that I can share with you the following door photos– and a bit of history in honor of Veterans Day.
We visited this well-organized museum last spring when we were on our vacation, and while the whole museum is fascinating, the beautiful stained glass windows in the chapel called to me.
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DOORS leading into the chapel vestibule.
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Stained glass window with military imagery.
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Stained glass windows behind the altar at the front of the sanctuary.
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DOOR with stained glass panels on one side of the sanctuary.
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Stained glass window with Jesus and cherubim.
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DOORS in the vestibule that lead to the outside as seen from the sanctuary.
I DID NOT START THIS. I want to be clear on this point.
I inherited this feud from some women who used to live on this street when all the houses were new, and the street wasn’t finished yet. Women who moved to the midwest from big sophisticated cities.
Women who had never dealt with a small town misogynistic resentful male postal clerk who grumbled loudly about doing his job, poorly.
For reasons never fully explained to me they hated him, and being who they were, they launched a letter-writing + email-sending campaign to get him fired. They found the names of everyone in the U.S. Postal Service who might be influential enough to get this resentful male postal clerk axed from his job– and set about trying to make it so.
Their campaign, organized and relentless as it was, did not work.
THEN they moved away leaving me the only woman on this street who knows what they did– and still suffers for it because he remembers which part of our street was out to get him.
The block I live on.
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SO KNOWING WHAT I KNOW, I went over to our local post office branch to get our mail that had been held while we were on vacation.
As usual he was the only clerk working behind the counter and I had to stand in a long line. No big deal. Totally expected.
What I did not expect, however, was our resentful male postal clerk getting into a prolonged shouting match with a male customer who was trying to decide which box to use to send something somewhere.
Our resentful male postal clerk had strong opinions on what this customer guy should be doing– and the customer guy was. not. buying. it. at. all.
I found this tense conversation fascinating because this is my first experience with our resentful male postal clerk turning vicious on a man.
He’s branched out. [pun intended]
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EVENTUALLY I GET TO THE COUNTER. With a sense of foreboding I hand my driver’s license to our resentful male postal clerk, and I wait for the inevitable hateful glare.
The snarl.
The shout.
“Greenwood Street, huh?”
But this time, my gentle readers, I was ready. I put on what might be my best dramatic performance ever, playing the part of a contrite suburbanite. When he squinted his eyes and glared at me, I slouched, I looked down at the floor, and I hung my head in shame for living on the street that I do.
Oddly, this performance seemed to light a fire under his heretofore slow-moving butt and he went into the back of the post office branch to retrieve my mail. Lickety-split-like. Without whining.
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BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE. As if this story could get more exciting and amazing, when our resentful male postal clerk returned from the back with our mail, that included 31 catalogues + many letters, he had it in an official U.S. Post Office rectangular white plastic toter that he handed to me.
This is unprecedented.
Never before has this resentful male postal clerk NOT dumped all of our mail on the counter for me to grasp, as best I can, in my arms. He has previously enjoyed making me look like a klutz as I scramble to not drop anything while skedaddling out of his post office branch.
But this time, he was, for him, in his own way, almost kind to me.
And I gotta tell ‘ya, I find this a bit disturbing. It’s just not normal– like he’s playing some new game with me that I have yet to figure out.
Once a week Cee asks the questions on her blog, and I answer them here on my blog.
• Have you ever participated in a distance walking, swimming, running, or biking event? Tell your story.
Yes, *sigh* back when I was a crazy, younger, athletically inclined woman who followed the crowd, I was a cyclist. I did lots of 30+ mile bike rides for charities, and even once went so far as to go on a Backroads bike tour vacation.
This adventure in hell vacation started in New Bern, NC, and involved days of bike riding on dodgy, bermless country roads, littered with dead snakes and frogs. Roads, filled with 18-wheeler lumber trucks zipping past us, spewing bits of pine bark and needles as they went by. It was scary.
Throughout the tour we were on a strict time schedule to get to ferry-boats to go island to island along the NC Outer Banks, with the goal of getting to Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
However, this did not happen because a huge storm, the aftermath of a hurricane, disrupted the ferry service to Cape Hatteras. Meaning that our last ferry-boat was abruptly cancelled, leaving us stuck one island short of Cape Hatteras, on Ocracoke Island. In a dumpy motel.
So with torrential rain falling and nowhere to go, we abandoned the pretense of cycling, made note of Ocracoke’s famous ponies, and drank excessively in the one bar that was open while it stormed, all the while lamenting that we were never going to get to Cape Hatteras.
Which *sigh* was the whole point of the bike tour.
• Name one thing not many people know about you.
I will not wear the color orange, so keep all your sports fan gear away from me.
• What is your favorite flower?
Tulips. Graceful and colorful, with no excessive leaves to muddle up their lines or draw attention away from their colorful petals.
• Things I want to have in my home (paintings, hot tubs, book cases, big screen tv etc)
While it’s true that I like things, and that if my life had gone in a different direction I might have become an interior designer, I feel that for me to list all the things that I want to have in my home would take hours.
• Optional Bonus Question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?
Last week’s gratitude award goes to the cats featured in the YouTube video below. They make me smile. I’m beyond impressed by their focus and skill– and that any human being was able to get them to do what they’re doing.
This week’s looking forward to something goes to Zen-Den listening to S•Town podcast so that he and I can discuss it. At length. Produced by Serial and This American Life, S•Town is the most compelling investigative-journalistic-true-crime-ish story I’ve heard [or read] in years. Think Southern Gothic genre. The language is coarse. The topics are mature. And the story is so good… in a bad way. Highly recommended.
It’s been 2 weeks since my FIL passed away.
Once a week Cee asks the questions on her blog, and I answer them here on my blog. 