Humor me on a ridiculously endlessly hot Arizona day
One of the fun and interesting bloggers I follow just made a trip to Daniel Boone’s Homestead in PA. Check out the beautiful pictures.
I was thrilled because I wanted to see pictures of it again. My parents were lousy with cameras and almost never took pictures of wonderful historic sites we visited. I had gone as a child and had a very strong sense of someone in the room with me. I suppose any time you preserve an historic old site that has seen a lot of families come and go and has a lot of artifacts around, you’re bound to feel it. It was a most comforting feeling, as if I’d just visited a grandparent’s home.
I always felt a strange attraction to this historic figure. Of course, the hat was a complete and total fashion risk, but paid off. No one else but Danny could wear that cap. There was something about him blazing a trail past Appalachia and not knowing what the land held that made me see him as a huge hero. Heck, every time we visited relatives in West Virginia, I felt certain there couldn’t be anymore country past that. Little did I know that several years later I’d be moving REALLY west to Arizona.
Although I rode in the back of a Cadillac the thousands of miles, and passed many rest stops, truck cafes, and freak sideshows that are tourists spots along I-10 with only a CB radio to talk to strangers with the handle of “Cactus Flower,” I thought it was a brutal march towards hell.
I wasn’t too far off the mark (especially if you spent the last summer here). Growing up the gentle green, rolling hills, and seasons of Virginia, it was a brutal awakening. And, although I despise the desert, the weather, the endless sky, and the dryness and heat, I do realize something. It made me much stronger. Having to stick it out in this hellhole has made me realize that happiness is something you can create, even from itchy cloth, you can make it seem like silk.
My motto has been “you can be happy anywhere with anything.”
Come to think of it, in the long run, it might be Boone that takes me for a hero and a role model.