I guess I am not the only one from Illinois, in Little Egypt or upstate, feeling a bit unsettled these days. The media pounced on news of Governor Blagojevich's (sounds like Boy-I'm-rich) downfall like these pitcher plants clamp down on trapped insects. People outside the Land of Lincoln may be understandably shocked by the news of such audacious corruption in the Windy City, but Illinoisans have become all too familiar with this sort of gubernatorial gaff (trick, fraud, ordeal, abuse).
My walk with Hubby last Sunday on the Blackwater Heritage State Trail provided some wonderful shots of Sarracenia leucophylla thriving alongside the trail. Phillip Merritt, a new blogger and friend of Cosmo, posted recently about these fascinating plants as some of his favorite things. You can tell by their beauty, if nothing else, why they could be favorites. This time of year and early spring are the best times to be traveling by foot here. I am thankful for these plants, and I hope they continue to thrive, because stinging and biting insects abound in marshy areas like this one. Summer is the worst time to be walking the trail, though bicycling and roller-blading do not seem to be unreasonable alternatives. If you are fast enough, you can easily escape the blood-sucking critters.
Here you can see one of several bridges along the trail, which is well-maintained and offers benches along its length for taking breaks. There are even porta-potties available for other kinds of breaks.
Water keeps flowing here in the creeks, inviting reflection and admiration for a state that strives to take care of its natural resources. It may not be the best of times financially for Florida, but at least its governor does not resort to underhanded methods of improving his own financial situation. At least, I hope he doesn't.
...For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept that "Whatever is, is right"; an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
--from Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities--
