Bless Brother Ali. He can be righteously angry on one track and beautifully moving on another. Indeed, using your heart for what hearts are for.

Ferdinand, IN

I’ve found my Amish lumber source! A guy named Emmanuel. His lumber is a fraction of the Lowe’s price. Part of that is because I’m getting rough sawn lumber from a sawmill but, still, so much cheaper. And planing rough sawn boards to a finish is a skill I’ve been wanting to pick up.

More from Uncle Wendell:

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgement. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost:

However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. “Death,” a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, “is a convention … not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.

Claire Carlson, “Rural America Did not Push Donald Trump to Victory in 2024”:

This data speaks for itself: Trump won because Democratic turnout in the core counties of major cities crumbled. Yet the urban resentment toward rural America is back.

Also, see this.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost:

From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see—such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.

Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather’s mare and I on Beauty the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.

But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick’s own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot, woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well and drinking trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it. He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and did not complain.

Remember when I built a house for our sickly neighborhood cat Morty? He came by on Halloween but we haven’t seen him since…

This is an excellent, excellent post by Donny. The Jonah Goldberg piece he links to is also worth your time. What we need is some sympathetic imagination. Maybe it’s too soon to ask for it, but we’ll need to get around to it quickly. The lack of it is one of the sources of our present troubles.

I could go on a rant about these crap junction boxes, which we tried to work on at my mom’s house today. Suffice it to say that it’s yet another example of building with no regard to future repairability. It’s mind boggling, especially when a simple 2x4 instead of that metal bar would be far better.