I always feel a certain sadness at this time of year.  The tomatoes and okra are gone.  I should have planted turnips--or some cold weather veggie.  Something I could go outside and pick.  Next year.

I've almost quit listening to the news.  It's all bad.  It seems like every day it is worse than the day before.  I remember when they put Ken and his Marine buddies in a trench in Nevada--1957--and blew up three (yes, three) atom bombs over the top of all of them.  They were less than 1/2 mile away from ground zero.  The government wanted to see what would happen.  Gee.  Duh.  Ken came back to California--where we were living--wondering what would come from the power of such a bomb.

Of course, those Marines in those trenches died, in the coming years, at an alarming rate--from leukemia.

It's been a long time since we've had a nuclear bomb scare.  Or test--until North Korea started rumbling this last year.  I remember them.  Every one.  From Japan, to the Chernobyl reactor fiasco.  I doubt N. Korea has any idea how terrible retaliation with nukes would be--from the USA.  Arrogance kills people.  Mostly innocent ones.  Nagasaki, Hiroshima.  I remember those.  I was seven years old at the time.  I was eighteen when they lit those three over my husband.

I keep thinking about wars and rumors of wars--as the warning in the Bible says.  My grandmother's brother fought in WW1.  He survived physically, but spent the rest of his life sitting on a concrete curb in downtown Heavener, Okla.  In WW1, they had few, if any, dentists for the guys who had abscesses in their teeth.  They were miserable with pain in their mouths.  The answer: hand out paregoric.  Which is highly addictive.  Back then you could buy it over the counter.  Thousands and thousands came back from that war addicted to paregoric.  Back then, nobody cared.  The governmental victims of war.  My great, great uncle was one.  I remember him.  Ruined by the conditions of war.

War.  Guinea pigs from necessity.  So.  Let us pray for peace.   Among each other, peace at home, in our churches, in our nation.   Peace.