A surprise visit

MOMA cover

The spring warmup is fine with me, but today I’m going back a couple months to Jan. 9. It was one of the coldest days of the winter, chilly enough to cancel school because of the biting wind chill. The snow was a bit more than a dusting though not severe.

Being unpredictable carries an appeal to me, so I stayed with my plan to visit Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site south of Charleston.

As I turn into the park, the winter feel abounds. On the left is a small pond. It reminds me of days growing up in Newton when, occasionally, we might lace up ice skates and spend time on a pond across the railroad track. At Lincoln Log, this pond looks bare. The wildlife have taken cover, benches empty. There are no signs of life.

At the visitor center, the parking lot predictably belongs to me. Someone sees me pull up and scurries out to turn the sign from “closed,” to “open.” The staff is in place, but expecting to see no one, a reasonable assumption. “You picked a great day to visit,” I’m told.

That I did. I oblige the request to sign the guestbook, the first and likely only entry of the day. I accept an invitation to watch the movie on the park’s history, alone in the theater with other items from the 1845 period depicted at the park.

The park is a favorite of many, but I’m not a regular. I’m familiar with the background, the Lincoln’s father and step-mother lived in a two-room cabin with as many as 18 people. They were subsistence farmers, meaning they grew much of their own food, and did their share of bartering, but held no plan to acquire financial wealth.

Volunteers who bring the site to life in the summer and fall are nowhere around today, but with some imagination you can feel the chill and isolation the family felt in the cramped cabin.

In the spring planting season, just a few weeks from now, they would have planted 2.5 acres per day by hand, the equivalent of walking about 25 miles.

Just down the road, the Sargents were worldlier and sought to profit financially from their farm. The Sargents were more literate in an academic sense, too.

Thomas Lincoln could sign his name, but not much more in the way of writing. Sadly, we haven’t progressed like we should in that area. One in six adults today has low (elementary or below) literacy skills. You may not have figured out who they are, but chances are you know people whose reading comprehension is at a low level.

President Lincoln separated himself from his father by learning to read and write. He didn’t stop loving dad, but was unafraid to explore beyond the world in which he grew up. Keep exploring.

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