The Sunflowers Along The Side Of The House Are Finally Starting To Bloom!

The sunflowers along the side of the house are finally starting to bloom!

Autumn Kitty by Афиногенова Татьяна

not to be emotional on main but fanfiction is a gift and it’s so fundamentally human to tell each other stories and i am deeply grateful to have that in my life. thank you all for adding so much emotion and meaning to the world with your words

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.

— Elie Wiesel, Dawn

Q&A: Betty Reid Soskin reflects on her life and multifaceted career as a singer, activist and park ranger

“What a gem.”

“A national treasure.”

“The most amazing ranger you’ll ever meet!”

What more can we say about ranger Betty Reid Soskin that hasn’t already been said? How about, Happy 100th birthday? We thank you for your dedication and years of service in helping preserve and protect our nation’s history.

Ranger Betty was born in 1921, just a few years after the creation of the National Park Service. She grew up in a Cajun-Creole, African American family that settled in Oakland, California after the “Great Flood” that devastated New Orleans in 1927. She didn’t begin her career with the National Park Service until the age of 84, when she took a job at Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park. There she was able to share with visitors her first hand and lived experiences from World War II, especially the untold experiences of African-Americans during that war.

Help us send ranger Betty all the birthday wishes today!  

Photo description: Ranger Betty sits on a concrete block while dressed in her park ranger dress uniform.

“Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient of everything that informs the present. When we read Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch, we’re not tempted to believe that because the characters wear funny hats, get about by horse and don’t talk explicitly about sex that they’re innocents. This is because we are allowed full access, or carefully arranged partial access, to their feelings and thoughts, their dilemmas. Assuming we’ve been carried along by the narrative, they appear before us, these characters, intact, as contemporaries, unscarred by unintended ironies.”

— Ian McEwan, interviewed in The Art of Fiction No. 173 (via theclassicsreader)