A brief report from Tinmouth, Vermont

Hi friends,

I guess because Melina my dear daughter has a cold she's having trouble keeping up with the blog. I'm stealing a minute here on my host's computer. He is the keeper of Tinmouth's Civil War past, and is tracking down all the men from Tinmouth (a town of 600 people then, and 600 people now) who served in the Civil War. It's not as easy as you might think. There was a quota which each town had to meet, and if they failed to meet it, a draft had to be set in place. Tinmouth had one draft, and didn't care for that, so they started offering a healthy bounty to men from other places who would come enlist here.

We sang at Solarfest yesterday. After our set we went to a local pond, owned by genial and open-minded people, where the kids instantly stripped, almost the whole two dozen of them, and proceeded to set up a game where some of the boys, striped with blue mud in some tribal fashion, pelted naked girls who were sitting on a floating raft with bits of this mud. The girls then wrote epithets on each others' backs and presented their backs to the pelting boys. This was an enjoyable and primal scene.

Until later,
Melinama