What We've Been Up To: Spring is springing

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Spring is springing

***********Insert deep, content sigh here******************

We are pretty lucky to live in such a beautiful area. A few weeks ago we had so much snow that my minivan was buried to above the window line. Today there is not a speck of snow on our property (nor to be seen from it except the beautiful mountain line in the distance). The great part about our location is that we get the cold winters and change of seasons but not so much rain that you spend 2 of the seasons (spring & fall) indoors trying to stay dry.

Today is a complete 180 from the weather a few weeks ago. Today we have sunshine over sunshine with an extra dose of sunshine. It's about 80+ degrees and all my flowers are peeking up out of the ground. We spent the last weekend doing some yard work and planting of seeds and general spring clean-up activities.N ow I am loving the feeling content, happy feeling. These pictures were both taken at our house this morning. Don't you just LOVE changing seasons?

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Spring is springing