Have a great summer! We appreciate your generosity. Looking forward to "seeing" you again. Dee

Shawn, you said it! Sometimes I wake up so early and know that if I log on, I will be able to read someone's message, LOL! I do sometimes get about six-hours of sleep so don't consider myself and insomniac, but sometimes I wonder :-). Sure hope all your brugs survived!

(((Kat))) this is very weird. I posted to this thread yesterday and also to Clairedo's painted door. There doesn't appear to be any postings from me showing up. weird.

Wow, def. touched a nerve here! Great thoughts everybody. Tex, your open plains background and upbringing have shaped your attitudes and understanding of wooded country-no fault in that. I might have difficulty identifying some poisonous (or so-called poisonous) plant species in your area. Doesn't make me a dummy, nor does your relative lack of experience with the plant I mentioned make you one. It's just down to what set of experiences and so on we had and were exposed to earlier in our lives. As to the various generations' attributes, I'm torn between bleak pessimism and guarded optimism when it comes to "the millennials". I do like that these people-as a group-are far less hung up on race, sexual orientation, and a handful of other innate human attributes than probably any other previous generation. There's reason for hope there. But I'm also right there with Gal, wondering about the parents of all these people, instilling fear at every turn. I thin it is that fear that will be our undoing. Take the San Bernardino massacre, a most heinous occurrence. Yet it has zero chance of upending us, destroying our country, ending ur way of life, any of the pablum you hear coming out of various fools who think they should be the president of this country. Utterly out of proportion to the actual threat. Since that happened, hundreds-perhaps thousands of Americans have been shot to death. But to hear these idiots on TV tell it, we've never had our backs against the wall like we do now. Such nonsense, yet it is driving the policy debate. The couple who wouldn't let their boy play in the woods out back are, IK'm afraid, of the same age class as I am. They did come from a more urban background and it is that factor I think that has driven their utter estrangement from nature. I was lucky to have grown up where and when I did. But what's the use of "being lucky" if later, all you see around you is ignorance? In fact, it has been my own generation and perhaps the ones immediately following that called for "tough on crime", for "truth in sentencing" and all the rest. Really, the biggest bunch of babies and hypocrites I've ever seen. It's as if nationally, we've suffered some kind of mass amnesia, forgetting all the things we ourselves were doing just the other year. So dumb. And all of this fear-based crap is what we've got now for a society. I can't come right out and say it but some of the things I've heard people right around my own age saying are just too stupid to believe. In a way, I think of it as, when we were young, there were the people that seemed cool but they were just there out of peer pressure or doing what they perceived as what you should do. Then there were the true believers, the actual trailblazers, the folks who actually lead us all to innovation and new ways of thinking about things. But you mostly don't gain any advantage by being one of these folks, your head tending to get used as a battering ram to open doors for those too timid to do the work themselves. But in general, I've got very mixed feelings about where we're headed. One thing of real concern though is this estrangement from nature. It's going to do no good to have little "preserves" where future people can look at the collection of trees or whatever. The battle will already be lost by that time. +oM