Church Fair
by Jane Kenyon

Who knows what I might find
on tables under the maple trees—
perhaps a saucer in Aunt Lois's china pattern
to replace the one I broke
the summer I was thirteen, and visiting
for a week. Never in all these years
have I thought of it without
a warm surge of embarrassment.

I'll go through the closets and cupboards
to find things for the auction.
I'll bake a peach pie for the food table,
and rolls for the supper,
Grandma Kenyon's recipe, which came down to me
along with her legs and her brooding disposition.
"Mrs. Kenyon," the doctor used to tell her,
“you are simply killing yourself with work."
This she repeated often, with keen satisfaction.

She lived to be a hundred and three,
surviving all her children,
including the one so sickly at birth
that she had to carry him everywhere on a pillow
for the first four months. Father
suffered from a weak chest — bronchitis,
pneumonias, and pleurisy — and early on
books and music became his joy.

Surely these clothes are from another life—
not my own. I'll drop them off on the way
to town. I'm getting the peaches
today, so they'll be ripe by Saturday.


Jane Kenyon, “Church Fair” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of Gary Paulsen (books by this author), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1939). He ran away from home when he was 14 and joined the carnival. This began a wide array of occupations: construction worker, engineer, sailor, and ranch hand, to name a few. He was working nights as a satellite technician for an aerospace company out in California when he was struck by the sudden inspiration to become a writer. He walked off the job that night and never went back. About writing, he says, "I just work. I don't drink, I don't fool around [...] The end result is there's a lot of books out there." More than 200 books, in fact, including Hatchet (1988), about a 14-year-old boy who survives nearly two months in the northern wilderness, and his most recent novels Woods Runner (2010), Lawn Boy Returns (2010), and Liar, Liar (2011).

Gary Paulsen died at the age of 82 last October, 2021. His final novel, Northwind, was published January, 2022.

Today is the birthday of Dorothy Richardson (books by this author), born in Abingdon, just south of Oxford (1873). She published her first novel, Pointed Roofs, in 1915. It was the first stream-of-consciousness novel written in English. Richardson disliked the term, referring to the style as an "interior monologue." Pointed Roofs ended up being the first in a 13-novel series called Pilgrimage, based on Richardson's life. She's often thought of as a feminist writer, and Virginia Woolf credited her with inventing "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."

The Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment on this date in 1954. An eight-year-old girl named Linda Brown in Topeka, Kansas, had to travel 21 blocks every day to an all-black elementary school even though she lived just seven blocks from another elementary school for white children. Her father, Oliver Brown, asked that his daughter be allowed to attend the nearby white school, and when the white school's principal refused, Brown sued. The court had five school segregation cases from different states on its docket, so the justices combined them under one name: Oliver Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka. The Supreme Court justices decided to list Brown's case first because it originated in Kansas, and they didn't want to give the impression that segregation was purely a Southern problem.

The legal basis for segregation came from the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson which had established that separate facilities for black and white students were constitutional as long as those separate facilities were equal. When Brown v. Board of Education first came before the Supreme Court in 1952 most of the justices were personally opposed to segregation but only four of them openly supported overturning such a long-established precedent. The tide shifted in September of 1953 when Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died of a sudden heart attack and President Eisenhower chose Earl Warren as the new chief justice. As governor of California Earl Warren had overseen the internment of many Japanese Americans during World War II and regretted it. Since the war he had devoted himself to the cause of civil rights.

Warren's vote alone made the decision 5 to 4 in favor of overturning segregation, but Warren wanted a unanimous decision for such a controversial case. Once he had all the votes Warren announced the decision to a crowd at the court on this day in 1954. Justice Stanley Reed, a justice from Kentucky who had been the final holdout, wept as the decision was read.

Even though the nation's highest court had weighed in, it took many more years and several more Supreme Court cases before most Southern schools were fully integrated, and de facto segregation still exists in some communities.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

^