Or maybe even mid-April--not sure kind of blooming tree this is, but I saw it today, when it was 60 degrees--on February 15! I spent a couple hours in the morning biking around the mall. In February!
Before we left Iowa, I looked up average temperatures in DC during the months we'd be here. DC seems to be about a month ahead of Cedar Rapids in terms of warming up for spring.
This is because DC is in The South, I said to Bruce.
Why else would there be these gigantic Southern Magnolias on the Capitol grounds?
And holly--holly TREES, for heaven's sake! They're everywhere here. Holly doesn't grow in Iowa--the winters are too cold.
I am really enjoying having missed a lot of the worst of a Midwestern winter by coming to DC. It's nice being in The South this time of year--even the coldest days here are much warmer than February in Cedar Rapids, and it's always nice enough to walk (unless it's pouring down rain of course).
On one of those rainy days, I was sitting in our apartment reading. Right around the corner from our apartment, there's a historical plaque marking a home where Frederick Douglass lived for 6 years.
After I saw that, I decided to read Douglass's autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: a riveting read (and in the public domain, so you can get it free for your Kindle or iPhone). As I read that afternoon, I discovered that Douglass was born and was enslaved on a plantation in Maryland!
Not Georgia or North Carolina or even Virginia! Maryland! The plantation, Wye House, was just across the Chesapeake Bay from where I was sitting and reading.
My brain doesn't hold onto history very well. I told Bruce about Douglass's birthplace and asked him how that could possibly be--wasn't Maryland a "northern" state? He told me that Maryland was a slave state. It didn't secede like the more southern states (and Virginia, also just a few miles of where we were sitting), but it allowed slavery.
There were plantations in Maryland. Africans were enslaved in Maryland and forced to work without pay or freedom. They were separated from their families. They were whipped and raped in Maryland, not far from the nation's capitol.
Probably you all, dear readers, remember this from your U.S. history classes, but it stunned me upon being reminded about it. Remembering how close slavery was/is to my current physical location is like a looming shadow just at the edges of my vision whenever I look around here. All the wonderful historic neighborhoods and buildings and monuments that we are so excited to see--they might have been around when, just a few miles away, people were enslaved. Maybe they were built by slave labor. Certainly they were affected by the economy of slave labor--everything was.
It's easy to ignore America's history of slavery when you're living in Iowa. Iowa had terrible discrimination, including an act preventing African-American settlement in the mid-1800s. But it had no legal slavery. But here in DC, a tiny district surrounded by states that were once slave states, we're surrounded not only by beautiful Southern Magnolia trees but by that shameful history. It will be an interesting experience to hold both this region's beauty and its history in my mind this spring.
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