On Memorial Day weekend, I was at the B-17 Museum here in Tucson, and the perky, lovely, very friendly descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder walked into our museum, toured our place and we had a wonderful discussion about life, politics and the difference between " Washington and D.C."
    She lives there.
    Washington, she explains is where "real people" live - that's you and I, if we can afford it. "DC" is where the politicos live, and she says, "they come, and they go."
     She was very open about the politics the town, saying that the majority population is "African American," (and has been since the Civil War, BTW). My ancestors were stationed there in Dan Sickles Corps, often wrote back to the family describing the life, the times, and the people there.
     Laura said the folks in Washington were very down on Obama because "he failed to meet their expectations" prior to the election of 08. A lot of grumbling in the hold, so to speak. I asked her whether her finger on the local pulse gave her any indication as to which way they might vote in six months: up, down, or sit it out. She was evasive. 
     My gut feeling, Ms Ingalls was very pro-Obama. 
     We spoke of her famous ancestor, and of the cabin from which the writings grew, the homestead in Sedan, Kansas, just an hour north of Tulsa, Oklahoma and thirty minutes by car from Coffeyville, Kansas. The cabin is still there, a one-room affair with one window, over it hangs a one page copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Bible verses she relied on during time of trial and stress. I still have copies I carry with me. 
     Laura Ingalls had been to the same cabin, and to the one room school house 20 yards to the west of it, 
     I felt an instant emotional connection to her, our mutual American roots, the school room, the values. I didn't get time to talk to her about her great grandmother, her time as a child looking out that window watching the long line of Indians trailing over the ridge from time-to-time just 150 yards to the west, a shotgun cradled in her lap.
    But, this is a new day, the 21st Century, with a new economy system, where the government takes care of everyone, or, at least it tries to. 
    No more individualism, like her great grandmother, sitting alone in a cabin, hours away by horse, self-sufficient, armed with a shotgun, confident in her own ability to protect herself, father outside plowing the fields and planting, all the while under threat of deadly attack. 
    Things change. Don't they?
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