Home Again.

If you didn’t see it already, here’s my post at New Evangelizers today.  It’s about what makes a community a community, and why do we need a Christian community?

If you didn’t see the March, EWTN’s coverage is here.  All jokes aside, it really did feel kinda like a Ninja March.  Noisy Ninjas.  But there was no one else around, other than us, as far as the eye could see in both directions on Constitution Ave. coming up by the Capitol.

Someone asked me before we went whether it was true that there were very many young people at the March.  Let me clarify: The March for Life is a youth event with some chaperones along in order to reassure the nervous security people at the Smithsonian.

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Interesting discovery, as I was walking up the hill from the playground after an hour or so of sledding, headed back to my friend’s house in my old neighborhood in the burbs.  I passed a house flying a US flag and a Maryland flag.  I had no idea a Maryland flag would inspire a wellspring of patriotic sentiment, but it did.

Another thing: Hills covered in tall, bare hardwoods – scattered with snow or not — just shouts with memories from the past.

And another: We went to the Star Spangled Banner exhibit at the US History museum.  Just wow.  I had a good patriotic upbringing.  It was like going to shrine.  Well, not like.  It is.  A shrine to something very, very good.

But, funny thing: Riding home, it was good to reach that special place in NC where it was warm enough to thaw the  windshield wiper fluid so I could finally see out the front window without a haze of salt-spray.  And then coming west on I-20, the vast expanses of pine trees through the sand hills — exactly the opposite of those Virginia hardwoods — and let me clarify right now that Carolina pine barrens *do not* possess the austere beauty of, say, the desert Southwest.  Just no.

But, weirdly, I felt welcomed home.  As we entered the infernal city on I-20, shoulder-to-shoulder with drivers doing their best via crowding and incompetence to make up for what we lack in population density, I could finally relax.  Driving on the Beltway feels like being in one of those car-race video games to me.  Infernal traffic is just as dangerous, but its my traffic, so nothing to worry about, right?

We crossed over a river and my daughter asked, “Is that the Congaree?”

I chuckled.  “No, darling.  That’s the Broad.”  Everyone knows it doesn’t become the Congaree until it joins the Saluda, downtown.

She laughed at her error.  Of course.  Everyone knows that.

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