In my lifetime, there has never been anybody like President Barack Obama. His very presidency was symbolic, and I feel privileged to have witnessed it. His presidential library opens today in Chicago, Illinois. Choosing Juneteenth I’m sure was no accident, and since it’s a federal holiday, today would be a good time to take a few days off, head to Chicago and visit the library of the first Black President.
Visit the website for a look back at the Obama Presidency Timeline.
Visit the library and Obama Presidential Campus in person:
The library is located on a 19.3 acre campus on the South Side of Chicago in historic Jackson Park. Directions.
There are many things to do there that do not cost admission:
Original works of art
Gardens and plazas, including the Women’s Garden, the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden, and the John Lewis Plaza.
Nature walks
Playground
Newest branch of the Chicago Public Library
Cafe, Restaurant, and Picnic Area plus a store.
There will be programs and tours throughout the year that may require registration or tickets. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Admission to the museum is about $30 for adults for timed tickets or walk the grounds; the campus is open daily, free of charge.
Tomorrow, in commemoration of Juneteenth, historical interpreter Nathan M. Richardson brings his portrayal of abolitionist Frederick Douglass to Grant Cottage in Wilton, New York in a conversation about Ulysses S. Grant.
I visited the cottage a few years ago, and it was hands down the best historical site tour I’ve ever been on. I am looking forward to this event, which will be held tomorrow, from 1 to 2pm.
All Grant Cottage programs are free and open to the public and donations are greatly appreciated.
Directions:
From the South:
Take the Adirondack Northway (I-87) north to exit 16 toward Ballard Rd/Wilton/Corinth.
Turn left ojnto Ballard Rd. (CR-33) toward Wilton/Corinth.
Go for about 1 1/2 miles.
Continue on Corinth Mountain Rd (CR-33).
Turn right onto Parkhurst Rd. Continue on Mt. McGregor Rd. The cottage is almost two miles.
GPS address: 1000 Mt. McGregor Rd., Wilton, NY 12831
While I know something of Native American culture, in writing my current book, I’ve discovered so much more, and it excites and inspires me. June is an important month in the Native American calendar, especially for the Haudenosaunee, as it is the season of strawberries. In addition to the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash), strawberries are a significant part of the culture, food source, and creation story. They are the first fruits of spring, and a leader of the berries. They are singled out for thanksgiving in the welcoming address before ceremonies.
Strawberries are sweet and tart, red and juicy. They can be enjoyed on their own or in other foods, mixed into salads, pureed into ice cream or yogurt, sat atop cakes or baked right in. They are refreshing and if you’re lucky, plentiful in June.
There are two Strawberry Festivals that you should know about happening in the next few weeks:
The 33rd Annual Strawberry Festival at the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community west of Fonda, New York on Saturday, June 27 and Sunday, June 28, and
Both events are filled with strawberry goodness, Haudenosaunee Mohawk culture, Native music and dancers, and much more! Check their flyers and websites for admission prices.
If you are in Fonda, stop by up the road and visit the St. Kateri Tekakwitha: National Shrine & Historic Site, celebrating the 350th anniversary of St. Kateri’s baptism on the site. She is the first North American Native Saint canonized by the Catholic Church.
If you decide on Kahnawake, don’t forget your passport for the border! You can also visit the Canadian National Shrine for St. Kateri where her relics are entombed. Contact the Kahnawake Tourism also to set up a tour of the village which sits on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Below the ‘read more’ cut are a few of the photos I’ve taken in the last couple of weeks. In some ways or others, they’ve captivated me. Whether the shadows playing through the curtains early in the morning or the fairy cave in the garden at work, they drew my eye away from the mundanety of my working day and took me on a journey to far away lands in my own backyard, sometimes literally in my own backyard.
Look deeply at these photos. Notice the colors, the shadows, the nature budding and growing, and in one case, its season ending while our spring is just beginning.
In the last photo, I saw the Empire State Building and the new World Trade Center (my name for it, if not its official title). The blue sky, the shining grey buildings, the sparkling water between our bridge and the island of Manhattan. It is a bittersweet scene. If you’ve read my thoughts here for awhile, you’ll know that on September 10th we were crossing this bridge heading home from a weekend with our family on Long Island. The next day changed everything for everyone.
What if the last two years could have been like the last week or so?
Getting to know the astronauts of the Artemis II. The collaboration between two countries, the best friends for the ages…before. The three men and one woman, flying faster than any of us, save a small handful have flown before. Working together. Laughing. Joking. Talking to their families. Talking to us. Showing us the stars. As television studios think they know what we want, what we long for, we watch the livestream of a government department from the outskirts of our little corner of the solar system. We hang on every photo. We cried with joy and sadness when the friends named a crater after one of their team who didn’t live to see this moment. Carroll. She was a spouse, and she was part of the team, because none of us can get where we are, can do what we do with support, and for these four astronauts, their families are their support, taking care of the homelife. Sacrificing in different ways. Like us, holding their breath but never saying the scary parts out loud. It’s different for them.
The best of humanity looking at the rest of humanity. Words of wisdom, words of faith, words of friendship.
I love the moon. I’ve written about the moon several times right here. I’ve been in love with the moon since my first memory, although to be fair it’s a family memory that I’ve adopted as my own since it was about me. I have been told that I watched the moon landing in 1969. I was two and a half years old, and I was so excited. I have uncles, my father’s brothers who are named Neil and Buzzy, and I thought they were the ones on the moon. Easy to be confused. In our first real apartment, the moon shone in our bedroom window, something I really missed in every other place we’ve lived. I loved (and continue to love) to sleep in the moonlight. I will often hold my hand up just to see it in the light of the moon. In the coldest night, I’ve tried to watch eclipses, standing on my front porch going inside to warm up every few minutes until it was over.
There is something special about the moon and the people who travel there and beyond.
Remember their names:
NASA astronauts Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canada Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen.
We were in Canada a couple of years ago and visited the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, and the one pin I collected from there was the Canada Space Agency, so when it was mentioned this week that Jeremy Hansen was a Canadian astronaut and part of that agency, I went to my pin collection and began wearing this one.
I’ll keep it on for a few days or longer past splashdown which is tonight at 8:07pm. As GenX, I may wait until they are safely out before I turn on the television. This has been a remarkable week. It has brought me a peace in the chaos, a stop on the journey, and something I haven’t felt for a long time – a lifting up; aspiration and inspiration. As I implied at the beginning, we can get through anything together.
We can. We will. We are.
I leave you with the words of astronaut and pilot for this mission, Victor Glover who said earlier this week:
“I think these observances are important, as we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation. I think for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing.
And you know, when I read the Bible, and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us, who we’re created, it’s…you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.
Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special. But we’re the same distance from you, and I’m trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special. In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.
I think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we got to get through this together.”
Photos from NASA.
(c)2026
Go to nasa.gov/artemis-ii for more photos from space.
I didn’t start out writing a book about St. Kateri. I’d never heard of her before a chance encounter with a random church in 2012, but that is an entire other story and a lifetime away, or at least that’s how it seems. As
I’ve written about before, I was drawn to her at the time very near to her canonization, and when I went through the conversion process, RCIA at the time, she was on my short list for confirmation saints. I went in another direction, partly for my attachment to Wales and partly because I still held onto the fear of appropriation. That might have been that, but in my discernment of joining the Catholic faith, I visited the shrine of the North American Martyrs and discovered holiness there. I found out that this palisade was the footprint of the original Mohawk village, Ossernenon where Kateri was born. She was born about ten years after the Jesuits martyrdom, but it never really resonated with me as her place. Over time, I discovered the Fonda shrine where Kateri had grown up. I visited the museum, the archaeological site, had a picnic there with the Cursillo group, a Catholic organization, and gradually began to read about her life. Her life in Fonda, her ‘escape’ to Quebec, the reception of her sacraments as a young adult, and her death at a very young age.
I’ve written about a lot of this, and some of it will feature in my book, but through it I learned more and more, and thought I’d visit her shrine in Canada to complete my journey with and alongside Kateri.
I’ve spent many meaningful hours at the shrine in Fonda, New York and the people there have been gracious and generous with their time and resources as I continue my research and writing. I feel a part of their community, and the first time I received an unexpected hug it came with a large smile welcoming me back. I felt it deep inside. I am drawn there more and more, each visit a gift. Learning about Kateri through different sources is also a gift.
She was born in 1656, parents died in 1659; she was baptized in 1676, received her first communion in 1677, and died in 1680. In 1980 she was beatified, and in 2012 canonized.
I give you the litany of her statistics to remind when big things happened in her life in order to inform that this year is a big deal anniversary. One member of the community did some math and as I said, Kateri was baptized in 1676. This was an Easter Sunday, and the date was April 5th. Because of that uncovering, it was realized that this year Easter Sunday also falls on April 5th! It is exactly to the day, and the Easter celebration that St. Kateri was baptized three hundred fifty years ago.
To commemorate this event, once in a lifetime I dare say, the Kateri Shrine in Fonda, NY requested ad received permission from the bishop of the Albany Diocese where the shrine resides to hold an Easter Mass on that auspicious day. The Shrine typically doesn’t open it’s buildings until May 1st when the weather is warmer as the public buildings have no heat, so this is a special day in so many ways.
The presider will be Fr. Michael Heine, OFM Conv., the Minister Provincial of the Conventual Franciscan Friars. They are the custodians of the shrine since its founding in 1938 by Conventual Franciscan Friar, Fr. Thomas Grassman.
It is a day or so away as I write this, but I am beyond excited to be going to the mass and to be part of this extraordinary event commemorating her baptism and we renew our own baptismal vows.
We’re a couple of days late, but I feel like World Book Day is on my calendar twice, so maybe talking about books throughout the year without an “official holiday” is a good thing, yeah? Can’t have too many books to read, write, or recommend, right?
For this year’s World Book Day, I thought I would talk about the journey of my own book in progress. I am no where near the stage of publication, but I am trying to work diligently to get on track for a more consistent timeline with tangible goals on the calendar and in order to do that, I should reflect back to see where I started and where I’ve come.
I began this venture without having a book goal in mind. I was moving towards a devotion to St. Kateri, and having visited her two shrines in the immediate area, I wanted to visit the shrine in Canada where she died* and is entombed. That exploration led to discovering her actual original burial place which was a few miles away from her tomb, and then with covid interference delaying our visit led to other factors, meetings, and research that eventually led to writing this book.
The main change that influenced the book was deciding on more of a pilgrimage to her final resting place rather than a stop on our vacation. The second was wanting to visit the places/shrines where she actually lived, where her footsteps roamed. I wanted to follow her to these places and envision her there.
Once that began, I thought I’d write about the shrines themselves – something of a travel guide to St. Kateri’s shrines, and that simply ballooned into something much more than that.
I have been privileged to have met with people who know Kateri, who were instrumental in leading to her sainthood, to her people, the Kanien’kéha who still live on the land that her village moved to after her death.
In a few short weeks (Easter Sunday), will be the 350th anniversary of St.Kateri’s baptism right here in New York. To the day! I am so excited to be a part of the shrine community and am looking forward to the Easter Mass to be celebrated there.
That is the gift of this journey for me – visiting Kateri’s homes and getting to know others who feel the way I feel about her and the excitement of continuing forward in this adventure.
Today is the third day of Women’s History Month. Typically, there’d be a proclamation from Washington, Congress and/or the White House, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. It was clear last week when the Olympics closed for this year that the White House would only be acknowledging the white men on the men’s hockey team. Yes, they did win the gold medal, and should be congratulated, but (or is it and) the women’s hockey team also won the gold as did ten other US athletes or teams. I will say that the last time that the men’s hockey team won the gold was right here in New York forty-six years ago. They were truly a ragtag team of true amateurs. I wasn’t even in high school. The women’s team, on the other hand competed in their first Olympics in 1998, and have won a medal in every Olympics they participated in.
You may think from that introduction that this is going to be a diatribe against misogyny, for Title IX, against discrimination, for DEI (which benefits everyone), but it’s not. It is, however, the world we live in currently with Congress and the White House attempting to take women back to their dark ages. We will not let them. We are not going back.
I begin this Women’s History month with that declaration: we are not going back. We are 50% of the world. We are equal. Even though we’ve earned it, we do not need your respect, but we will not be mocked.
One way to commemorate and celebrate women is to support their spaces and we can do that by using our time and our dollars and visiting some of those spaces.
We have traveled to Canada yearly for the past several years, and each time we’ve driven west towards Niagara Falls and the Rainbow Bridge, we pass a sign on the New York State Thruway that declares the Women’s Rights Historical National Park, and every time I see that sign, I say (out loud), I want to go there one day. And maybe one day, I will.
Last month, my husband and I traveled to the Albany area to see the Titanic Exhibition at the Schenectady Armoury. I had been there a while ago to see their Monet interactive exhibit, and I was excited for the Titanic.
We had visited the Titanic Experience in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2017, and that was fantastic. It was a superb blending of the Northern Irish pride of having built the Titanic and a solemn, respectful balance of the tragedy.
I didn’t know what to expect in Albany.
To begin, its title is Titanic: An Immersive Voyage. Now, I get that these exhibits do have an immersive quality to them. You’re made to feel that not only are you at something like a museum exhibit, you are in the space. We walked the gang plank onto the ship, we stood on the main staircase, and in the screened room, we were on the ship as it crashed and sank. They even had a life sized lifeboat in the room for some people to sit in.
However, immersive? Really? For a ship that sank? I don’t know.
The second thing that made me side-eye things is pictured below. I did not buy these, but I was surprised to see them in the gift shop. They really will sell anything – Titanic themed ice trays.
I had the opportunity a few days ago to spend a couple of hours at Starbucks. I don’t know if the best part was the free breakfast or the writing I got done. It may have been the moment of Zen and bonding between the barista and me when we both agreed that this day was the fifth Monday in a row.
I typed and I scribbled – keyboard and paper both. I set my alarm for PT and didn’t worry one minute about the time. Whenever my rant became too vocal inside my head, I took a metaphorical step back and people-watched for a minute and I was able to step back from the edge and regain my focus. And I wrote some more.
Since I started working full time (which I am not complaining about), I have not been able to take my writing time on the road so to speak. I miss taking myself to a quiet meal, pulling out my notebook and jotting down some thoughts that eventually expand into something else; something more.
My witchy ghost straw and I enjoyed this quiet time, and it reminded me that I need to schedule these moments into my month. It doesn’t need to be a long time; it can be on one of my lunch hours, but it is so important to recharge the creativity.
I had another wonderful day the Friday before, joining a pilgrimage at the St. Kateri Shrine in Fonda. I was able to meet new people, hear their reactions to the shrine, sit and listen and absorb the spirituality, the music, the moments in mass, and with the Sister who is part of St. Kateri’s story and miracle. The only word that comes close to describing it is glorious. It truly was that.
That one day there, and these couple of hours at the coffee shop will stay with me for the next few weeks, possibly a month or so, and carry me, push me, and let me move my book, as well as other writing, forward into the new year.
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 