Midweek: mini in the mail + reading

Left:  mertensia (Virginia bluebells) in the back garden.  I have sorely neglected said garden this season.

I signed up for the doll quilt swap hosted by Lori at Humble Quilts.  The instructions were simple:  make a small quilt using Civil War reproduction fabrics and a traditional block.  Participants sent to one person and received from another. 

Here's what arrived yesterday.  Debra from Colorado used a block called Old Maid's Puzzle (there are several blocks by that name).   I really like the pop of red.

She included a cute hotpad/tea bag holder made out of charm squares. 

The swap was a nice, low-stress exercise in creativity.  (Here is Rose Marie with the quilt I made for her.)

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When Davy Crockett made both the Big Screen and the Little Screen in the early 1950's, courtesy of Walt Disney, I was among the millions of kids who was entranced.  I sang the song.  I had a Davy Crockett wallet.  [That Halloween I had a beautiful visiting nurse's costume (white dress, blue cape lined with red satin). "Oh, you're a nurse!" admired a neighbor. "No, I'm Davy Crockett," I replied.]

Journalist Bob Thompson is from my era, but his investigation into the real David Crockett began with a Disney Davy revival.  His then young daughters were caught up in the catchy song: "DavEE, DAvee Crockett, king of the wild FRONteeer."  

Many people, both amateurs and scholars, have studied Crockett for decades.   Thompson began with "born on a mountaintop" and visited Crockett's actual birthplace (along a river, not on a mountain).  He visited all the places David went to:  Baltimore (as a young teen), Alabama (Fort Mims battle), western Tennessee, Congress (fiercely anti-Jackson, pro land reform), a tour through New England, back to Tennessee, and eventually to Texas. 

Thompson sifts through the information, disinformation, and myth with great good humor.  Crockett was a legend in his own time.  "If David Crockett had [survived the Alamo] we almost certainly wouldn't be telling his story today." (p. 336) 

"We have trouble preventing myths from hijacking the past," Thompson writes. "WE *need* stories that give us home, stories that give us courage in the face of death, stories that tell us who we are.....We long for Mythic Davys in our lives, and historians' efforts to teach us the difference between truth and myth will always be an uphill fight." (p. 332)

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Linking up with Wednesday Wait Loss