Lil stood with eyes lowered and hands demurely clasped as spectators filed into the Meeting House. When everyone was seated on the simple wooden benches running down either side of the hall, she looked up and began to sing: “Welcome, welcome, one and all.”

Lil regales visitors with Shaker songs and dances

One of several interpretive guides at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Lil has made a study of the music of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Clad in a dull blue, ankle-length dress, her hair covered in a net cap, Lil sang hymns that had reverberated through the Meeting House when this was still an active Shaker community. Words became undecipherable tongues as she raised her hands in the air, shaking her widespread palms in jubilation, demonstrating the charismatic trembling that earned members the nickname of “Shakers.” Read the rest of this entry »

Take heart, all ye devoted fans who have written that you are in withdrawal because you no longer have my blog to read over morning coffee. I have not left for good – I only took a short break. While I absolutely loved writing about my travels and sharing my photography with you, it was an incredible amount of work. At the end of each day I would return to the hotel with 200-300 photos, all of which had to be downloaded from the camera to my laptop and individually named. Then I had to choose which of the day’s photos I would use and resize them for the blog. Only then could I begin to write and upload the articles and the photos. That doesn’t even take into consideration finding an Internet connection, which was sometimes the biggest challenge of all. There were several nights during my trip when I did not get to sleep at all and many others when I only got two or three hours sleep. So I took a much needed week’s rest from writing and taking photos.

Not that I have been sitting around since I coming home. I arrived in Sarasota, Florida late last Wednesday evening and spent two days opening a mountain of mail (a laundry basket heaped to overflowing), balancing checkbooks, doing laundry, trying on everything in my closet in search of clothes that fit me (an exercise in futility, since everything was WAY too big for me and had to be donated to the secondhand store), getting a new cell phone, and figuring out how to get an Internet connection with no cable (we have a satellite dish) and no landline phone. On Saturday I left Sarasota and drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to check on my house and pick up Read the rest of this entry »