LFS: The Storyteller

©2007 by LeeZard It was just Stonewall and me, only he wasn’t saying much; Stonewall Jackson has been dead for 144 years. But there we were. Well, there I was, standing by myself at the Stonewall Jackson Shrine in the small rural town of Guinea Station, VA where General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson died at the Chandler Plantation on May 10, 1863. The great general himself, or most of him, is actually buried across the state in Lexington, VA. I say most of him because, believe it or not, the general’s chaplain took Jackson’s left arm, amputated eight days before his death, from the Chandler Plantation to a field hospital several miles away - and buried it. That’s where the general was first treated after he was accidentally shot in the arm by his own troops during the Battle of Chancellorsville. So, if Stonewall Jackson wasn’t actually with me on that quiet southern morning, even in spirit, at least part of him was nearby. Nonetheless, I stood transfixed, staring at a small, lonely ma...

©2007 by LeeZard Somewhere, In the Middle of Nowhere, Washington - That's where I found this farm. It is on a lonely two-lane blacktop running 30 miles east from Yakima, WA to the northern end of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Just outside of Yakima, the road takes you through vineyards and hops farms but slowly gives way to mile after mile of empty rolling grassland, and then - The Farm. What's so special about this place? Not only is it lonely, it is eerie and abandoned. I'm guessing it's been abandoned for at least 50 years. I base this estimate on the age of the rusted out vehicles sitting there with only sagebrush and tumbleweed for passengers. It seems as if the people living and working here just walked away, leaving their life as a monument to days long gone. As the years have rolled by, modern times - and sentiments- have overtaken history.