The camp host I met last weekend at High Cliff State Park decorated her campsite with a narrow tube of fairy lights, a sign that read “Caution: Grandma at Play” and an American flag. Immediately, I assumed she’s a Republican.
 
How did that happen? When did posting the stars and stripes come to mean people of conservative values live here? As if liberal values don’t deserve that grand symbol of our democracy?
 
Liberals should re-appropriate the American flag so that it once again symbolizes our aspirations for frayed politics to be mended, our states united. 
 
I’m optimistic.
 
Every year, political signs promoting liberal candidates disappeared from a neighbor’s yard. Within hours of planting their wire roots in her front lawn, the signs vanished.
 
Until she added an American flag.
 
Then, the signs remained throughout the campaign in the swirling shadow of fabric fragments patched and stitched into one whole cloth.

I miss the double thump of the librarian’s date stamp as she pounds it into the ink pad, then the inside cover of each book I select. The pad. Then the book. The pad. The book. I wanted to sway my skinny adolescent hips to that beat.
 
Until her cadence stilled -- a due date sheet was full. She’d tender the gummed lip of a new sheet to her tongue, square it over the stack of previous pages and swipe it with her thumb to seal it.
 
Later, I would study this memo pad of dates. What eyes haunted this book’s pages? Maybe the milliner on Main Street in her dusty cave of tulle and silk. Maybe the creepy hardware store owner who sidled up to every mom. Maybe my next best friend.
 
Now with paperless computer checkout, there’s no hub for my imagination. Just a random penciled parenthesis, a creased page corner, a brown smudge to ponder. Chocolate or blood?
 
A bookstore devotee tells me new books protect her from the germs that she thinks seethe and multiply in library volumes. Yet, she falls ill quite often.  
 
Most maladies bypass me which makes me wonder if all library patrons suffer less, immunity bred in each breath of a page turn.
 
For a delightful missive about library books, see Billy Collins’ poem, “Marginalia.” https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/marginalia/
 
 

Thanks to human biology and oxytocin, visits with my demented mom are less stressful. The visits actually renew rather than deplete me. And it all started with hugging research.

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak, also known as “Dr. Love,” recommends at least eight hugs a day to be happier and enjoy better relationships.16 This may very well be the “hug threshold” that allows our bodies to produce ample amounts of oxytocin. http://www.epatienthealthcare.com/2015/02/09/could-a-hug-a-day-keep-infection-away/#more-35754

So, on my last visit, I slung my arm across the back of her wheelchair and when she tilted her head my way, I looped my arm around her shoulders and she nestled into me. I kissed her forehead and stroked her cheek and she didn’t push me away.
 
She calmed. I calmed. Thanks to biology and oxytocin.