Thursday's Sunny Day

It has rained off and  on for almost 24 hours.  It was foggy and gray when I first went outside.  Barney didn't want to go out in the dark so 20 minuets later he did go out and I captured some daylight.

The rain helped to get these two buds opened.  The other old bud finally shed all of its petals onto the ground. I shared a similar photo on my Photo a Day blog.

In 1983 Woodward, Iowa had its 100th birthday.  A local man, Dennis Adams, created a watercolor painting and proceeded to put a similar image of it on this brick wall. I don't remember when he returned to repaint it the second time but this summer he took the summer to give a third refresher coverage of paint. The first year that he did the work he used a lot of my high school art students to do a lot of the basic labor of under layers of paint.

On the day that he finished, I happened to catch him doing final details on this corner of the mural.  I don't remember him having so much detail that is shown now.  I know if I were repainting something I would add extra stuff.



The town was established by the railroad company. The original first  trains stopped at the bottom of a hill east. a coal mining town called Xenia. Some engines couldn't move on going up the hill after taking on water without having a lot of struggle.  So they discovered that if they kept up their momentum through the proposed stop and sped on up the hill they could make the incline. They then decided that they  should have the station at the top of the hill.

The area was all virgin prairie with roaming buffalo. There were Native American Indians that lived closer to the river a few miles away from the town. I assume they migrated south in the winter following the Des Moines river.  I bet they had buffalo and deer all in the areas that they lived.  The farmers did break up the prairie soil at that time of late 1800s. Some of the area farmers today can follow their family roots back to the beginning of the development towns and counties. The train was beneficial to build up the area and the town as it brought in goods and more people to live in the town.

When I left this morning for school I could see about a dozen blooms on the vines.  It is nice not to have it stop raining for a while.  Yesterdays rain was strange as the rain did not cool it down at all.  One could take a walk in the rain and feel like it was a rainy sauna.