You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
At 1.4 miles from the sun in our scale, Mars is about half the size of Earth and has two moons that are too small to be presented in this display.
The angled post in the crescent, as we were learning, represents the planet’s tilt in its orbit, the major factor that gives us our seasons.
By this point in our drive, we were beginning to catch on to what we were looking before rather than passing by and having to circle about. The game now became who would spot the next stop first.
Through much of the colonial era, Salem was one of America’s ten biggest cities. In addition, it was closer than Boston to Dover, and like Dover it was settled by West Country English fishermen before the Puritan migration flooded into New England.
Salem’s first Quakers suffered some of the most intense persecution for their faith found anywhere, and they were instrumental in bringing that faith to Dover.
What I didn’t realize was that Salem was long the only Quaker Meeting in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The other early Meetings in today’s Massachusetts were actually in the Plymouth colony.
Details on Salem Meeting’s existence were scarce until I was pointed to Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.
Her study breaks off before the Salem Meeting shifts to Lynn, where it was once the largest or second largest Friends congregation in New England. And then that, too, faded from sight early in the 20th century.
Pestana’s sensitive telling of Friends through the period includes her sense of Quakers as family oriented, communal, even what she calls tribal. I would still like to see the story of what happened to Salem Friends in the industrial era, but she provided consolation for my own conclusions in Quaking Dover.
As for Salem, its unique Peabody-Essex Museum ranks in many categories in the top ten art institutions in America. It’s definitely one of our favorite destinations. Its grounds even include a reproduction of Salem’s first Quaker meetinghouse, built about the same time as Dover’s.
The color comes on in waves.
In our eyes, in the perspective of gazing from Earth, the sun and full moon appear roughly the same size.
Not so in an actual size comparison.
The model, 1½ inches in diameter, is a fiberglass covered golf ball. Remember how big the sun was, back in the science building?
My, what the miles can do.
Exactly a mile from the college, for good reason. The scale for the solar system model is one mile on U.S. 1, befitting the astronomical unit (AU), which is the distance from the earth to the sun. Everything else was then put into relation to that.
The model is 5½ inches.
The display is outside a used-car dealership on U.S. Route 1.
Home, sweet home, right?
Shakers are trying to recruit me, but I turn them down because sex is too important to me.
Am marrying the Nazarene, the Texan who can’t cook or keep house. I feel happy to be having such a sexy woman, nice body, etc. but also feel concerned, forced into it somehow. Am full of grave doubts, justifiably, of course.
Later, the Assemblies of God or some such are encouraging me to run with them. I forget the details, only the feeling of being desirable and yet a bit leery.
Once, I drop in on an Assemblies, intending just on a brief pre-Meeting worship. Instead, to my side, what I notice is my car’s up on a lift, getting a free inspection and oil change. I’m somewhat peeved, then wonder how they got into it to drive it etc. See, in time, they have a kind of universal key. In gratitude, I stay for the whole service.
Or should that be “makeup”? Weathering has taken a toll on the coloration of what lurks beneath the heavy cloud cover.
Set six-tenths of a mile from the sun and sized at 5.2 inches, it’s a Styrofoam ball with a fiberglass cover.
It sits outside the chamber of commerce.
Our next stop was within sight of the college, about three-tenths of a mile away.
The brochure said the planet was to be found at the Honda dealer, but we couldn’t find it. This was not a Ford-Lincoln product, after all.
This time, after a laugh, I was pointed across the street.
Here’s how big the little planet appears in relation to the sun we’d just met earlier. While the sun was built with a 598-inch diameter, Mercury weighs in at a mere 1.1 inches.
Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t have selfies through most of it. Most of those shots would have no doubt been embarrassing now.
So here’s how my life’s shaken out in terms of lifestyles.
