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In the middle between Washington and Richmond

During the Civil War, approximately 20,000 solders died in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia. In the Battle of Fredericksburg alone, the Union army suffered 12,653 casualties and Confederate army 5,377. Even in such brutal times, humanitarian spirits shined through ordinary soldiers.

Lee’s Hill where General Robert Lee and other members of the Confederate high command watched the Battle of Fredericksburg in December, 1862. Witnessing the slaughter, Lee remarked, “It is well this is so terrible! We would grow too fond of it.”

Fredericksburg National Cemetery – the final resting place for Union soldiers who died during the Civil War on area battlefields. Of the 15,300 men buried here, the identities of fewer than 3000 are known whose graves are marked by a rounded granite headstone. Unknown soldiers were buried in mass graves marked with small stones bearing two numbers: the first number identifies the plot; the second is the number of soldiers buried in that plot.
Monument at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park dedicated to Richard Rowland Kirkland, a young Confederate soldier who, during the the Battle of Fredericksburg, risked his own life onto the battlefield back and forth several times to give the wounded Union soldiers water, warm clothing, and blankets, as soldiers from both sides watched on, and no one fired a shot. 
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Four Mile Run and those things we don’t remember

Sometimes we yearn to see great waves in the ocean, but it is a small stream like this – which runs through an ordinary landscape of clusters of trees, houses, factories, and apartment buildings along some roads – that evokes a feeling of intimacy in which we always find comfort. I think it is because the stream is one of those things connected to our childhoods that we may not remember but are never gone – only buried deep down in neuron circuits.

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Say an uncle who lift the baby you up above his shoulders and that first taste of ecstasy of flying, and the same hand held yours walking across small alleys to a fish market to buy tiny sea snails wrapped in cone-shaped paper. Or a parasol tree in the front yard under which the small you sat on a small wooden stool looking at some drawings to learn Chinese characters – they were like figures of sparrows, magpies, or little people; a purple flower, bell-shaped, fell on a page, and the whole book was lit up by a light fragrance. Or an autumn moon burst through clouds all of a sudden and the miraculous feel of being in the middle of a corn field showered by moonlight.

Things like these from the early days even before we can say words and the feelings attached to them form the emotional core that dictates how we feel today. Our intellects have grown out of the past, but our emotions don’t. As life goes on, we keep looking for that uncle whose hands are a bit rough but warm. We’d look outside the window at night seemingly unconsciously. In early May I was so glad to spot two parasol flowers on the brick sidewalks at Georgetown in the rain and almost cried.
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A perfect evening

It reminds me of Vermeer’s 24 paintings with which the Dutch painter depicted an ideal human world. Materialistic advances do not mean social progress or the superiority of a system, which aught to be measured by the well-being of people; and we need to look no further than at whether women flourish (as human beings and women), and how the elderly are treated and taken care (with every society cherishing children, rightly).