November 23, 2012 Over the River and Through the Woods

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Columbia at the home of John and Colleen and James.  An abundance of food, only three child injuries and not severe.
  I drove home over the river (the Broad) and through the woods (the Sumter      National Forrest) and past the tiny town of Peak where I learn today the body of a woman stabbed to death by her husband was floating even then in the Broad.  Today a body was found burning in a field in Waterloo in Laurens county and another in Asheville.

I am walking in the woods listening to the drumming and tapping of a woodpecker.  I see her as she flies above me to another post.  She is small without a red mark and must be a Downy Woodpecker, who drums and taps messages to her mate.  The drumming and tapping is not the same as the digging for insects.  This message was about the hawk which flew up just moments later.  A single crow also announced the hawk's presence.  A Red Tailed hawk, just like the hero of the book, "Rufus Red Tail" read to us by Miss Sheedy our fourth grade teacher and which she read to generations before and after.  She has been gone long years now and so has the school principal she pined after in vain.