Blood Soil

non-subject: history
aww ~ 7/20/11

July afternoon, 2011. My 23-year old daughter and I walked along Davie Street in Greensboro in the 100-degree weather.

We had just finished a delighful meal at the Europa Cafe. Grilled shrimp in lime and garlic sauce. French bread with butter. Greek salad. American salad. Greek spanakopita. Ice cold water with lemon wedges. We opted to eat inside, in the air conditioning.

"Dawg days of summer," I stated as we made our way back to the 1999 gray Ford Explorer, meter-parked in an open public lot, the sun beating through tinted windows upon the faux leather interior. "Yeah," she replied.

I eyed a historical marker to our right, placed in the soil in front of a large brick building that I think must be part of the Greensboro Historical Museum. The marker is one of those signs with raised engraved words from a silver-gray, thick, metal, rectangular plate; engraved raised edges around the border of the plate, the edges producing a framing effect; the heavy metal erected on a 6-foot pole. These type signs are sprinkled all across American landscapes, at least in cities.

How often does anyone notice them? How often do we pause to think, "Upon this ground where I place my feet, blood was spilt."

It is something I think about regularly, regularly being at least once a month. I don't need a historical land marker to remind me. Nor do I have to be in an urban city.

The ground simply speaks.

My time on any given day, on even given ground, is borrowed. Borrowed from my ancestors. Borrowed from those who have gone before. Borrowed from those who have not yet been.

"Borrowed" probably isn't the correct or accurate word. "Gifted" may be better.

My eyes read the words on the historical marker. "Set up in the First Presbyterian Church to receive wounded from battle of Bentonville, 1865, was here."

I read it through a few times.

I almost take a photograph with my iPhone camera. I've never been a photo buff, but I am really enjoying this iPhone camera. I opt for no photo because I don't feel like pulling it out of my hip pack, then out of its case, then turning it on, then snapping the shot. It feels like too much work on the 100-degree stroll.

I wonder what the Battle of Bentonville was? War. Battle. Blood. Quakers. Pacifists. Where would I have sided in such a time as that? Where would I side now?

We, being my husband and two children, lived in Greensboro for a little over a year in 1998 and 1999. We lived on Lawndale Avenue, not far from Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, where in 1781 masses of bloodied and dead bodies would have been strewn all across the acreage. A 2-1/2 hour battle left over 500 men...lifeless. Their bodily fluids feeding the soil. I can only imagine, and hardly that, the stench and the clean-up. The deadness of it all.

Flat. Coping. Carnage.

Quakers tended the wounded on both sides...the British and the American.

I learned that the ground on which our quaint apartment condo abided on Lawndale Avenue, only some few miles from the historic battleground, was one of the escape routes for the troops in The Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

In 1999, I sat with my two children at our kitchen table listening to a book on tape about a boy, maybe 13 years of age, who fought in the Revolutionary War. I wish I could recall the name of the historical fiction and the author. It seems the author's name begins with "O" and it is just one word and an unusual name. The author was the narrator on the tape.

I became enraptured with the story, there in that time and space as a young boy making a decision to go to war.

"Decision to war." What an odd thought.

Through the kitchen window I gazed across the grassy yard with the creek beyond, knowing that beneath my feet was blood soil. It is sacred ground, fed with people's very lives.

It isn't just that ground, but everywhere.

Everywhere.

Blood has fed the soil.
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I googled to find the author and the book: Avi wrote The Fighting Ground.
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