California! Nevada! Arizona! Colorado! Nebraska! Iowa! Illinois!

From Chapter Fifteen, for Dorothy, Indigo, Patricia, and Holly:  “In Davenport, Iowa, Shelah and I stayed one night in Marcher in the Home with nationally known clay artist, Isabel Bloom. She recommended that we visit the John Deere Museum so we went to see the evolution of the plow. A rough stick pushed or dragged to furrow the soil morphed to the huge mechanical green monsters with multiple disks, the principle still the same: make a slot for seeds or seedlings. Maybe a metaphor for planting seeds of peace along the March route.

By the time the March was in Iowa, I had discovered the Dale Carnegie Libraries. Dave, a big red-haired Marcher from Pismo Beach showed me one day as I rode with him to shop for another old school bus. He was the bus-shopper for the March. He also wrote articles for his home-town paper and had found the Carnegie Libraries. They were clean, quiet and had chairs! And tables, bathrooms, and drinking founains.  The wind didn’t blow papers, the rain didn’t destroy them. From then on several times a month I went with Dave to one of the libraries. We talked with the librarians about the Peace March, wrote our stories, sometimes leaned over to check our facts with each other, and went directly to the post office to mail our submissions. So easy! The libraries seemed to be everywhere! Later I learned 2,500 were built between 1881 and 1919, across the country from the Atlantic Seaboard to California.

On August first, a sparkling bright day, the Great Peace March crossed the Mississippi River. Our last campsite in Iowa melted away, only to reappear that afternoon in Illinois.

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Okay, now I’m going to do my fingernails and then I’ll be ready for Gail to pick me up at 6:45 tomorrow morning. You’ll hear from me again in a couple of weeks.