Quiet, peaceful, lovely.
It’s October now, but back in September, while the first two weeks of the month ticked slowly by, as if on a hand-carved nineteenth-century wooden grandfather clock, I dusted off my cherished Galveston history books and read again, in memorium, not about the more recent events of Hurricane Ike in 2008, ugly though they were, but of a foggier past, the long-ago but not forgotten, almost inconceivable tragedy, that was the Great Storm of 1900.
Truly, Galveston is a city of ghosts, a town that has witnessed past suffering and sorrow and rueful, wretched loss beyond any sort of present-day comprehension. And for some reason, maybe for that very reason, I feel a pressing need, at this time of year, to acknowledge it. Read the rest of this entry »

