My lover and I biked Shiloh yesterday, the great Civil War battlefield that lies beside The Mighty Tennessee River, this late winter, swollen with rain. It was a beautiful day, flowering trees just beginning to bud, buttercups opening, grass greening, the kind of day that seems to underscore the sorrows of the past with springs eternal. There were two American flags horizontal in the breeze scented by the rolling river and new growth. One flew over the graves of warriors long dead, one over the park as their harnesses played a deep tone on the pole. I privately saluted each one and said to those long dead, “Long may you wave.” It was America the beautiful, the true America that we seemed to have forgotten—the America that washes our sins in the blood of our youth and repents atop the mass graves of our own. It is not the one the media rails against or the foolish hold in contempt, but the one that we hold so dear because so much of our blood has bathed our shores from sea to shining sea. We are a people United who now seem determined to rend us apart clawing at our mistakes as some such mortal wound that demands the hate-filled death of us all. My lover and I sat on the banks of the river and watched a Bald Eagle held aloft on the rising cold currents and my heart seemed to be divided between her and this land that I love.
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