09/07/2026
Morning Cicely. It's a quiet one out there. Smoke sitting low in the valley, sun coming up the color of an old penny, and Pennsylvania Avenue is about as empty as a street can get without being a photograph. First Monday in September, and the whole town has agreed, without any of us having to say it out loud, to not do very much. Which is its own kind of ceremony. Whitman said he loafed and invited his soul, and I think about that a lot on this particular Monday, because loafing is the only holiday we've got that you observe by doing nothing at all. You honor the work by setting it down. There's a koan in there somewhere and I'm not going to chase it too hard before coffee.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though. You walk up that hill above town and you find out the cemetery isn't a cemetery. It's twenty-some cemeteries, all leaning into the same slope, sorted by lodge and by mother tongue. Croatian. Italian. Lithuanian. Polish. Serbian. Knights of Pythias, the Masons, Mount Olivet. Those weren't social clubs, friends. That's what a union looks like before anybody has the words for it yet. You paid your dime a month, and when the mine took your brother, the lodge put him in the ground and kept his widow fed, because the coal company was not going to. And if you read the dates you'll notice they come in clusters. The tenth of May, 1892. Number One let go and took forty-five men out of a town about this size, and there are stones up there cut with that same date in six different languages. Grief doesn't need a translator. It just needs a hillside.
And there's more up there than sorrow. Back in '88 the company hit a strike and went down south and brought Black miners north to break it, brought them in under guard, whole families, men who didn't know what they'd been hired into until the train stopped moving. And they stayed. They dug. They buried their own on that same hill. And inside a few years they were standing in the union next to the very men who'd been told to hate them. That's a harder story than the one we usually tell about ourselves, and a better one. Six years later it's Pullman, and Debs, and a President signing the Labor Day bill in June and sending the Army into Chicago in July. Same hand doing both things. Sandburg saw that town clear. The holiday arrives already carrying an apology it never quite got around to making.
So the mines closed in '63 and the money went over the pass and Roslyn just stayed put, a little crooked, quietly refusing to be finished. That's a form of grace, I think. Go have your b**r at The Brick this afternoon. Take the good stool, the one by the window. And while you're sitting there, remember you're four blocks from a hillside where a couple thousand people are lying in their own languages, most of them gone before fifty, and every one of them is the reason the hardware store is dark this morning. Nobody handed us this day. It was purchased up on that hill, plot by plot, in installments. The least we can do is take the whole thing off.
Happy Labor Day, Cicely
