Wisps of cloud crept over the forested hilltops last week. Green fields glistened in the intermittent rain. Southwest Wisconsin’s beautiful Driftless area, never flattened by glaciers, gets its name from the lack of glacial drift or sediment. Maps from the Vernon County Historical Society guided us over rugged, narrow country roads to find the county’s nine surviving round barns. 

Without much thought, I’d assumed round barns were an old cultural tradition from some obscure corner of Scandinavia, brought by immigrants too recent to have adopted the more common rectangular shape. Wrong. The round barns of Vernon County were a modern innovation to meet the needs of the area’s growing dairy industry. Fifteen were constructed after World War I by farmer/carpenter Algie Shivers, son of a former slave who had moved to Wisconsin on the underground railroad.

Most round barns were built in the Midwest between 1890 and 1930. Agricultural colleges promoted the circular shape as the barn of the future, a model of efficiency. Cows stood like spokes of a wheel, narrow head toward a central feeding trough and silo, broader hind end toward the outer wall with space for a milking stool. Round barns were  wind resistant and saved on building material.

Though round barns were never a majority, Wisconsin once had more than two hundred. Electricity and mechanization made them obsolete. Linear milking pipelines, machine-made square hay bales, and prefabricated flat building materials were all better suited to rectangles. Luckily for us, some owners have preserved the outmoded round structures for other uses such as storage. The one-time barn of the future is rapidly fading into the past.

Our first summer in this house, eight years ago, our perennial garden brought surprise after surprise. Among my favorites were the delicate, bright red petals of poppies in June. Two poppy plants returned the next couple of years, then died out. My attempt to plant new ones failed. Then last year, a poppy volunteer cropped up in a totally different part of the garden. My only role was to weed around this unexpected gift to help it thrive.

I’ve blogged about weeding before and probably will again. It’s a metaphor for so much in my life: editing, scheduling, options, immediate gratification. This season I’m thinking about invasives, the species that spread so thick and fast they can choke out everything else.

Some plants and life events are always unwelcome. Others bring delight wherever they appear, like poppies. Most complex, for me at least, are the mildly invasive beauties that bring joy in their place but will overrun the garden if given a chance. Elsewhere in life it might be screen time, or social activity, or chocolates.

National news this season brings little joy, but I don’t want to weed it out altogether. To know what’s happening and yet leave room to savor life’s delights is a balancing act. Where to draw the line varies from person to person, and from one week to the next. Heading back out to the garden reminds me this day still holds enchantment for the hours I can set invasive worries aside.

One summer day long ago, I walked from a cluster of museums near Chicago’s South Loop southward toward McCormick Place. It’s a stretch of Lake Michigan waterfront I hadn’t previously explored on foot. Imagine my surprise to happen on the oldest outdoor artifact in the city. As best I could decipher the Italian inscription, the 2,000-year-old stone column was a gift to Chicago from Benito Mussolini. Had we and Fascist Italy once been friendly enough for gifts?

Apparently so. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, celebrating technological advances of the city’s first “Century of Progress,” gave Mussolini a chance to bring modern Italy out of the shadows. The futuristic Italian pavilion held hundreds of exhibits to showcase Italian technology and medicine. In July 1933, more than 100,000 spectators cheered the arrival of twenty-four seaplanes from Rome, under the command of Italian air force minister Italo Balbo. Americans welcomed the pilots as heroes.

Mussolini’s public relations coup linked modern Italy to Rome’s ancient history as the mightiest empire of its time. Chicago might boast a hundred years of progress; Italy could boast two thousand. He adopted the classic Roman fasces, a bundle thin rods tied together around an axe head for strength, as his symbol of power. The ancient column of the Balbo Monument, Mussolini’s gift to Chicago in honor of Balbo's squadron, was taken from the erstwhile port city of Ostia outside Rome.

The message was clear. Mussolini and his National Fascist Party rose up to Make Italy Great Again.

Image: Balbo Monument, Burnham Park, Chicago. Chicago Park District.

On a recent phone chat with family in California, an unknown voice told us this call was being recorded. What? Slightly spooked, we hung up and took a few minutes online to find out more. To record a call, we learned, a few states require consent from all parties. Most states, and federal law, require consent from only one party to the call. In some, being told you’re being recorded implies consent. Some require consent only in a situation with a reasonable expectation of privacy, like a personal call from home.

A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy: What a great title for a novel! The plot centers on an elected leader who wants to become a dictator while appearing to follow the law. He empowers an unelected, unconfirmed official to silence the opposition. The scheme has two prongs. One is to stir panic by firing thousands of workers in the name of eliminating waste and fraud. Positions abolished include those of watchdogs to guard against illegal or unethical action.

The other prong is to monitor personal data and communication to identify “enemies” who criticize the leader or his agenda. As monitoring grows more and more intrusive, the public is too frightened of retribution to object. By the end of the novel, when the two schemers part company, “a reasonable expectation of privacy” has lost all meaning. No reasonable person still expects any privacy whatever.

Of course, this plotline is only fiction. At least, I hope so. These days you never know.

Image: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.

My one college semester of constitutional law didn’t earn my highest grade. I didn’t realize we were supposed to know Supreme Court cases as well as the Constitution itself. For the judicial branch in particular, the Constitution says remarkably little. Judicial power extends to cases arising under the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties. Specifics lie mostly in cases and precedents.

The Supreme Court avoids taking sides in issues of foreign policy. It refuses some cases on technical grounds, such as who brought the case or where. On birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, for now the Court will rule only on whether a judge trying one  case can issue a nationwide injunction. If not, apparently every newborn must bring a separate lawsuit while the earlier case proceeds.

​What happens when a president disobeys a judicial order? The Supreme Court can issue injunctions, sanction officials, declare them in contempt, and impose fines or even arrest. But enforcement depends on federal marshals, who serve under the president. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, the judiciary holds neither the purse nor the sword. Its power lies entirely in an abiding respect for the rule of law, by nearly all Americans regardless of party. It’s up to us, the public, to insist our elected representatives uphold that respect.