Our first post from Walkerton

(now joining the 20th century) + March Madness

Greetings and Happy Easter, Frog Troublers! We’re writing from Walkerton, which finally, in 2024, has broadband Internet! Until just a few weeks ago, Walkertonians like Mamie and Grampa had to use hot spots and phone roaming to access the Internet for work, homework, telehealth, and other modern necessities. (This is still true of more than 22% of rural communities in America, and more than 27% of tribal land communities.)

We’ve had a great, mostly offline weekend cooking and eating delicious seafood, playing ball with Steddy (Mamie and Grampa’s puppy), getting haircuts from Mamie’s friend Tara, shopping for shoes to replace the ones that Steddy chewed up, visiting with Sammy the miniature horse, and…

WATCHING MARCH MADNESS GAMES

Pretty much everyone in our family loves college basketball. Mamie, Grampa, Sky, and the cousins root for VCU. Richard and Uncle Skipper (and lots of our friends) go for UNC. Our neighbor and friend David is a Duke fan. Beatrice, Harriet, and I are Wolfpack fans (Bea says she is ABCD—Anyone But Carolina or Duke).

So this afternoon, between a neighborhood Easter egg hunt and Easter dinner at Sky and Cheryl’s, we’ll be cheering on the NC State women at 3PM (against Texas) and the men at 5PM (against Duke!!!).

What we love about college basketball:

-Watching women’s games in Reynolds coliseum, which sold out 97% of their seats over the course of the season. We were able to take friends to some of the games, give tickets to friends when we couldn’t make it, and go as a family to a bunch of games. They won every game we saw in person, and all but one of their home games!

-Rooting for student-athletes is truly exciting, especially as the women’s teams are getting more press coverage, sponsorship deals, and selling out stadiums in record numbers. We know (because I tell the girls) how hard these players work, balancing full class schedules while also traveling, practicing, doing press, and just being 18-to-twenty-something years old.

-The best thing, for me, about watching college basketball is how consistently teams defy expectations. NC State’s women were unranked at the start of the season—unranked! Back in the fall, Harriet and I saw the game where they beat top-ranked UConn and surprised everyone. Except, maybe, themselves and their top fans? Reynolds was packed that day, and NC State had tucked light-up foam wands under everyone’s seats (Harriet still has hers). So someone knew. Someone believed!

Watching the game against Stanford on Friday night, Bea and I noticed how the announcers seemed to play up expected but incorrect narratives. Look at the NC State team’s body language, they said at the half, as the Wolfpack trailed by ten. They look like they’ve given up.

But as fans who’d watched them, in person, battle back against tough teams all season, we knew that wasn’t possible. “They’re not giving up,” Bea said. “They’re gonna win this game.”

And now they’re in the Elite Eight.

NC State’s men, on the other hand, have truly surprised people, ending their regular season with four straight losses and then going on to win… all the rest of their games? They won the ACC tournament, but entered the NCAA tournament as an eleven-seed. Their game against Marquette was hardly even stressful! Which was a good thing for us since they were playing at basically the same time as the women and we had to switch back and forth.

The games will definitely stress us tonight at Sky’s, but the girls and I are happy that our whole family will root for the Wolfpack. We’re also thrilled that the Wolfpack are the only team with both men and women’s teams in the Elite Eight.

I hope it isn’t disrespectful to talk about basketball on Easter—that’s just sort of how it is ‘round here.

And… Trump is selling Bibles! What the what?

He’s actually part of a long history of violent American white supremacists claiming to be Christian and demeaning the actual religious beliefs of others… but that’s a post for another day.

How are you spending your Sunday, Frog Troublers? Any other Wolfpack fans out there? Here’s Bea with Mamie’s cat Kit:

And here is a photo of an osprey and her nest next to the Walkerton Bridge:

Lots of love from us at the FTT.