Word: vernal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vernal Brown, 39, does what used to be a man's job: making front bumpers in a Ford auto plant in St. Louis. Though her paycheck was essential for paying the family's bills, she says, her husband "expected the same as if I was a housewife. He told me that if I couldn't take care of the needs at home and have his food ready, I should quit." Instead Brown quit her marriage. Among the upper middle class, male rhetoric may sound enlightened, but the bottom line is much the same. In The Second Shift, a study...
...called Ra by the Egyptians, Helios by the Greeks and Sol by the Romans. To the Aztecs, the sun god was Huitzilopochtli, whom they nourished with human sacrifices. Egypt's great pyramids at Giza were built with their sides aligned with the rising sun at the vernal equinox, and the temple complex at Karnak was dedicated to Ra. The ancient circle at Stonehenge, in England, was apparently constructed so that the sun would rise over one of the great stones at the time of the summer solstice...
Long before there was a Magic Kingdom, Florida was an enchanted land, a place where the vernal verities of spring training stopped time in its tracks. A recent preseason game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds in Plant City reassured like a Norman Rockwell painting: in some ways, things haven't changed. Bats are swinging, and all's right with the nation. The rituals that are played out in Florida and Arizona from early March into April are part of baseball's enduring legacy, and generations of Northerners have taken refuge here in the balmy revels...
...miles to the south in Brookfield, Postman Julian Hill offers another favorite vernal incantation. "In Vermont we have seven months of winter and five months of damn poor sledding." Hill, sporting a T shirt with the motto OLD POSTMEN NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR ZIP, drives 63 miles a day on his rural delivery route. Detours add five miles in mud season. "I've had to jack myself out two or three times this year," he says. "The trick is to get under the car with this thing called a handyman jack, get it up three or four...
...away when his wife complained of puzzle-neglect. He made a breakthrough by linking the inscription under one picture, "One of Six to Eight," to Catherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VIII's six wives. Thomas also divined another key clue: a pictorial reference to the vernal equinox indicating an object whose shadow on that day, March 21, would point to the buried treasure...