Isabella was the most popular name for a newborn girl in the United States in 2010. The Social Security Administration, which keeps tabs on all of us, also keeps track of what parents name their offspring and lets the world know.
For 40 years Isabella didn’t even rank in the top 1,000 choices. Parents decided on Destiny, Dawn and Tiffany instead or chose a wild spelling of a family name — Bettyee, perhaps — which became an unintended curse.
Last year, however, parents looked around for some classical moniker that would introduce some stability to this unstable time and found Isabella. (Which brings Columbus and his queen to mind. How classical can you get?)
But they stuck with Jacob for their boys. Jacob has been at the top for years. It’s biblical. Classic, too.
Isabella is a great name. Solid, like Ruth, Dorothy, Mary, Elizabeth and Rachel. Wonder where those grand old names came in on the rankings? Wonder if there is any correlation between the names chosen in our Great Recession and those picked in the Great Depression? Too lazy to learn.

    — Emerson Lynn, jr.


Currently 96; high, 100.
Haven’t had a summer like this for a while. Turned the grass brown in a week. Respite from mowing, but hard on the beans, the corn, the cattle. Still, not all that unusual, after all, we do live in Kansas.
I can remember buying our first air conditioner — a window unit for an upstairs apartment above the Humboldt Union in 1953 — because a newborn’s diaper rash wouldn’t heal in those 100-plus degree July days.
Also remember how ineffective the old swamp coolers were before the technology made its quantum leap. There have been 100-degree days and 90-degree nights in Allen County for as long as records have been kept — and certainly much, much longer.
Today it doesn’t matter for those of us lucky enough to have inside jobs.
And that reminds me that Africa is in the throes of another devastating drought. Cattle dying, dust blowing so thick the people shouldn’t get outside their tents for fear of clogging their windpipes and lungs with corrosive silicon. But they stand out in the swirling wind, all hopes of a crop gone, desperate for water, tending their goats and cattle, their only wealth.
There are no inside jobs in most of Africa. Where they exist, there is air conditioning only for the very few who are also very rich.
Think about Sudan and realize that the poorest among us in Allen County are rich as Croesus in comparison. There now, feel better?

Athal, Cedar and Gaylord, all in Smith County, and Brownell in Ness County have been added to the list of 32 Kansas post offices under review for possible closure.
Closing a post office is a very-last-ditch thing. All of these on the dead and dying list have workloads of under two hours a day and don’t have postmasters. The communities involved don’t have other businesses either. The people left first. Then the businesses. Now, finally, the post office will close and become a dwelling place or a barn or bulldozed.
Without a post office are you still a town? A post office is, after all, a key part of a community’s identity. That’s why post offices last as long as the Cheshire Cat’s smile, hanging on after the town itself lives only in the memories of the old timers determined to live on in their two-story white frame houses until they are led away — or carried away.
Having another batch of towns turn to dust and knowing that another place name will be dropped from the Kansas map before too many more years pass — look for Geneva on yours — is either sad or of-course. Mostly, of-course, or even so-what.
It doesn’t really hurt because the process takes generations and with each generation Athal, Cedar, Gaylord, et al, grew smaller and provided less. The schools shrank until the kids had to be bussed to a bigger place to high school. The next generation was bussed to seventh grade and the next had no school at all.
The jobs left and the last store closed and by the time the town was nothing more than a name the final losses were too expected to cause grief. When people went away for a while they realized there was nothing left to come back to. And so when the post office closes and even the name has its days numbered, the last man can walk away, turn and salute and think no more about it.

                — Emerson Lynn, jr.