Pandanus. It is an ugly tree with a million uses. The leaves look a little like palm fronds but can be woven into a variety of objects. Dancers in Palau use them as brassieres to go with their grass skirts. The resulting material is soft as a baby's blanket. I have a tie made of pandanus and shells. We gave Ebbie a coaster woven of pandanus.

I HAVE been writing. I finally got an ergonomic keyboard and, TA-DA, a cable modem!!! I have a better internet connection now than I have had in a long time.

Here is my latest contribution.

Three times I have tried to write about our visit to Hiroshima. Each time I wind up leaving the computer before I get it posted. Now I should be able to convey to you what visiting that town was like. Even now, three months later, I am carrying the feelings of standing in the Peace Park. It was a powerful and emotionally gripping experience.

I guess a description of the place is in order. The Peace Park occupies a wedge of land between two rivers. At its point the two rivers come together and are spanned by the famous T-shaped bridge. The bridge runs from bank to bank across the confluence of the rivers with a smaller bridge running at right angles to connect from the middle of the bridge to the Peace Park. This was the aiming point for the bomber in 1945.

The park has a concrete avenue that runs its length from the A-bomb Dome to the Peace Museum and Conference Center. There is an eternal flame in its center with a water garden around it. There is the Peace Dome with a cenotaph in it containing the names of the 140,000 dead from Hiroshima. To the left, as you face the A-bomb Dome, and half way down the avenue, is the Children's Memorial. This is a stretched dome with three sculpted children flying/playing around its surface. Inside is the peace bell with a golden origami crane on its chain. In an arc around one quarter of the dome are large glass cases full of strings of one thousand folded cranes. While we were there two more strings of cranes were being delivered. There were fresh flowers on the marker inside the dome.

On the other side of the avenue is a large fountain. The water flows up and over a circular platform with a wedge cut out of it. The wedge corresponds to the position of the hands of a clock denoting the time the bomb was dropped. There are stairs and an elevator that takes you down under the fountain. There a circular ramp leads deep into the ground. Under the fountain is the Hiroshima memorial. At the center is a small version of the fountain above. The room is circular with twelve cedar posts that run from floor to ceiling. The upper half of the wall is a depiction of the famous three hundred sixty degree photograph showing the destruction caused by the bomb with the burned tree in the foreground. The picture has been built of one hundred forty thousand small tiles, one for each death. The lower have of the wall shows the names of the old neighborhoods that used to stand in the areas shown in the picture above. There is no sound in the memorial except for the splash of water from the little fountain in the center of the room. At the base of each post is a seat. It was on one of those I sat to weep for the fallen. Those were not the only tears I shed that day.

Needless to say Hiroshima is a very powerful place to visit. The peace dome has a continuous stream of visitors, tourists and mourners. It was almost impossible to get an unobstructed view of the cenotaph. There are fresh flowers at each of the memorials.

It would be very easy for the people of Hiroshima to be bitter and to blame the USA for what happened. I am, of course, very clearly an American. I did not know what to expect as a reception in this town that was the first to suffer the devastation of a nuclear attack. I was not prepared for what I heard from many of the people I met. To a person they welcomed me and thanked me for visiting their town. It makes it all the more poignant.

The museum is large and well laid out. The first part is the history of the town before 1945. Then there is the development of the atomic bomb. But in the center of the room, almost as an unnecessary reminder, are two large dioramas. One shows the town as it was on the morning before the attack. The other shows the town after the attack. There is a small red ball suspended over the second diorama showing the position of the bomb when it exploded. Overhead is a scale model of the A-bomb Dome.

Up the stairs are displays on the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the efforts to ban them from the world. The museum is dedicated to the eradication of such weapons. It does not point fingers at any particular nation and does not pick out any particular aggressor. Instead they have taken their disaster as an opportunity to warn the world of the folly of using such horrors again.

But then you get to the gift shop and an opportunity to rest your feet. You need it. After that you go through the really horrific part of the museum, the part depicting what happened on that day in August.

The rest of the museum is laid out to show the effects of the three types of destruction caused by the bomb. First is the heat. There are charred tools, building parts, clothing, and children's toys. There are lunch boxes with the outside seared and the contents charred ash. There are melted glass and twisted metal pieces. Eyeglasses with the lenses melted out of them. There is a model showing survivors with the skin burned and hanging from their limbs, dragging themselves out of the wreckage. There are photos taken by the first newsman into the city after the attack. There are only five of those. He quite taking pictures after that and started to help the survivors. And there is the famous depiction of the shadows of objects on surfaces. They have preserved the steps of a bank with the shadow of a person sitting on the steps.

Next is the depiction of the blast damage. Most of this is shown by dished in steel shutters and twisted metal wreckage. There are crushed concrete walls and splintered wood beams.

Then there is the radiation damage. I couldn't face this one. I was suffering from emotional overload and hurried past the bottles with preserved ketoid scars, charts depicting death rates over time, and pictures of suffering, hairless women and men. It was a great relief to step into the sunlight and fresh air.