Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I've been thinking a lot about how a beautiful place can have bad memories intertwined, in such a way as to spoil the love, or at least complicate it.  I loved where we lived in Virginia when I was a child.  Our house was embraced on two sides by woods, and it was a bike ride to the Rappahanock River.  I loved the gentle seasons and especially the violets and daffodils popping up on the hillside in spring.  Yet it was a segregated place when I was a kid, and it was my dad's job to integrate the plants in the south.  We were outsiders, we were the only family without a black maid, we were troublemakers.  I knew a lot of what I heard and saw was wrong.  I knew to keep my mouth shut, but I judged others silently.  I was there from eight to fourteen, and didn't return for over fifty years.  And when I did, though the rural area was basically unchanged, I didn't find it as lovely as in my memory.  Part of it was the hate signs by the side of the road driving to Richmond, reviling our black President.  Another was the talk of Grant being a drunk and Lee a saint.  The Confederate flags didn't help, either.  And several times I had to listen to racist comments about the necessity of slavery, and the arguments about "the North".  Words hurt, color everything, and change what you see and feel.  Words have separated me from a lovely setting which still is sullied with hate.