Thursday, February 25, 2010

Theme Thursday: Bottle

The word bottle led me to think about cellar holes.

Rambles in the woods in New England can often mean coming upon a sunken patch, with what looks like a stone wall around part of it. It's fairly regular in shape, and always has a lilac bravely holding on, somewhere nearby, even as the forest closes in. When I was a child, we found some of these in the Vermont forests around where we lived during part of the year. There are old roads, tracks, logging roads to explore. Going deep. Sometimes alone. Smell the moss, swim in the sunless green. Cracking twig just off to the left. A deer? or a bear . . .

Just off to the left again. There. The place where a house once stood. Then you start to root around. The dump is never very far from the back door. You find a cup handle, a broken plate. A spoon! But always bottles. Patent medicine usually. The turquoise faded. Or brown. sometimes clear. An intact one a prize.


New Hampshire
–Donald Hall

A bear sleeps in a cellar hole; pine needles
heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak
which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.

Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer

on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane

Monday, February 22, 2010

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to, II:



Yeasayer's Ambling Alp

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Theme Thursday: Bell

this was running all through my dreams last night. L used to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on video as a tiny child:



But I'll really be ringing a bell at 2 pm for Barry! Barry, I hope you've seen the last of that place.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Music Monday!

NRBQ, for those who knew

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Theme Thursday: Mirror

There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
–E. Wharton

Here it is, Theme Thursday again. I had such plans for this theme, too. Genes appearing as mirrors of ancestors, or more recently, grandmothers. The Distant Mirror of the Middle Ages. The silvering mirror in my bathroom that give back a ghostly sort of reflection.

Then, BANG! Thursday has whirled around the carousel of the week again and presented itself in front of me. Well, I can supply a link to a program I try to remember to listen to every Friday evening (or Sunday morning, whenever).

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Gene Zeiger

poet, writer, teacher, encourager.

Genie, I wish I'd known

Monday, February 08, 2010

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to:

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Oatmeal Chocolate Cookie recipe

Here you go, e and Betty!

From Mad Hungry, by Lucinda Scala Quinn

oven at 350 degrees F.

whisk together: 3/4 c flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 3/4 tsp coarse salt.

beat together, in another bowl, 8 Tblsp butter (1 stick), 6 Tblsp granulated sugar, 6 Tblsp light brown sugar, 1 large egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 1/4 tsp water.

Add flour mixture and stir to combine.

Stir in 1 c rolled oats (NOT quick) and 6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto buttered, rimmed baking sheets about an inch apart. Bake for about 10 mins. CHECK! ours got a bit dark. Still tasty, though.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

college!

Oberlin College, class of 2014, welcomes L!!

Helen, I think Avery's Store are graduates.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

5th Annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam

Solar Creation
by Charles Madge

The sun, of whose terrain we creatures are,
Is the director of all human love,
Unit of time, and circle round the earth.

And we are the commotion born of love
And slanted rays of that illustrious star,
Peregrine of the crowded fields of birth,

The crowded lane, the market and the tower.
Like sight in pictures, real at remove,
Such is our motion on dimensional earth.

Down by the river, where the ragged are,
Continuous the cries and noise of birth,
While to the muddy edge dark fishes move,

And over all, like death, or sloping hill,
Is nature, which is larger and more still.

Thanks, Reya, for inviting me!

Monday, February 01, 2010

Music Monday

Constance Amiot