Billy Collins finale

 

Snow Day

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

and beyond theses windows

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling....

I will make a pot of tea

and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,

as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,

the Ding-Dong School, closed,

the All Aboard Children's School, closed,

the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,

along with--some will be delighted to hear--

the Toadstool School, the Little School,

Little Sparrows Nursery School,

Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School

the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,

and--clap your hands--the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,

These are the nests where they letter and draw,

where they put on their bright miniature jackets,

all darting and climbing and sliding...          Billy Collins

Living on the Great Lakes Plain, in a little town that averages nearly 100" snow a season, though it's been much less the last few years (climate change??), this reflection on snow made me smile, first for Collins' wonderful imagery and clever vocabulary, but primarily for remembering a recent snow day here. Part of the snowstorm forecast is listening to the radio or checking alerts on your phone or TV. One evening, on the brink of an incoming blizzard-snow, we were reading the runner under a TV program as it announced all of the next day's closings....schools, of course, and some major events. But the one that sent us into gales of laughter as it passed by, was this one, "The Dining Alone group is cancelled."

What?!

Our world in July

The Washington Lilies are out

and daisies are everywhere.

 

                                                  A summer thunderstorm came through last week                                                    and brought this to the patio's sky at about 8:15 pm

We've been hearing what sounds like 100s of birds singing and chirping in our inner courtyard all                       the time.  One day I was weeding under our magnolia tree and happened to look up.                         Five very large nests at the very top.

A huge crocusmia plant in our inner courtyard has been in full red bloom for a couple weeks now.

Billy Collins festival continues

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

that I was still learning to turn,

Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,

playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

the boy and girl who begin fiction.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden

and gate,

and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she

were always pointing at something and shouting "Look!"

pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already

and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,

and  now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.

Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

                                                   Billy Collins

Dick and Jane first appeared in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. 

Zerna Sharp developed the main characters of "Dick" and "Jane," the older brother and sister in a fictional family that included "Mother," "Father," and a younger sister named "Sally," their pets, "Spot" (originally a cat in the 1930s, but a dog in later editions), and "Puff," their cat; and a toy teddy bear named "Tim." Sharp named the characters, selected and edited the storylines from ideas that others submitted, and supervised production of the books. William Gray and others wrote the Dick and Jane stories; illustrator Eleanor B. Campbell did most of the early illustrations.

Train talks

Union workers at one of Erie County's top employers, Wabtec, have been on strike for a couple weeks now. It's quite unusual to have a large strike in our town, but every once and awhile one gets going. Wabtec is a global provider of equipment and everything else that might be part of the transportation industry. A few years ago they took over the GE plant here and continued to build trains, more specifically, locomotives. Here's a recent brand new one that we saw on their test track, which is only a mile south of the Mount.

The plant is right on the way into Erie for many of us who work there and so we pass the workers, their tents, chairs, placards and their job johnnies every day. One of the things on their agenda, according to the reports in our local newspaper, is for the company to transition to building more green locomotives...in line with climate change issues.

A second thought today: I have found a new author that I love. So I wanted to share some of his work with you, in hopes that if you like it you'll look him up and see what else there is. One hint: he was the US Poet Laureate!

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence

he told them the Ice Age was really just

the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

than an outbreak of questions such as

"How far is it from here to Madrid?"

"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom

on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom

for the playground to torment the weak

and the smart,

mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home

past flower beds and white picket fences,

wondering if they would believe that soldiers

in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

designed to make the enemy nod off.

Billy Collins

July

The year's first calla lilies bloomed this week and they are now the subject of a science experiment! In past years the summer rains and/or winds have affected these beautiful flowers rather quickly--they are rather top heavy and easily bent over by the elements. So this year I'm trying to prevent that by tying them up to a rod. If you look closely at these first three groups you'll see the light purple yarn I'm using to try and keep them upright longer. 

July is the peak month for visitors to our place. The July list just came out and it has 27 guests  scheduled to come to our guests rooms and 18 to the hermitages in the nearby woods. Sounds like a full house to me! 

But these guests, many (but not all) who we already know, are a delight to have around--for prayer, meals and just chit-chat. There's a lot to catch up on, too, as many have not been here for 2-3 years because of the Covid restrictions.

Welcome home friends!