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!

Seek

The title of this blog post is "Seek." Not in the biblical sense, as in, "Seek and you shall find" but in the nature sense. 

There is a wonderful, free app called Seek, look for a single white leaf on a green background. Just point and take a picture of a flower, tree or plant and voila, it gives you its name, or an educated guess, AND keeps a list of what you've identified. 

Our inner courtyard garden is having one of its best years this summer and the sisters, and I, are enjoying the variety and the lushness of the many plants that have been coming and going since May. Right now my favorite are the 16 night blooming evening primrose plants that are going absolutely wild every night. I swear we had 100 flowers the other night and the nicest thing about them is that at 6:30 a.m. when we are passing them along the chapel window corridor, they are still open wide, so we get a great view each morning. 

Here's what they look like---times16 plants!

This week the three peony bushes lost their flowers: pink, white and dark purple, but the roses are out and  the calla lilies are just beginning. The azalea and rhododendron are gone but the hydrangea are just on the verge of getting their blooms going. 

It's a lovely garden and we remember Sr. Rosemary and Sr. Mary Margaret every time we look out upon it or walk through it on the newly-paved winding pathway. They tended it so faithfully for years of summers. 

The Mount and the Companion

Nothing spectacular to share with you this week.....except that two of our summer publications came out just last week and they are really lovely, in fact, maybe spectacular!

a) Take a look at the Summer edition of our Mount  magazine, by clicking on the new cover on the right side of this page...it has a cover of the waves from Lake Erie crashing onto one of our piers at Glinodo;

b) Also, the latest edition of the Companion,  the newsletter of Emmaus ministries: soup kitchen, food pantry, Kids Cafe and inner-city garden, was just put out. See it here.

Enjoy browsing!

Retreat closing

Now that our 2023 retreat is over, I thought I'd share some scenes from an afternoon walk I took on a peaceful, warm, sunny day here in Erie. Although we did have some of the overcast skies from the Canadian fires, we didn't have the visibility issues and severe fog-like scenes that we saw on the news programs from east coast cities.

Here's a whole field of phlox down on our Glinodo property.

And here's a look at part of our Lake Erie shore line. This day is was rocks and shale, 

some days it has quite a sandy beach.

This is a favorite tree for our guests in the hermitages, in the nearby woods. 

It is right outside hermitage #2 and can lend itself to interesting meditations!

In walking out of our nearby woods, we came upon this lone daisy in the grass. 

Hundreds of daisies are blooming right now, but they are all grouped, except...

And, finally, two trees in the library courtyard have their full summer bloom 

of whatever these are. Absolutely gorgeous.

(click a photo to enlarge)

Retreat 2023

This week we're on retreat for 5 days. For the first time our two 30-minute daily conferences will be offered via Zoom for anyone who is interested. Register here.

Blessings on your week, "retreating" or not!