Loose Leaf Notes

My life is structured around seasons and holidays in the same way I imagine an elementary school teacher’s might be. Every month I look for seasonal graphics and clip art to adorn the Museletter, the local newsletter I put together with others. Page colors are chosen with the seasons in mind. Orange and pumpkins for October. Pink hearts for February.

The monthly Spoken Word nights at the Café Del Sol, which started two years ago by the writer’s circle I belong to, also mark the seasonal cycles of my life. Every month brings a few new attendees, and the seasons are reflected by the choice of readings that are shared. October is an especially rich time for poetry and prose. The bright colors of fall coupled with descending darkness, Halloween, and death made for some interesting themes that repeated throughout Saturday night’s readings.

Rosemary Wyman opened the set with a poem about our unusual warm autumn weather, followed by a prose tribute (which will appear in November’s Museletter) to Catherine Pauley’s garden. Catherine, a well known artist and long time high school teacher, is director of Floyd’s Old Church Gallery. Her garden is a wild spot cultivated with an artist’s eye in amongst the open and rolling hills by the Pauley well drilling business office. It was started by Catherine with the help of her husband after her battle with breast cancer over ten years ago. Since then, her husband has passed on, and recent additions to the garden have been in memory of him.

It was the view that called to me first, and then when I started to look around at my more immediate surroundings I noticed the old hand pump, the large stone table, the set patio stones, the low stone wall and the informal stone steps that snake away through the flowers and trees and off down the wooded hill, Rosemary read. She described the garden, which has a sitting bench and a swing chair, as a place of healing. She spoke of how the garden gave her support when she wasn’t feeling well, and of introducing it to a woman with failing health who found solace during her illness and before her death. Oddly, I had visited Catherine’s garden just an hour before coming to the café for the first time in several years.

I followed Rosemary at the mic with a reading of “Country Boy,” the WVTF radio essay aired this past summer about my Asheville potter son, a good old boy with a twist and one of the kids of Floyd’s alternative community who paved the way for a meeting of cultures. After that, I read an older poem called “Sunflowers” which I chose because it’s fun to read this time of year. I can’t stand to see them droop … Faces hung like lamps bent over …Their lights are out … and … They hang like skulls in suicide nooses … in garden graveyards for Halloween … Their thorny crowns have fallen down … Their bones loom long …

Greg Locke, sign painter by trade, took questions after his reading. His mostly surreal art of the past twenty years was being shown on the cafe walls. People wanted to know which pieces were earlier ones and which were new.
Earlier that day, when I talked to Katherine Chantal, she said she had nothing new to read. I encouraged her to read something old. She did, but she also read a new piece that she ended up writing after all, after taking a walk and being inspired by the fall colors.

Retired Radford University Professor, Chelsea Adams, returned to the stage to share a few original selections. I especially enjoyed her poem in answer to Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gently into that Good Night, in which he implores us to rage against the dying of light.

“But I want to go gently,” she began, and went on to describe how she wants her eyes to be closed and to be wearing a favorite red robe when death visits her.

Dr. Sue Osborne was there with her son Mars and his friend Emerson. Each read a piece of their own before joining together to entertain us with some three part harmony. I think the song they sang was about a skeleton, judging by the refrain that went something like ‘it must be chilly it must be without skin,’ and by the fact that Sue said they chose it because of Halloween.

Café owner, Sally Walker, introduced each reader and offered tidbits about what was going on in Floyd as she did. June, blogger from Spatter, made it back from her trip to Assateague Island in time to attend, but she didn’t read anything this time. Regular reader and Writer’s Circle member, Jayn Avery, was too tired from selling pottery at the Roanoke Market that day to do a reading. After the last performer had read, a group of us stayed on to mingle and to meet Jayn’s sister who was in town. With the foliage starting to peak here in the mountains, it’s a good time to visit Floyd. And there’s a lot going on in town these days. The third Saturday Spoken Word Open Mic is just one of Floyd’s unique offerings.

Post notes: To read more about The Café Del Sol’s Spoken Word nights, go HERE and scroll down. Photos above are of Sally, Rosemary, Greg, Katherine, Emerson, Mars, and Sue.