Loose Leaf Notes

The following year review was done by excerpting the first few lines of one post of each month from last year. You can click on the name of the month for pictures and a  full accounting.

January: We were driven out of our house by ice escapades, laden trees dropping frozen bombs on to our roof. With a gunshot cue, they were off like a stampede of horses at the races, like ladies at Filenes Basement, like Santa’s reindeer landing his sleigh.

February: Strangest thing said at the Mardi Gras Ball by Colleen to Mara, who was dressed in a suit for her Mardi Gras King election campaign: “Neckties are so phallic.”

March: The poets came out of the woodwork for a Spring Equinox reading at the Black Water Loft coffee house in downtown Floyd Saturday night.  Poems about daffodils and wild strawberries were mixed with readings of Hemingway, Jane Hirschfield, and Shakespeare.  There was a leftover love poem from February’s Spoken Word that was cancelled because of wintry weather and Jayn Avery’s poem began: Dear Winter.

April: “Wow. This pot is big. I bet we could fit Bryce in here,” I say to my son Josh as my house and yard are being totally redesigned with pottery in mind. We got the lawn mowed and the dog’s hair cut.   The grill is ready to fire up.  “This is going to be fun,” Josh says.   “Yeah, I feel like we’re getting ready for the party I never let you have as a teenager.” I answer. Some kind of 80’s sounding retro music is playing and Josh is starting to dance.

May: For my 60^th birthday I soaked in a tub of weightlessness.  Floating on what felt like a heated cloud of jiggling jello, I had a cold cloth on my forehead and someone was massaging my feet.  I had dinner with a Scottish man who was at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-in for Peace, and breakfast with a renowned golf course architect and his wife.

June: The beach at sunset is the Louvre of nature.  A Sistine Chapel of sky. A Maxfield Parrish of pink-lined clouds over a Timothy Leary of tide.

July: In the Global Village at Floydfest I went from a talk on the teachings of Buddha to petting a milking cow named Primrose.  I met a young boy who was carving a bowl out of stone in the primitive arts camp, danced in my bare feet on the grass to the music of a surprisingly good band, and then laid in a hammock to wait for the full moon.

August: We passed a display of chicory and a field of cabbage.  Joe pye weed loomed tall over a row of goldenrod along a farmer’s fence. Around the corner a cluster of happy faced jewelweed seemed to greet us.  She pointed out boneset.  I opened a milkweed pod and shook the silky platinum hair loose.

September: As far as I can determine, I’m a Jungian Taoist who might have been a Transcendentalist if I lived in the time of Emerson and Thoreau.  I’m a cultural Catholic who believes in Divine Intelligence and accepts Evolution as fact.

October: If you ever go to Sinkland Farms Pumpkin Festival in Christiansburg make sure you bring a two year old.  According to my grandson Bryce, the farm is a kid’s play paradise where you can run through mazes, play king of the hay mountain, pet a baby goat, or play grocery store with the pumpkins. On this day, the cloud filled blue sky provided a masterpiece backdrop for taking a hay ride to the pumpkin patch and picking a fresh one off the vine.

November: Did I drink too much beer?  There was a winter draft with cinnamon,  beer with blueberries and dark beer mix with a top as creamy as Guinness.  The band setting up was called  the Syd Slack Elastic Waist Band.  Someone actually flirted with me and there were green spots floating all over the bar.

December: On Christmas Eve day we waited for baby Liam’s Paddington Bear to be delivered by UPS.  We fed the scraped bottoms of burnt Christmas cookies to the birds and enjoyed a walk in the snowy woods. The stockings were hung by the counter with care and emptied of clementine oranges, ginger cookies and buffalo jerky.

Last year’s Rear View Review is HERE.