Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following 2014 review was done by excerpting the first line or few in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting.

January – What happens to the poem after the climax? When you have to re-create the romance? When you have to gamble the progress already made? Invite strangers into your innermost space?

February – Neighbors on snow plows are the heroes of the day. Nearly two feet in two days was no picnic (and notice that the picnic bench seating has completely disappeared).   Even the chickens appreciate the snow shoveling efforts of others.

March – I wasn’t at the Mardi Gras for more than five minutes before a man in a devil mask asked me if I’d consider selling my soul.  “How many tickets is that worth?” I asked.

April – Sometimes when you live in Floyd you forget that Friday is Jamboree night until you go to town for an unrelated reason and see tourists taking pictures of the Farmers Supply.  People are walking around with ice cream cones and the strum of fiddles can be heard. You cross the one stoplight intersection to meet friends at Oddfella’s Cantina, stopping to wave to a neighbor across the street.  That’s when you look up and notice the moon on the rise.  You join the rest of the tourists and snap.

May – Acupuncture, carrot cake, putt putt golf and ballroom dancing, all against the backdrop of garden dirt-lined fingers tapping at the keyboard, a browser that kept wanting to crash, a black snake in the chicken coop and a mystery culprit that kept emptying the birdfeeder of every last drop of seed.  I really don’t know how to explain my birthday weekend.  We ate out three times.

June – Driving home from Christiansburg yesterday I watched cloud continents collide. Light and dark confronted each other, storm threatened shapes like Italy and England dissolved into thin air and even the moon got chased.

July – Ziggy Marley’s people have checked out this blog.   I was told that by a Floydfest staffer after I signed an agreement in order to be in the media pit and take pictures when he played Floydfest on Friday night.

August – Butterflies and blooms. What could be better? I’m dizzy with the colors of zinnia and the glitter of the great spangled fritillary flittering all over my yard. Brazened by the drunken desire for nectar, the butterflies are no longer resistant to close proximity of my camera and some have even landed on me.

September – The word glorious came to mind: a bounty of apples picked with our precious grandsons in our favorite abandoned orchard. “I’m taking some good Andrew Wyeth shots,” I said to Joe, who was reassuring three-year-old Liam that the grazing cows wouldn’t hurt us. Our favorite “golden tree” stood alone in the sun-filled pasture.  It had the best tasting apples of the day.

October – October is the best dressed month of the year and the Parkway is a runway show of color. The double yellow road line winds like a ribbon, tying nature’s glamour, shine and glitter all together. Like a lit up Las Vegas turned on by the sun, full length trees and a palette of rolling scenery steal the spotlight.

November – I can’t drive through any part of my hometown of Hull (MA) without setting off a memory.  They come, one right after the other, like text messages from the past dinging on my phone.  That’s where my first boyfriend lived, and a girlfriend who had a really cool dollhouse lived in the house across the street. That’s where I learned to play pinball.   I practiced CYO drill team in that field and had my first Holy Communion in that church.

December – It felt like we fell into a Christmas wormhole, coming out of the theater after watching the nearly three-hour Science Fiction film, Interstellar, on Christmas evening. I stumbled out of the theater in a surreal haze and saw a crescent dish of a moon hanging low on the horizon, just over a Best Buy sign. At the Hotel Roanoke we sipped Irish stout (Josh), Muscat wine (me) and amaretto (Joe) and talked about plot loop holes, black holes, other dimensions and time travel. I’m as much a fan of Christmas lights as I am of Science Fiction and was happy to see the hotel’s festival of trees on display.

________2013 Rear View Review is HERE.   / Shadow Shot Sunday