Loose Leaf Notes

1. I tell time in summer by what flower is in bloom.

2. Mushroom omelets. A crossword puzzle to solve. Tracking bats that sleep between cabin logs. Spraying lilies with deer deterrent.  Stillness is broken with a windchime song. Birds sing in stereo like sopranos and chorus.  Hens cluck and brag about their newly laid eggs. Bathing suit and a towel dries across the porch chair. Purple stokes asters are laid down from the rain but the corn is still standing and the tall phlox is about to pop. All there is to do is to wait for the tomatoes to turn red. I make a second cup of tea while I wait.

3. The word artistic sounds like autistic.

4. Haven sounds like heaven and earth spells heart with the letters moved around.

5. Once a flower child, always a flower child HERE.

6. I don’t have to leave my porch to be on vacation. 

7. At a dental consultation on Monday, the dentist asked if I knew what was good about getting older. I answered, “I’m better at doing crossword puzzles because I know more?” He said ‘no, when you get older sometimes your teeth lose their nerve and have no sensitivity to pain.’

8. “No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known. If it is the harvest of true concentration, it will know more than can be said in any forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.” Jane Hirshfield

9. “What’s the matter? “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.” Einstein

10. “What made last Tuesday better than average – If I were a professional wrestler, the pandemic would’ve been rough on me, being a 300-lb. guy with big tattoos and weird hair and nothing to do but walk his Pekingese, but for a writer, isolation is an opportunity. And I found a young couple to join me for dinner. Two musicians pursuing nonmusical careers that engage them, both of them cheerful and looking ahead, and I ordered oysters and a salad and they ordered a humongous chunk of meat, which might’ve been a flank of antelope or the left cheek of a cougar, which they split, and, just in case their mothers inquired, a serving of broccolini.” -Garrison Keillor

11. Time doesn’t heal / It only hurts slightly / It drips like a slow leak / but pours in the end / Time wears a path / that erodes all our secrets / It doesn’t play favorites / and never admits its faults.  Read Time Will Tell in its entirety HERE.

12. HERE is another take on “Time Will Tell.”

13. “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”  Winston Churchill

__________Thirteen Thursday