Loose Leaf Notes

1.  Red zinnia flowers after our first freeze remind me that Christmas is coming.

2.  October ends with a  jackpot of color. By November fallen leaves cover our open acre of green like left-over Halloween candy corn.

3. Garrison Keillor’s Rules for Aging Include: Enumerate your benefits, enjoy inertia, get out of the way, don’t fight with younger people; they will be writing your obituary, and ignore rules you read in a book. Do what you were going to do anyway.

4. We grew up next to a cemetery but didn’t see it as a spooky place as much as a place to play, except for the receiving tomb where they stored dead bodies over winter when the ground was frozen. We stayed clear of that.

5.  ‘We used to think if we dug far enough we’d eventually get to China.  Is that something all the kids of our time grew up thinking, the way all the kids of my son’s generation seemed to know what “Nanny Nanny Boo Boo” meant?  I remember a scary song about dead people that we sang when we were kids …The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.  Was that a song that other kids knew or was it just for those who lived near a cemetery?” – From the Jim and Dan Stories

6. “There were some advantages to living near a cemetery, like all the free flowers we brought home to our mother.  The cemetery workers dumped them across the street at the bottom of a hill, right next to the blackberry bushes.  Bringing home flowers didn’t last long, though, because we got the distinct impression that my mother wasn’t thrilled with cemetery flowers, so we stopped doing it.  But we still collected the green plastic water tubes that held the flowers, because once we collected a whole set of ten, we could wear them on our fingers for long fingernails and then play “witch” or maybe “Godzilla.” One time, Joey brought a condom home that he found near the dump.  He thought it was a balloon.  He couldn’t understand why my dad was interested in it, or why it was taken away from him.  Another time, we found the hood to a car which we used to sled down the cemetery hill all winter long, the same hill where Jim and Dan are now buried, the same spot of land where two pumpkins now sit next to their graves, placed there on Halloween (Jim’s favorite holiday) by his kids, Valerie and Brian.” – Jim and Dan Stories

7. All things must pass, but some things last a long time:  On Saturday, we hiked the 6.6-miles to-and-from the Great Channels, a mountain entombed maze of 400 million-year-old sandstone outcroppings and caverns, likely formed from permafrost and ice wedging during the last ice age that split large seams of rocks apart.  The giant boulder maze covers about 20 acres. Some pathways loop around and connect to other paths and some reach dead ends. For me, it was something of a cross between the tunneled rooms of Fort Revere in Hull, MA where I grew up, the beach scene in the movie Ryan’s Daughter and Arches Park in the Southwest. -More from Monuments of Time HERE.

8. Speaking of Fort Revere, You Are HERE.

9. “Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity.” James Hollins

10. Birds are your angels now / You practice to be one / You save your voice / and hold out for an heirloom / You vow not to forget / that love is what’s left / when life has been spent / and time no longer counts you. -Read When Time Doesn’t Rhyme in its entirety HERE.

11. It turns out that Lurch (Casey Worley) still only grunts, and Fester (Riley Wheeler) is a champion of love who falls in love with the moon. Add a walking dead group of Addams ancestors and a dramatic tango dance (or was that a bullfight?) and you have a play with all the ingredients of a Broadway show, complete with chorus lines, punchlines, great costumes and songs, and stage props that include torture paraphernalia, which Gomez calls “instruments of persuasion.” Read Still Spooky and Kooky: Addams Family Musical a Hit in Floyd HERE. 

12. We freeze garden vegetables. Why not flowers? LOOK how easy it is to do.

13. Distilled to an essence / and faithful to the eternal / I like poems of choice and change / that embody the inevitable… Read A Poem That Looks Good for its Age in its entirety HERE. 

_________Thirteen Thursday