2024 Rear View Review
-The following 2024 review was done by excerpting the first few lines in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting.
January: In my experience, practices and platitudes that have once served have tended to fall away over time. Sun and moon. Breakfast and dinner. The arts. I keep in mind not to over-intellectualize. I keep it simple but don’t oversimplify. Curiosity is important. Beauty is salve.
February – Joe and I were part of the Naples beach parade with our matching hats. The bathrooms at the restaurant we ate at last night were marked Gulls and Buoys for Girls and Boys. A crevice of crescent over the ocean slowly filled with light like an hourglass each night. Seeing Flamingos was a bucket list experience for me.
March – There was a lot of green to be seen at McDaniel’s Tavern at Buffalo Mountain Brewery last night and a new brew called Lucky Charm. I was already lucky because I had just come from The Great Clover Hunt with Muriel Alderman at Floyd’s Center for the Arts and found my first wild four-leaf clover.
April – Eclipse: Moon empties the sun’s hot plate / bite by bite it swallows the light / Bit by bit it moves like a ship / crossing the sun’s sea of heat waves
May – If you can’t celebrate your triple goddess May birthday with your two friends because your recovering from dental surgery and one of the goddesses lives in Maine, you might have a small house party and share your gourmet carrot cake with your grandson who just turned 16 and drove up from Roanoke with Joe on his learner’s permit.
June – Poets reunited at the Little River Poetry Festival with hugs and conversation while lunch was being set up by the crew at Floyd’s Outer Space. After nine years, it felt like no time had passed or like it was a reoccurring dream. Some things were the same and some were different Katherine and I premiered the new collection in our Soulful Aging duo reading series: Fairy Godmother’s Midnight and the Art of Archetypes. The set started at the enchanting beginning with “Once Upon a Time,” which was dedicated to Joe who was taking pictures.
July – It didn’t rain once on my two days so far at Floydfest, but there were signs of past rains on Thursday, and I had a hard time keeping my head up for want of finding a four-leaf clover in the grass. On Friday, I got lucky walking through the site when I heard Jaime Wyatt on the main stage and remembered I had starred her on my “music to see” list. The first song I heard sounded like Bonnie Raitt.
August – In my nearly 20 years of blogging, this is my fifth post called “Can You Dig This?” Three of the ‘Can You Dig It’ posts are garden posts. One is a post on shoveling snow.
September – The closing gratitude circle at the Mindful Living and Soulful Aging retreat was an opportunity to ring the singing bowl and send our thoughts out into the universe. Someone read a poem. Martha sang a song. But mostly people expressed their heartfelt thoughts on how the retreat had changed them. There were smiles across the room and tears at times.
October – A poem is like a waking version of a dream, an opening of a window to let the birdsong in. Writing poems for me is like leaving breadcrumbs. I hope we all get home.
November – It looked like a scene from Where’s Waldo. I think it was the biggest crowd yet for the Dogtown Roadhouse annual Community Thanksgiving. It took three Dogtown turkeys – BBQ, Hawaiian and Cajun – to feed the crowd, and they went fast. First come, first self-served. The feast was followed the next night by Gobble Till You Wobble with Buzzkill Karaoke.
December – I want to wake up Christmas morning / like Ebenezer Scrooge did / and know there’s still time / I want jingle bells to chime / and not be drowned out by the sound / of Jacob Marley’s chains / I want the billionaire bah humbugs / of the world to be haunted / Shamed by Christmas ghosts / into epiphanies of conscience