Loose Leaf Notes

1. And I didn’t take pictures. Well, maybe a couple.

2. It was Nyo Allen’s 18 birthday celebration and as a member of Music Road Co and Father Sun family, there was lots of good music on stage.

3. A touching highlight was when Nyo sang this original song, dedicated to his Aunt Lila who passed away a few months ago.

4. Our friend Cameron Stallings made the colorful tent decorations and stage art for the party.

5. We danced to C.C. Coates the night before, but I didn’t take but one picture and no videos. What have I been doing?

6. I’ve been in the weeds, literally.

7. I love our monthly tea and poetry group at Living Light Studio. I’ve read my poems from my books Packing a Suitcase for the After Life, Objects are Closer Than They appear, Poems from the Dark Room and Mining the Gold of the Inner Life on my own and with my poet friend Katherine to audiences over the past five years, but reading them again to this small listening group is different, and I’m different. I follow a tender trail. I fully feel the poems on an emotional level and am easily choked up.  Many deal with the deaths of my brothers Jim and Dan, my sister Kathy and my parents. I hit a nerve and feel the emotion of the poems rather than holding it in as I’ve done with more formal readings. It’s open to the public.  Read your poems or come to listen.

8. I used to see colors when I hugged people. Now I get goosebumps every time I’m moved. And that’s a lot.

9. My sister messaged me to wish Joe and me a happy anniversary, but I had to admit neither of us celebrate or even remember the date. It was actually a blue moon in June of ’96 (the 29th I looked it up after she called) and after nine years of living together. Wow, that adds up.

10. From The Boston Tea Party Revisited …Fireworks are illegal for Massachusetts citizens to possess, let alone set off. In the past, Hullonians watched official firework displays, set off from offshore barges or from the local playground field. But then, even those were deemed unsafe or too costly by the powers that be, and so, being the freedom-loving and independent Yankees they are, Hullonians took matters into their own hands. Here’s what I saw on the beach: Spectacular fireworks, as professional as the ones that small towns display, were going off continuously and in both directions for as far as the eye could see. There were Revolutionary War-like bonfire encampments from horizon to horizon along the 5 mile stretch of beach. Groups of people were gathered, and some were still coming out of their houses, as though an invasion from Mars might be occurring. More HERE.

11. More Mining the Gold of Loose Leaf Notes:  Bryce (7) in the garden helping to pick and shuck corn:  “Nana, you’re like the farmer and Hopa is the hunter. You don’t even have to go to the grocery store.”

12. A honey bowl of sun / fills buttercups up / spills over red clover / in the height of midsummer / Grasshoppers hopscotch / Crickets crisscross / Petal skirts flirt / and bees do what they please – More from my poem The Hum of Summer HERE.

13. Bryce is 18 now. He took this video of a marmot during his camping road trip out west with his Hopa Joe.

_________Thirteen Thursday