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As a child, I learned to eat honeysuckle sugar.

October 11, 2017 by 25 Comments

As a child, I learned to eat honeysuckle sugar. It is a tedious process, […] one that requires demonstration and touch. Despite the meager payoff, a few drops of nectar, these are small, bright memories. When I look through my past for a consistent pleasure, I find those empty, discarded blossoms scattered through my childhood summers.

~ Alysia Sawchyn, from “Riverbanks and Honeysuckle,” Cutbank (no. 86, July 2016)

Notes:

  • Inspired by Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay: “the surface on which we step has no more substance than the clouds floating above us on a summer day.“
  • Photo of Honeysuckle: Awkward Botany.
  • Prose Source: Memory’s Landscape.  Alysia Sawchyn was the Winner of the CutBank 2016 Big Sky, Small Prose: Flash Contest with Riverbanks and Honeysuckle.
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Lightly child, lightly. (Winter. Last Call.)

March 30, 2017 by 8 Comments

In the postcard I keep of a field in winter,
a child’s head is tilted back,
her mouth open to snow.

The awe is held still, says oh and oh and oh.

— Allison Benis White, from Please Bury Me in This

 

Notes:

  • Photo:  just charlaine (via children of the universe). Quote: A Chateau of My Heart
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
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Saturday Morning

March 25, 2017 by 18 Comments

I see no pressing reason to get out of bed.
The lights are off
and it is raining
and the covers are the cave I dreamed of when I was a child.

– Barry Hannah, from Ray: A Novel

Notes: Photo: Dormír via Mennyfox55. Quote: Memory’s Landscape

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the summer we’re all sharing still has a few breaths left

September 2, 2016 by 28 Comments

beach-summer-weekend-breeze-grass-sand-dunes

From behind me in the heat, beneath a cloudless sky, I hear happy shouts. Treasure every moment you are given; savor every summer’s day. From the time you are a child there is the sanguine suggestion that you will have a supply of those days stretching to the horizon and beyond. The greatest gift of summers, even as they conclude each September, is the winking promise that next year a new one will be rolling around. Waiting for you up ahead.

Labor Day weekend: Soon autumn will arrive, cool days for rekindled ambition, a time for fervent vows and ardent goals, of fresh determination that this may be the season when your ship comes in. But before that, even now, the summer we’re all sharing still has a few breaths left, each with an expiration date. To squander a single one of them would seem a shame.

~ Bob Greene, excerpt from Summer’s Greatest Gift Is That Next Year There Will Be Another

Photo Sand, wind & jazz by Fintlandia (via couvertures de sérénité)

 

 

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Summertime

August 6, 2016 by 37 Comments

beach-memories-summer

Charles Simic, 78, the Pulitzer Prize winning Serbian-American poet, wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books which was published in July, 2013.  It is titled “Summertime” and is a wonderful collage of short reflections on summer. Here’s a few excerpts:

  • A wind so mild this afternoon it touches our faces as we lie in the shade like little children going to sleep.
  • Are rocking chairs in this country, I’m asking myself, being rocked on summer evenings as much as they once were? Or do they stand abandoned and motionless on dark porches across the land, now that their elderly owners tend to relieve their boredom by sitting in front of their computers?
  • To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived liked the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds.
  • There’s something familial, deeply comforting in the sound of a pig oinking in the peace and slumber of a summer afternoon.
  • For the sweet old couple working side by side in the garden, being ignorant of what goes on in the world has been the secret of their lifelong happiness.

Don’t miss “Summertime” in its entirety here: The New York Review of Books

Notes:

 

 

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Lightly child, lightly.

May 12, 2016 by 18 Comments
light,lightly,
Good memories that even now can heal.
Those mornings when I laddered to the loft,
made my straw manger beside the square bale door.
There on the straw-strewn floor,
a sundial of slanted light.
I’d reach my child’s palm into it,
hold sunspill like rain.

– Ron Rash, Above the Waterfall

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Memory’s Landscape. Photo: Thank you Your Eyes Blaze Out
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

 

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Walking with Spirits.

May 7, 2016 by 11 Comments

rural-sleep-walking

I was a sleepwalker as a kid. Always Summer.  Always between the late night news and 2 a.m. Walking with spirits. And not friendly ones.

She would scold him. What’s wrong with you. Don’t do it. Don’t take him with you.  He shrugged her off. The volunteer Gravedigger would grab three red apples, polish each one to a high gloss, and gently place them in a brown paper sack. He would toss his shovel, his pick axe and his Grandson in his pick-up and off they went.

I would wake, staring at the clock in the kitchen. 1:23 a.m. In rural Canadian stillness. Alone.

I would wake in the front yard, the cool grass between my toes. Full Moon luminous.

I would wake on the gravel road in front of the house, in white briefs and a white tee shirt, in total darkness, the screen door slapping.  Shivering. [Read more…]

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Perspective of time and distance alter substance

January 14, 2016 by 13 Comments

pascal-campion-drawing-illustration-jump-child-youth-memories

In the poems I have been thinking of and writing the last few years, I have grown aware that childhood is a subject somehow available to me all over again. The perspective of time and distance alter substance somewhat, and so it is possible to think freshly of things that were once familiar and ordinary, as if they had become strange again. I don’t know whether this is true of everybody’s experience, but at a certain point childhood seems mythical once more. It did to start with, and it does suddenly again.

~ Donald Justice, from an interview with The Missouri Review, quoted by Linda Pastan, “Yesterday’s Noise: The Poetry of Childhood Memory,” Writer (vol. 105, no. 10, 1992)

Credits: Art – Pascal Campion. Quote: Memory Landscape

 

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(Nostalgia) The taste of early things lives on.

December 30, 2015 by 22 Comments

water-ocean-sea-wave-beach

As a boy I knew none of this. In the summer we went to the beach, Atlantic City, and stayed with my maternal grandparents: my mother, cousins, aunts, and I. Across the bright flatlands and bridges, the earth of the roadside losing its color, we drove, children in a separate compartment, the rumble seat, in back, hair blowing, arms waving in happiness. There was sea smell in the air and sun in the bedroom windows. The rhythm of life was set by adults but the carefree joys were ours.

We played all day in the sand, down where it was smoothest, the green sea hissing at our feet. Not far offshore was the black wreckage of a small coastal steamer. We were unable to go near it but it is stuck there in memory, the sea swelling over it and then pouring away, the water dropping in sheets from its sides…The taste of early things lives on.

In my mouth I feel the freshness of farm tomatoes and salt, the scrambled eggs my grandmother made, the unexpected gulps of sea. In my heart there remains childish love for those cousins, whom I saw only seldom and who later drifted away entirely.

~ James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

Image: “Beach Breaks” D.Fodie – Retrospective

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Riding Metro North. With My Schwinn

December 10, 2015 by 31 Comments

image

5:40 am train to Grand Central.
50º F. Top coat-free morning.
Warm.

Morning papers.

Photo of the Day: Jogger in Beijing. Eyes visible. Face covered with a mask. Street flooded with smog. Mile 1 of apocalypse?

Climate change.
Trump
Fear.
Guns.
Grim.

Hoo-Ah!
Lt. Col. Frank Slade (aka Al Pacino) in Scent of a Woman: “there isn’t nothin’ like the sight of an amputated spirit.”

Bend it. Bend it back.

Mid-summer. 1970’s. Billy’s out front. Brother Rich and cousin Jim tail far behind.  The fishing pole is in my right hand and bending in the wind. I’m griping the handle bars and pumpin’ my legs.  Up down. Up down.  We reach the final leg, a steep decline.  Heads are tucked down and in over the handle bars. The Schwinn accelerates.  We lean into the slow turn right. And then into the slow turn left. The white birches lining the road are a blur.

Metro North makes its first stop and rolls on.  I turn my gaze to the window.  Lights from lamp posts, street lights and apartments illuminate the darkness and whiz by.

I turn my right shoulder ever so slightly to cock the rod.  Out of my right eye are lush forests.  I cast. The floater and lead are suspended in the air. The worm is tucked in tightly on the hook. Towering above, the Cascade Mountains watch over. And the cloudless blue skies watch over all of us.  The Kootenay River, clear, clean and lined with moss covered stones, meanders down stream.

The train pulls into Grand Central. We spill out.

The floater, red and striped, is suspended.  Hanging, frozen in time.

Hold it.

Stop right there.

Don’t let me go.

Notes:

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