Apple orchard in Littleton.

Hi Michael,

All this talk about grammar on the blog reminded me of this column I read in the New Yorker. I didn’t realize how clever it was until the very end. Can you see it?

pesky godson

The year Hilary turned 3, we had a very large party for her. We had aunts, uncles, cousins along with a smattering of playgroup friends totally something like 40 people in the house. Fully dressed in her party dress, pink tights, black Mary Jane’s and hair in pig tails, she quietly disappeared from the party. She was missed after a while and a search ensued. After a longer while she was discovered in her bed with the covers pulled up tightly over her head. When asked why she was in bed when there was such a wonderful party going on in her honor, she politely said,

“Mama, can you please ask the people to leave? There are too many of them.”

I read like a goat eats. I don’t see punctuation, and whatever is in my way, well, it sure doesn’t effect my comprehension, as it clearly does smiling Dan’s. Btw, Jennifer, nice grenade you launched at him a while back. I’m guessing he didn’t see it. However, whenever I read something I’ve written, say, more than three days ago, I’m astounded by the number of of typos, and, what Adam refers to as my comma carnage.

Does it make a difference that I know I’m repeating myself? It’s all so I can post this cartoon which applies to me more than this one.

Mike,

Nothin’ like a new snow to let you in on the otherwise unseen goings on of one’s “wild” backyard — I’m guessing Felis silvestris catus from back right to front left, with an evidently time-other passage of Sciurus carolinensus middle left to front right.

Adam

by Wendell Berry

1.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs,
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

2.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

3.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

4.

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend

slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

6.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

7.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in this ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

How often can you say that Zippy is laugh out loud funny?

We’re going to see Molly in “Gary” at the Boston Playrights’ Theatre on Friday. If you click on the Media link on her website you’ll get to this week’s short Youtube skit.

Mike,

No matter how cold it gets, and no matter how much it snows in NE or CO, there is always one place that’s colder and snowier — Antarctica, where these pictures of a “Frozen Wave” were taken. One wild-eyed blogger claims that these show an ocean wave that punctured the sea ice and froze solid.  That may be what it looks like, but it is probably part of a glacier poking up through the sea ice. If anyone finds out an accurate attribution for these amazing pictures, please let me know.

–rakkity

Karen, her daughter, Annie, and Matt

Karen, Jacquie and Diane.

Matt and pesky godson fishing from a bridge in Menemsha.

Pesky and his dad fighting waves at Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark.

Matt and pesky godson fishing from a bridge in Menemsha.

Pesky and his dad fighting waves at Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark.