#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Charles River waking up
"The gilding of the Indian summer mellowed the pastures far and wide.
The russet woods stood ripe to be stripped, but were yet full of leaf.
The purple of heath-bloom, faded but not withered, tinged the hills...
Fieldhead gardens bore the seal of gentle decay; ... its time of
flowers and even of fruit was over."~Charlotte Brontë
Early, there is mist that rises from the October Charles. Gloveless, my hands are cold. But the sky is blue and the sun is warming the earth. I must revise a poem today for a deadline. I am going to a workshop later this month, online, a morning workshop with the poet Paul Muldoon. I have chosen a poem I have been working on, drafts and drafts, workshop after workshop, about a meditation retreat. I keep thinking I am finding a way with it, and wonder, also, if I should just give it up, but I don’t, because there is so much I like about it. While I walk, under the trees going red and gold, and the mist rising, I think about this poem, the work to be done by the end of the day. And then I get lost in my headphones, listening to the most amazing book on Audible: “Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver,” by Jill Heinerth. Her narration and stories are transfixing. I’m hooked. I could listen to her risk-taking and discovery all day. But I am home. I spend most of the afternoon revising, fussing with the poem. The house is quieter today than it has been, and there’s a fire. Again, I am lost, and the time flies. I am satisfied enough. The poem goes off, imperfect, and either better or worse. Frank and I go into the yard, it is Friday, he’s done early, the weekend begins with a stroll around the the yard, the house, and my excitement about a new garden area that I’ve started to clear. by a set of doors on the far side of the house. I have ripped out the weeds cluttering the path to a door we haven’t used. I have to be patient. It’s not the time to plant. There must be another fall, another winter to wait through to spring. In March, this baby seemed impossibly far off; such a long wait. Two seasons have passed, spring and summer, now fall, and the waiting will be over soon.
