A beautiful morning coming back home from coffee at the corner.
I walked around the subdivision this morning and met a new neighbor. She was quite convinced that she was going to fit a garage full of books into her house. Her daughter was not. A pleasant lady with an interesting story. When she said we should get together for coffee, I asked if she drank alcohol. The answer was no, so I suggested I could have her glass as well when I poured her coffee, She asked which house I lived in, I said, the one with the Harris sign. A moment of dead silence before she continued on with whatever she was saying. I lost track.
But I did feel compelled to add my thoughts to the Philosophical Considerations Book.
Some are religious, some have flamingoes in their yards, and of course, Trump. All before I find the place with an open bottle of wine and a comfortable chair.
The local grocery store is very low on food because the main warehouse east of Asheville was lost to hurricane Helene. It is the only thing we are missing compared to the immense losses of those near Asheville.
On another note….
I was thinking that The Fairy Book should be the smaller size so ordered two proofs to have a good look. Today they came and I have changed my mind. The book will now be the larger size…6″ x 8″. It feels nicer in the hand and the drawings show up better. So now I have ordered a proof of that size after making text corrections.
I will take one to the poetry meeting next week for when I read this:
The Woods Out Back
When I was young and alone
in the woods out back,
I’d find a moss-covered mound
and put down my sack.
Inside was my lunch, notebook
and pencil to draw
whatever magical things
I thought I saw.
Now all these years later
I sit in my chair
and draw from old memories
what I know was there.
S. Webster
Yesterday at the other poetry meeting, I took in this essay to see if it qualified as a prose poem. The answer was only if I reworked the paragraphs into stanzas, eliminated several words, etc. All agreed it reads like poetry but would remain an essay unless I made drastic changes.
I will put it here because it made me smile and remember…it will stay an essay.
Travel Journals – S. Webster
It is the journal that is indispensable when traveling. Not the camera or even the companions. The camera gives too much information, and the companions will not see nor remember it the way I do. But the journal with quick marks of local color, wines, foods, and notes, brings the entire trip back each time I refer to it. I see the place and smell the food. I taste the wine again and hear those sounds of being in the country, in the hotel, at an art opening, alone in an unfinished building with the soft sound of cane toad feet dragging across the floor toward my bed. My journals are filled with a shorthand and economy of marks that preserve it all, and I can return anytime I want to.
Young Patrick is waiting in the pub somewhere in New South Wales to shout me another beer while I wait to be found. The Poets in Pubs group that meets monthly in Broken Hill are still seated around the table in the back room listening to me read their favorite American poet in an appropriate accent. I can smell the worn leather case belonging to an elderly former boxer as he removes an old black and white photo of himself “in the day” and the poem he wrote earlier that week.
There are travel journals from Japan, China, Bali, New Zealand, France and Italy but the outback towns of Australia are where I prefer to spend most of my return voyages. Our shoulders touch, our eyes meet, and we raise our Toohey’s Old and Stone’s Ginger Wine in remembrance.
Til later….