Sherry Chandler » October 1
October 1
So, today we turn the calendar page and autumn is really, truly here. Golden October may not be so much golden as brown around here. Driving up to my mother’s place in Owen County yesterday, I was dismayed at the number of trees whose leaves were not the brown of autumn but the dried up brown of death.
September was a quite a month in my life, beginning with my mother’s 90th birthday and ending with the 28th Women Writers Conference, the viewing of Motherland Afghanistan and unforgettable readings by poets such as Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye. If you ever get a chance to hear either of these women, grab it!
But now it’s Monday morning, another week to face, another calendar page to turn. I have much to process and dirty dishes in the sink. The quotidian world must have its due, but there’s something to be said for washing dishes. I’ve written some of my best lines with my hands in warm soapy water.
I will have more to say later. Meanwhile, take a look at Jen Stark’s cardstock sculpture. Link courtesy of Donna Rhae Marder.
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Good on Barney Frank; he has impressed me lately, although my only previous knowledge of him was through...
4 Comments
1. Rosalie replies at 1st October 2007, 12:56 pm :
In 1969 I lived in Coronado, CA, where I attended art school. I had a studio apartment with no phone, so I had a small pad of paper and a pencil attached to the wall outside my door for messages. I came home from school on the afternoon of October 1st and found this written on my pad: “There’s something about October that sets gypsy blood astir.” I don’t know who wrote it, but I have thought of it every October 1st since. — Ro
2. sherry replies at 2nd October 2007, 10:01 am :
Rosalie, what a lovely story. Thank you for sharing.
My first experience of poetry was when my mother would recite to me poems she had memorized during her days in a one-room school in rural Owen County. One of them was Helen Hunt Jackson’s “October’s Bright Blue Weather.” Not, perhaps, what we would call great poetry today but it gave my mother joy and bits of it have stuck with me for five decades or so. I don’t know whether that set my love for October:
October’s Bright Blue Weather
O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather;
When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;
When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;
When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;
When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;
When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October’s bright blue weather.
O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October’s bright blue weather.
3. Alan Bender replies at 2nd October 2007, 11:03 am :
Sherry,
The link to Jen Stark’s work is a most wonderful October gift. Thank you so much for sharing.
4. sherry replies at 3rd October 2007, 10:21 am :
Ah, Alan, the thanks all goes to Donna Marder who keeps me abreast of the best art on the web. These are great, aren’t they?
Leave a comment