Poem for Tuesday and Halloween

November Night
By Adelaide Crapsey

Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

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Halloween was a beautiful, sunny, cool day in the DC area. Adam had no school because of teacher meetings and Paul had the day off for an early doctor appointment. We had lunch in College Park with Daniel, who is thinking about dropping out of College Park Scholars so he can do a dual degree in mechanical engineering and computer science; one's an engineering degree and one's an applied science degree, so there's not a lot of crossover coursework, and it would be very hard for him to do a Scholars project while taking so many classes. We had Sbarro in the student union and discussed it with him since he needs to meet with his adviser tomorrow.

In the afternoon we all worked on our pumpkin, carving and toasting seeds. Then Adam went to his girlfriend's house with a bunch of other friends while Paul and I went to the neighborhood Halloween party, which was organized by the mother of one of Adam's friends. Trick or treaters usually start arriving soon after that breaks up, so we had a quick dinner and lit our candles. We had far fewer visitors this year than last, when we went through eight bags of candy, though still enough to aggravate the cats, particularly when one of son's friends arrived with her dog! We watched Terra Nova when we weren't opening the door, but I feel like I missed half of it. Hope everyone had a lovely Samhain!


Many costumed neighbors turned out for the local Halloween party.


Since I no longer get to go to parades at my kids' schools, this is where I get my Adorable Child fix...


...though the gendered costumes haven't improved much.


Everyone looked like they were having a great time, though.


This is me with the mother of Daniel W, the boy we took to Kings Dominion on Sunday.


Earlier, Adam and our pet targ helped carve the pumpkin...


...which we kept fairly simple this year due to time constraints.


Adam gave his prize whale to his girlfriend as a present, while his friend drew a Picasso for his girlfriend.


Here they are with the friend who came to Kings Dominion in mask.


And here is our pumpkin, lit, on the porch.

Poem for Monday and Kings Dominion

Witch-Wife
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

She is neither pink nor pale,
    And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
    And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
    In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
    Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
    And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
    And she never will be all mine.

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We spent nearly all of Sunday at Kings Dominion with Adam and his friend Daniel Wigle, a trip we had promised them before Adam's birthday in July but couldn't make work for any weekend in the summer or early fall. That worked out well, because we couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day -- mid-50s, not a cloud in the sky, red-gold leaves still on the trees all around the park -- and until late afternoon, when people started to arrive for the Halloween-themed Haunt activities, it wasn't crowded at all, meaning the lines for the rides were quite short. Adam's priority was roller coasters; they went on Flight of Fear, Intimidator, Volcano, Dominator, Shockwave, Avalanche, and the classic from my youth, the Rebel Yell, plus a bunch of flying rides. We "old people" stuck to the ferris wheel and were passengers on the Blue Ridge Tollway (on which we sat in the back of a car driven by Daniel W, since driving is the one thing we can do that he can't).

We all shared a pizza for lunch, had some cotton candy and drinks late in the afternoon, went up the 1/3-scale Eiffel Tower together, and looked at the Halloween decorations that were all around the park (tombstones, "bloody corpses" and skeletons, ravens, etc.). I played a couple of rounds of skee-ball, winning a pair of small rubber sea turtles, and left shortly after Adam tossed a quarter onto a dish and won a four-foot stuffed whale, which pleased him greatly. The food in the park is ridiculously expensive, so instead of staying for dinner, we stopped in Fredericksburg at Carlos O'Kelly's for enchiladas, which were yummy. Then we came home and Paul and I watched Case Histories, which continued to be fairly depressing but really well acted. I will not mention the embarrassment that was the Redskins game, which we followed on Sportacular -- frankly I'm more annoyed that the Cowboys didn't manage to beat the Eagles. At least the Ravens won!


Adam and Daniel W about to ride the Volcano, which belches fire when it isn't flipping people upside down...


...and sitting across from me on the Ferris Wheel as it rises above the Rebel Yell.


Here they are near the end of the Intimidator ride, which they went on twice (and apparently blacked out on).


The Halloween decorations include ghouls under the Eiffel Tower...


...and lots of graveyard imagery, most less cheesy than this!


There are also very tall pirates, even when it isn't a holiday.


And cotton candy in the usual pink and blue.


Adam won this whale at a Quarter Toss. Daniel W was envious but the cats are suspicious of it!

Poem for Sunday and October Snow

Crocus
By Alfred Kreymborg

When trees have lost remembrance of the leaves
that spring bequeaths to summer, autumn weaves
and loosens mournfully -- this dirge, to whom
does it belong -- who treads the hidden loom?

When peaks are overwhelmed with snow and ice,
and clouds with crepe bedeck and shroud the skies --
nor any sun or moon or star, it seems,
can wedge a path of light through such black dreams --

All motion cold, and dead all traces thereof:
What sudden shock below, or spark above,
starts torrents raging down till rivers surge --
that aid the first small crocus to emerge?

The earth will turn and spin and fairly soar,
that couldn't move a tortoise-foot before --
and planets permeate the atmosphere
till misery depart and mystery clear! --

And yet, so insignificant a hearse? --
who gave it the endurance so to brave
such elements? -- shove winter down a grave? --
and then lead on again the universe?

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Pretty much my entire Saturday was taken up with the freak October snowstorm that struck the east coast. We had it very easy here -- my in-laws got several inches piled on their street, my sister's area lost power, my friends in New England got a foot of snow -- but we had precipitation from before dawn (which was not apparent, as it was still quite dark outside at 9 a.m.) until evening, with snow showers on and off during the morning and quite hard snowfall for several hours in the afternoon, though thankfully it only stuck to metal surfaces like cars, not to streets and more importantly not to local tree branches which could have fallen on roads and power lines. I blame the snow for the terrible conditions in College Park that caused the Terps to fall to Boston College.

Anyway, after our late start in the darkness, it was a pretty quiet day. Except for a brief shopping trip to the mall, which was unsurprisingly mobbed with people like us who decided it was the only safe place to take a walk given the weather, we mostly hung out, read, and watched football. Adam was in and out with friends (and apparently earned the approval of his maybe-girlfriend's parents during an after dinner visit), but the cats lounged on the couch with us all afternoon and evening. We watched the third and fourth episodes of the current season of Merlin, which I'd thought would make me sad but were instead so amazingly slashy that I couldn't work up any real unhappiness. I am more annoyed that Ohio State beat Wisconsin! And now I must sleep so we can take Adam to King's Dominion tomorrow as a late birthday present.

Poem for Saturday and Autumn into Winter

In the Airport
By Eleni Sikélianòs

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field.

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I got to spend quite a bit of Friday with Paul, though not for the best of reasons -- his eye has been bothering him and he had a late-morning doctor appointment, so he worked from home in the morning, then returned and worked from home in the afternoon after he had an infection diagnosed and a prescription. Hopefully this is it for ALL of us with eye infections for the foreseeable future! It sounds like we may have an enforced quiet day tomorrow due to snow (SNOW! NOOO!) so everyone can recover.

I posted my review of DS9's "A Man Alone", which I loved SO much more this time around, and got out to enjoy the gorgeous weather before we went to dinner with my parents (Adam having belatedly informed us again that he had plans with friends...next week we may make plans with our own friends, though he is home now and we watched Sanctuary together which should always end just the way this one did, heh). I actually preferred it to Nikita for a change. Congrats to the Cardinals, and here are some Brookside Gardens autumn photos:

Poem for Friday and Riley's Lock

Mother
By Herman de Coninck
Translated by Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Bosselaar

What you do with time
is what a grandmother clock
does with it: strike twelve
and take its time doing it.
You’re the clock: time passes,
you remain. And wait.

Waiting is what happens to
a snow-covered garden,
a trunk under moss,
hope for better times
in the nineteenth century,
or words in a poem.

For poetry is about letting things
grow moldy together, like grapes
turning into wine, reality into preserves,
and hoarding words
in the cellar of yourself.

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Thursday was nearly as rainy as Wednesday. I spent the morning having Issues burning backup discs (apparently there is a maximum number of files a DVD can hold regardless of the size of the files, or at least there is in the programs I use). In the afternoon I took a brief walk and took Adam along with his friend Daniel to Hot Topic to get pink hair dye for Halloween. His hair is so dark that it's only moderately pink, but that may be just as well when it comes time to wash it out.

Adam wanted to go to his high school's Got Talent show in the evening, so we had dinner early, then I watched DS9's "A Man Alone" to review -- an episode I think I only saw when it originally aired. I love Odo almost as much as I love Kira. Then we watched the World Series, which has seemed endless, I suppose because I don't passionately care who wins! Here are some photos from Riley's Lock last weekend, both the C&O Canal and the view across the Potomac River toward a Virginia golf course:

Poem for Thursday and Beaver Dams

Hawthorne in Tuckerton
By Stephen Dunn

Like the other great ones he wouldn't vanish
into his own destiny, kept showing up
in different parts of America, small pious towns
like this one, wooded, where he trusted
that what thumped in the human heart
would manifest, make its old nightly rounds.

"Scratch an American," he was overheard saying
at the diner, "and you'll find a Puritan."
And one man nodded while another
in a John Deere cap swallowed hard,
changed the subject to the Phillies.
Hawthorne still loved the repressed, the avoided.

Nothing made him more alert than a large passion
twisted, coiled in the recesses of an innocent.
But something had changed.
People camped without fear in the piney forest,
were simply amused by tales of the Jersey Devil.
And Tuckerton now had its Seaport. Its Dimmesdales

and Rappacinis had a stake in the market.
Their daughters wore lipstick and openly danced
to loud music. Hawthorne began to feel like the ghost
he was. Grace, he lamented, was once so poignant
before this democratization of the sacred. Adultery
so much more interesting when everyone didn't commit it.

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It was a quiet, rainy Wednesday that I spent working and backing up files, so I have nothing exciting to report. I kept trying to motivate myself to clean up the downstairs bathroom, whose sink doesn't work so everyone else uses it as a dumping ground, but I'd just end up having to move people's piles of stuff somewhere else, so I kept stalling and ended up reading pretty much the entire Washington Post instead. Are there actually people who read the paper cover to cover every day who don't have a two-hour commute on public transportation? How do people find the time?

I have no idea where the evening went...I was cleaning up some files and the next thing I knew it was dinnertime, then we went to watch the World Series only to find it was rained out, then we went to watch Boardwalk Empire only to find that this week's episode STILL is not On Demand. So we decided to record The Lost World, since it's the only Jurassic Park movie we didn't have a copy of, and we ended up watching and really enjoying it. It's as silly as ever but has a really great cast and the dinos win. Here are a few photos from Huntley Meadows last weekend, including the beaver lodge and dams: