Poem for Tuesday

Porch Swing in September
By Ted Kooser

The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.

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Today at lunchtime came over with hot pretzels and we watched The January Man, which I have been meaning to see for ages ever since certain evil influences tried to lure me in with fanfic (and succeeded). I thought I did not remember the movie, but as it turns out I merely had it totally mixed up in my head with The Calendar Girl Murders, an inferior movie with a singular asset named Robert Beltran. I had forgotten that Alan Rickman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio were in another movie together before Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves! And what fun they are together -- I think Ed, Nick and Bernadette should all live happily ever after together. Will you forgive me if I OT3, ?

Otherwise my day involved older son having his first fencing class, in which his instructor informed him that after a year and a half since his last lesson, she thinks he needs to return to the beginner-intermediate class for a few weeks before moving to the intermediate-advanced level, so he was rather put out even though we had warned him that this might happen. Younger son discovered that there are new Furbys from an eToys catalogue we got in the mail (reminder to self: hide all catalogues), went to the Hasbro web site after he did his homework and colored his ideal Furby, which he now wants for Chanukah. I discovered that Amazon.com has Robert Place's wonderful book on Tarot, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, on sale brand new for $6.78 -- along with Karen Hamaker-Zondag's Tarot As a Way of Life it's one of the most useful I've read -- and I think that may be all the exciting news around here, other than that I can't bear to listen to news about the Roberts hearings and really can't watch the news in general -- Gaza looting, Ulster mayhem, Ophelia evacuating the Outer Banks and New Orleans not looking all that different...

Hey, I wrote a Mulgrew article, a Blalock article and a Braga/Spiner Threshold article. Ooh that last sounds wrong but I don't feel like changing it. Hey , are you going to have to revise your theory on why there are no photos of Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean with their arms around each other now that there is one? *g* It made me squee even though I abandoned that fandom more than a year ago...

In addition to butterflies yesterday we walked through the rest of Brookside Gardens. Here are some photos.















This last is part of the monument to the ten sniper victims from this month in 2002, four of whom were from the Rockville-Olney-Wheaton area.