Poem for Thursday

Good and Bad Children
By Robert Louis Stevenson

Children, you are very little,
And your bones are very brittle;
If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.

You must still be bright and quiet,
And content with simple diet;
And remain, through all bewild'ring,
Innocent and honest children.

Happy hearts and happy faces,
Happy play in grassy places--
That was how in ancient ages,
Children grew to kings and sages.

But the unkind and the unruly,
And the sort who eat unduly,
They must never hope for glory--
Theirs is quite a different story!

Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.

--------

All day Wednesday I had young guys in tight shirts in my house. Unfortunately the reason they were here was to put my house back together and neither spoke much English. The good news is that there is now a cabinet in my kids' bathroom again (which is actually much nicer than the one that got ruined in the flood) and instead of a hole there is a mismatched piece of drywall in the living room ceiling. The bad news is that there were hammers and drills and scrapers and some knife-cutting-drywall thing that was worse than fingers on a chalkboard. told me about ("Write Something You Miserable Fuck") and made me smile a lot, because while I routinely write much more than ten minutes a day, I've given up thinking that writing a rushed novella in a month is going to lead to anything bigger. What I need to do is write a non-rushed novel over several months without drills interrupting me.

But things are progressing, if more slowly and at greater expense than we had hoped, and the guys left around dinnertime so we could eat a modified Dia de los Muertos feast (all right, mostly this was an excuse for Mexican food) and then get ready for trick-or-treating. The kids both wore heavy capes and scary masks and gloves; I wore a much flimsier cape and a big lacy blouse and black velvet skirt and witch hat (which did not stay on long, as it made my head sweat). We had fewer visitors than last year but still a good number, and the kids came home with an absolutely terrifying collection of junk, of which my favorite items were 150-calorie packs of Wheat Thins. (Well, those were what I admired the most; my favorite items were the Almond Joys!)


My children and Adam's best friend trick-or-treating. Don't I have handsome sons? *sighs proudly*


Our jack-o-lanters on the front stoop...


...and the tea light glowing in the candle holder to show kids where the edge of the steps are...


...cannot compete with some of the more impressively carved pumpkins in the neighborhood.


There are neighbors who celebrate the Day of the Dead...


...and neighbors who just enjoy tissue paper ghosts in their trees.


And here I am, in my fancy Spider Woman cape since I had to loan older son my heavy velvet one to trick-or-treat in.


Once again, my handsome sons!

I had a somewhat hectic viewing of Pushing Daisies due to the knocking at the door, but I did manage to enjoy it enormously anyway. The Doctor Seuss-style history of why Ned hates Halloween (I keep wanting to call him "the piemaker" like the narrator does), including that deep-seated childhood nightmare -- being sent off to boarding school and forgotten entirely -- is beautifully done, hilarious and sad at the same time, and Olive's past in the "Jock-Off 2000" had me howling. And the acting is universally wonderful, and it's actually much sexier to watch these people who can't ever have sex than most of the set-up UST on most shows....I adore this series.

And I managed to get the laundry folded while waiting for people at the door, and moved the upstairs bookcase out of the way so that one wall at least can be painted on Thursday, when in the afternoon while the paint and sealer are drying, we are going with my in-laws to Gambrill, Gathland and Washington Monument State Parks as we do each year to picnic, hike and see the leaves.