Poem for Friday

Truro
By Elizabeth Spires

I found a white stone on the beach
inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.
All night I'd slept in fits and starts,
my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.
And then morning. And then a walk,
the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.
I felt its calm power as I held it
and wished a wish I cannot tell.
It fit in my hand like a hand gently
holding my hand through a sleepless night.
A stone, so like, so unlike,
all the others it could only be mine.

The wordless white stone of my life!

--------

Another not-very-eventful day -- yeah, I am having a quiet week. Got up early to get witch plushies for me and Adam so our penguins can celebrate Halloween in style, though mine is happily in Sherwood Forest right now, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Wrote a review of Next Gen's "Cause and Effect" to post Friday because I won't actually get any writing done, in all likelihood -- the kids have no school, so we are going to the NSA National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade and maybe the National Wildlife Visitor Center at the Patuxent Research Refuge. My mom got me some low-sodium stuff from My Organic Market, so now I know where to get salt-free bread. We had dinner with my parents -- my mom cooked stuff I could eat, and I thought the shrimp corn chowder in particular was really good.


Glass paperweights at Art of Fire for sale on the Countryside Artisans Fall Tour.


Son visiting with the dogs at Something Earthy Pottery Studio.


Also at Something Earthy, ocarinas in the shapes of animals.


Iron Antler Forge makes skeleton bodies for pumpkin heads to decorate lawns at Halloween.


The alpacas at A Paca Fun Farm were curious about visitors until the visitors got close enough to pet them. Then they backed off.


Autumn-colored yarn at Dancing Leaf Farm...


...and autumn colors in the trees above the sheep.

We all enjoyed this week's FlashForward more than last week's, though I could see how that could turn again on a dime...I am enjoying the actors, both the ones whose work I know and the ones I've never seen before, and I like the tension between work/professional life and family/spiritual commitments that they're all struggling with -- the frequent TV pattern of women being focused on relationships, men being focused on careers isn't much in play, and when there aren't artificially constructed moral dilemmas involving Nazis or terrorists, the characters seem pretty real to me. The rest of our evening was taken up with baseball; I am halfheartedly rooting for the Dodgers, but I don't much care, so long as the Yankees lose.