Poem for Monday and Glenview Mansion Christmas

The Harvest Moon
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
  And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
  And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
  Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
  And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
  Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
  With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
  Of Nature have their image in the mind,
  As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
  Only the empty nests are left behind,
  And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

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We had a bunch of stores we needed to get to in Rockville on Sunday, so before going to them, we went to the Rockville Civic Center Park where we visited Croydon Creek Nature Center a couple of weeks ago. The Glenview Mansion was having a holiday open house and art show, with nearly every room decorated with a Christmas tree by some local organization and several rooms of painting and drawing upstairs. Unlike other local houses we've visited, this one is not furnished to any given period but is available for rental for events, so the former slave quarters have not been restored and much of the furniture is contemporary.

















Rockville Cemetery is part of the same park, so we took a walk there looking for the names of people of local historical importance; the Magruders, Wests, Bealls, Pumphreys, and baseball star Walter Johnson are all buried there, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald before he and his wife were interred together at St. Mary's downtown. Then we went to My Organic Market, CVS and various other stores, came home for dinner, and watched X2 since it was its last night On Demand and none of us had seen it in nearly a decade. The Redskins and Ravens both won today, so they will both be in the playoffs with the Ravens winning the AFC North!