By Gerard Manley Hopkins
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
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I had a very nice, very full Saturday! We got up early with Adam to go to the National Zoo, which is allowing members to visit the panda habitat and meet Bei Bei a week before the rest of the public will be allowed in. The baby panda was sleeping, but his older sister and parents were up playing and being adorable. We saw some of the animals we didn't get to visit during ZooLights, and I ran into an old friend on the way in.
We came home for a late lunch because I had plans to meet Angela and her sister Katie at Montgomery Mall, where the Lilly Pulitzer store was doing a fundraiser for a pet adoption group that included having kittens in the store for prospective adopters to visit. We walked around a bit in the mall, then came back to my house so that Katie could meet my kittens, who are bigger now than the babies at the mall.
In the evening, we went with son to meet Kay, Chris, and their sons at California Pizza Kitchen for dinner. All our menfolk are engineers or pre-engineers, so they always have things to talk about, and it was very nice to catch up. We dropped Adam off for a late game night with friends and came home to catch up on still-engrossing Heroes Reborn, and now the extremely messy end of the Bengals-Steelers game!
Bei Bei's sister Bao Bao enjoys a treat in her yard...
...while her father Tian Tian gets one as well, licking honey from the crannies of a crate.
Mei Xiang watches over Bei Bei, who slept the entire time we were there (and indeed most of the morning, based on the reports of others).
Though most of the zoo's red pandas are reproducing at the conservation facility in Front Royal, Virginia, there are two non-breeding firefoxes at the zoo.
We saw the orangutans on the O Line between the Great Ape House and the Think Tank...
...and all the animals in the Reptile House, which was so much less crowded than during ZooLights a couple of weeks ago.
Here is one of the PetConnect Rescue kittens at the Lilly Pulitzer store at the mall.
The store had an event they called a "Crazy Kitten House" to raise donations from sales and get kittens adopted!
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