Poem for Friday and Patuxent Amphibians

People Will Come
By Phil Alden Robinson, based on Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

People will come.

They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.

And they'll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. 

They'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.

This field, this game: it's a part of our past. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

People will come. People will most definitely come.

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I'm watching The Pirate Fairy which has some delightful music, some pretty animation, and Tom Hiddleston both singing and voicing Captain Hook so no one will never convince me that this isn't a Loki AU. We spent most of the evening watching the Yankees-White Sox game, played in Iowa on the farm from Field of Dreams, which was supposed to happen last year but did not for obvious reasons; they got James Earl Jones to record voiceovers and Costner was at the game, and the players walked onto the field from the cornfield. Plus the White Sox beat the Yankees with a walk-off home run, an excellent ending. 

 It's always fun to watch men cry over a baseball movie. We ate finger food for dinner in front of the TV during the game, which felt indulgent, but it was literally 100 degrees so we'd been pretty lazy all day -- bailed on taking a walk when we got the third heat advisory of the afternoon, and I nearly melted just refilling the bird feeders. We did NOT watch any of the Washington Football Team-Patriots pre-season game, which is just as well, since Washington lost (also true of the Nationals and Orioles today). And apart from squirrels, that was the day's excitement! Here are some amphibians and their habitat at Patuxent: