Poem for Friday and Lady Washington

Puget Sound [Excerpt]
By Helen Hunt Jackson

He comes suddenly on another exquisite land-locked, unsuspected harbor, — the Esquimault harbor, with its own little hamlet. Skirting around this, and bearing back towards the town again, by a road farther inland, he finds that to reach the town he must cross inlet after inlet. Wooded, dark, silent, amber - colored, they are a very paradise for lovers of rowing; or for lovers of wooing, either, we thought, as we came again and again on a tiny craft, in which two sat with idle oars. At other times, as we were crossing some picturesque stone bridge, a pleasure barge, with gay flags flying, and young men and maidens singing, would shoot out from under it, and disappear around a leafy corner. From every higher ground we could see the majestic wall of the Olympic range rising in the south. The day will come when some painter will win fame for himself by painting this range as seen from Victoria: a solid wall of turquoise blue, with its sky-line fretted and turretted in silver snow, rising abrupt and perpendicular out of a dark green and purple sea. I do not know any mountain range so beautiful or so grandly set. Often its base is wrapped in white mists, which look as if they were crystallized in ripples and ridges, like a field of ice floes. Rising out of these, the blue wall and snowy summits seem lifted into the skies; to have no connection with earth except by the ice-floe belt. 

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We knew that our guest sleep sofa was arriving (in pieces, from IKEA, because that was the only one we were positive would fit through the narrow interior door) on Friday. So I spent the morning doing things like folding laundry and carpet scraping while listening to Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and chatting with my niece about whether the surprise drop today might be autographed CDs (the purple cardigan is too cropped for me but will probably look great on her). 

We decided to do the bulk of the sofa-building tomorrow morning when the room is cooler, since it was nearly 80 degrees this afternoon, so we walked to the beach instead. Now we're watching the end of The Other Two -- the fake Applebees episode had me in tears, I was laughing so hard -- and making a "Starbucks Lovers" friendship bracelet for my niece. Some views of the Lady Washington last weekend, docked in Port Orchard and sailing in the Sinclair Inlet of Puget Sound: