Poem for Thursday and North Creek Park

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
By Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

-------- 

My computer apparently heard my threats to throw it from the upper balcony because for an absolutely unknown reason, this time it allowed me to reinstall Windows. It won't let me make a recovery drive and I haven't tried to install a single program -- not even Firefox or Chrome, I'm using the Edge browser with Bing, ha -- but it is booting into Windows and this is enormous progress after 10 days of screaming into the void. 

Yet again we had gorgeous weather and a lovely walk to the beach for the start of the Pokemon Halloween event. I don't want to talk about baseball -- we saw most of the Phillies loss and too much of the Rangers loss around my Thursday night call -- though Cheryl and I watched the new Our Flag Means Death and Loki episodes (swashbuckling! White City!) and they were awesome. Hiking in North Creek Park last weekend: