Lyrics for Wednesday, Supergirl Finale, Black Hill Leaves

Landslide
By Stevie Nicks

I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

Oh take my love, take it down
Oh climb a mountain and you turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down

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 I had a pretty quiet Tuesday. The weather was magnificent, over 70 degrees and clear, so I spent as much of it walking in the neighborhood as I could when I wasn't down the basement sorting magazines. Now I have big stacks of Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic, Popular Photography, Smithsonian, Chocolatier, and various other magazines that are being picked up by a teacher tomorrow, and we will have more shelf space. We had Trader Joe's vegan meatballs for dinner, which I don't like as much as Beyond's, though they were okay. My Voyager group was missing someone tonight, so we put off watching an episode and just chatted. 

Then I watched the Supergirl series finale, which was excruciating plot-wise but had some lovely character bits. I hate what they've done with Alex -- she's a mom for five minutes in series time and she's ready to let everyone else die for a bad plan to save her? -- and Lex should not be so stupid, ever. But we get Lillian Luthor! And James and Mon-El, even Winn, suitably not getting too much screen time -- I hate when finales bring back former cast members then let them dominate the episodes. I always love the Dallas reboot cast reunion when Brenda Strong and Julie Gonzalo are both in episodes and I'm glad Lillian was finally defined by Lena more than Lex. 

But my favorite bits belong to Brainy ("Like Cinderella, without the gender inequality"), Eliza Danvers ("You'd think in another life I was a Kryptonian"), Cat Grant ("Supergirl"), and of course Lena, who comes into her full powers, saves the world with Kara, then changes Kara's life by reinforcing Cat's suggestion that she needs to come out of the closet, which has been a huge theme of this last season -- I have loved the DC growing up gay/growing up superhero parallels since Smallville -- so I'm sad we only got Supercorp friendship, since Melissa Benoist has better chemistry with Katie McGrath than Chris Wood on this show, but glad Lena and not Alex got that scene. 

And of course I'm happy about watching any show that has Pat Benatar's "We Belong" as a wedding song, sung by the two characters played by actors who came from Glee and Smash before this show -- Winn was basically only there to sing with Kara, I was so worried they were going to try to have him upstage her one more time -- and then Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" at the end, plus Mary Fahl's "Going Home" (all songs more appropriate to the ages of the show producers than most of the characters, but since they're closer to my age, that did not bother me). Here are some photos of the gorgeous leaf colors at Black Hill Regional Park last weekend: 

Poem for Monday and Virginia Renfaire

Panels for the Walls
By Cedar Sigo

Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak)
Here were my paints and there were my powders
And then I was drunk and we lost each other
My shadow tumbled after
Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon
The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty
The dice in the light of the lamp
I hear a stone gong
I lean full weight on my slender staff
Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my garden
The hard road is written to music
How lovely locks, in bright mirrors, in high chambers
The moon shows further a gold and silver terrace
The northern grass is blue as jade
(A dream) venting in the pit of heaven

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The weather was perfect on Sunday and we spent it at the Virginia Renfaire, which is having Pirate Weekend! We drove down after lunch (Adam was going to a funeral with his girlfriend, a crew coach passed away, they are having a really rough couple of weeks) and met and Lin at Lake Anna Winery, where we did not buy any wine until we were leaving but we got to see lots of musical groups including Ship's Company, meet the Queen and Captain Jack, eat cheesecake on a stick, and see lots of animals including horses, rescue dogs, alpacas, ducklings, and a falcon. We have none of this year's cicadas in my area but they were all around the winery making phaser-type noises in the trees!


With Delta, Lin and Queen Elizabeth.


Delta with one of the Brood II cicadas...


...and Adam threatening to eat one.


Me and Captain Jack aka TallPirate.


Ship's Company performing on the Woodland Stage.


Me feeding an alpaca...


...and the alpacas out for a walk.


Hungry ducklings.

Since we were near Fredericksburg, we went to Carlos O'Kelly's for dinner. When we got home we watched the first hour of the national Memorial Day concert (thankfully Alfie Boe sang during that part), then the final episode of Smash (which had a great opening but there's really nothing at this point that I'll miss, characters less mature than those on Glee, if I'd never seen a Broadway musical I'd never believe from this show that any of them were worth my money), then HBO's Liberace movie, which is almost too horrifying for words (Douglas, Damon, Bakula, and Lowe give amazing performances, but I think even the characters on Smash are more sympathetic). Have a good Memorial Day if you celebrate it!

Poem for Monday and Arboretum Mother's Day

Survey: Phototropes
By Eleni Sikélianòs

The snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself off
a sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its tree
The future does a backbend toward you, it's
what you can almost see, scrimmed
in the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing

After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning water
and two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling

back to back, arms unlaced, perfect
swimmers in the lit dusk

Where are they going?

First, to Holland, then
to calcium-kiss her bones

And in Holland the streets are made of water, the dolls & dogs gather
   round lit picnic tables like happy rags

The body is in the root cellar

When snow falls our dead gather close to our bones
because the cold's ghost has come back to haunt the cold & the body,
too, is a happy rag

Tree, take a photograph of her thought, you can do it
with photosynthesis: silhouettes of seals appear, a swarmed planet and its satellites, a
   celestial atlas that breaks when tapped (it's glass)
Some giraffes, some elephants, a lion scatter
in the clearing; in the clearing

the leaves of the world turn toward the light as do the letters of the word
the words are beautiful not for their accuracy but for their dream:
words-are-arrows that loop between no-man's-land and the wetlands, soft
flints flying toward their target

—words bird the zone—

when home was adopted as mother
area was given here
[a future of] all surface, no border

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I had a very nice Mother's Day with my extended family in the afternoon after sleeping late in the morning while Adam was working at Hebrew school and my parents were at the post-Bar Mitzvah brunch of longtime family friends. We picked them up, then went to meet Paul's parents in College Park, where we also retrieved Daniel and went to the National Arboretum. The azaleas are long past peak -- the hillside color is pretty much gone -- but the weather was gorgeous, it was much less crowded than when we tried to visit two weeks ago, and we saw an oriole (speaking of whom, they won):



















We went out to dinner at the IHOP in College Park -- I had a cheese omelette, pancakes and hash browns, plus Adam made me chocolate mint cookies for Mother's Day and I had a couple of those when we got home. (My parents gave me a necklace, Paul gave me the 2000 Les Miserables miniseries with Depardieu and Malkovich on DVD, yay!) After taking Daniel back to school, we watched Once Upon a Time (better than the past couple), then caught up on the Nikita (pretty good) and Smash (put it out of it misery already) we had missed over the weekend.

Poem for Sunday and National Harbor

La Noche
By Anselm Hollo

the wind   let loose in the dark
and the lights of the city   moving

the city is a great dragon   it is a procession
           it is on the move

but the curtains are drawn
the music unheard

see   men and women   preparing themselves
for the long journey across a room

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Adam took the SAT early Saturday morning, so I hung out at home and waited for him to need a ride home. My teenage cousin Garrett in California and my friends' kids in several states were doing the same thing. Once Adam was home, we had lunch and planned to go to the National Arboretum, which has had its budget slashed and will soon close three days a week. There was a bonsai festival going on as well as azaleas blooming, plus I-295 was closed for a stretch and we had to get off the highway, so by the time we got there, found we'd have to park at the edge of the arboretum and take a shuttle bus, we realized we didn't have time.

This is because we were going to meet my friend Annmarie at National Harbor where the Army has sent her for the weekend. We got there early, so we saw some of the tents set up for the wine and cheese festival going on there, and we walked along the waterfront to see the boats and ducks, which is where we met Annmarie. Then we went to the Peeps Store and Thai Pavilion, where Paul, Adam and I shared three awesome vegetarian dishes (green curry, panang, I forget what else), and then Annmarie and I went to Charming Charlie since she'd never been in one and they had lots of stuff on sale.

















Adam wanted to get home early enough to walk the dogs and go running, so we watched this week's Smash, which was having a Very Emotional Episode that made me feel pretty much nothing because the characters have been jerked around so ridiculously all season. We caught up on the Nikita we missed Friday -- not bad, not great, too much running around and too little Alex and Amanda -- then the OMGWTF Doctor Who episode that the awesome guest star couldn't even come close to saving for any of us; we are boggled that among four major female characters, none did anything memorable.

Poem for Saturday, College Park Scholars, Return To Grace

The Call of the Open
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Which yet joined not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.

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I had a busy Friday, but all good. In the morning I finished a review of DS9's "Return To Grace", the second week in a row in which the writers did Kira wrong, and tried to organize all the photos I took while out of town. Paul worked from home so that in the afternoon we could go to College Park with my parents for the College Park Scholars' Academic Showcase, which was in the alumni center and featured the culminating projects of students from the past semester. Out of more than 450 projects on display at the showcase, Daniel's project on Microsoft marketing was one of seven finalists in the show, as was the project by one of the people he'll be sharing an apartment with next year.



















We went out to dinner at Plato's Diner, where half of us had breakfast food and half of us had dinner food (I had a feta cheese omelette, home fries, and veggie sausage, all very good). Then we took Daniel back to his dorm, took my parents back home with us, and chatted briefly with Adam, who is taking the SAT early tomorrow morning. Since we'd already missed Nikita, we caught up on Nashville, which has gotten awfully predictable but I still like the music and all the actors, then Smash, which makes me think I should go back to Glee because everyone acts like immature brats on both shows but at least on the latter they're actually teenagers rather than adults who should know better!

Poem for Monday and Mount Vernon

Little White Church
By Marilyn Nelson

          Eaton, NH, 1879

Us Free Will Baptists walked a thin tightwire,
a springing path out over the abyss.
We knew how a sudden April desire to dance
can topple you head over heels into the fire.

We knew how warmth exuded by a youth
singing at prayer meeting in a nearby seat
and inhaled deeply can inebriate
you to the point of renouncing the truth.

We lived repent-now-before-it's-too-late.
We didn't believe God forgives you, once and for all.
We knew how you can just turn around and fall,
of your own free will, how easy it is to doubt.

But there's no Free Willers left around this place
since the Phelps boy come back from Harvard talking about Grace.

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Sunday was yet another gorgeous day, sunny but not too warm. Paul's parents came over late morning, we picked Adam up from working at Hebrew school, and we spent most of the rest of the day at Mount Vernon, where we ate lunch, toured the house (the dining room is being restored and it was pretty crowded but otherwise very nice), and went to see the piglets, lambs, spring flowers, early vegetables, and the rest of the plants and animals on the farm and in the gardens, plus the threshing barn, slave cabin, gravesites, estate buildings, and river dock. We even had time for the introductory film and the museum!

















Paul made peanut soup (a Colonial favorite) plus chicken and potatoes for dinner, and I gave his mother my old Kindle since she has developed an allergy to newsprint and book ink so I figured she would like to have an electronic way to read. After we had brownies for dessert, they went home and we returned Daniel to College Park, we watched Saturday night's episode of Smash because we figure we should see out the series (we only caught part of Once Upon a Time, will have to catch up later in the week). So all in all a very nice Sunday!

Poem for Thursday and Frying Pan Farm Park

The Pool
By H.D.

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you--banded one?

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I had a long but good day starting with a walk along the C&O Canal with a friend from high school in early morning fog. We saw almost no people but lots of birds -- herons in the water and flying above it, Canada geese annoyed to have anyone around, cormorants, piliated woodpeckers, crows. Then Louise, who's only in town for the week, went to work in DC and I came home, showered, and went out to do various shopping chores in different parts of Bethesda. When I picked up my Lilly Pulitzer prize at The Pink Palm, I ran into another friend from high school whom I haven't seen in forever except on Facebook.

There were flowers everywhere -- tulips in planters all around downtown Bethesda, white-flowered trees in the median of the road on the way to the mall where I had frozen yogurt for lunch. Then I came home for the very exciting tasks of getting stuff done and folding laundry. Hey, that was less annoying than the news, where the positive (New Zealand legalizing gay marriage) was outweighed by utter idiocy about guns in the Senate. The Orioles lost, the Nationals won, we watched last week's Smash (totally mediocre) and The Americans (good and depressing as always). Some Frying Pan Farm Park pics from last month: