Last Saturday afternoon, my husband and I went to hear Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States, in a nearby town. He gave a reading as part of the Chelsea District Library’s fourteenth Midwest Literary Walk. It was wonderful. We showed up early, and a few folks even earlier. Eventually, I believe, everyone who came made it in, and that’s a good thing, both for them and for the rest of us. Everyone got to spend an hour listening to Billy Collins, and we got to do it in each other’s company. It was a bit like going on a trip to a place we all wanted to go.
Collins’s work is accessible, conversational, and striking. I heard one of his poems one evening on NPR and hit the bookstore the next day to find and buy whichever of his volumes included that work. With the bookseller’s permission, I went through all of his books, hatching them from their shrink wrap as necessary, in my quest for that poem. It turned out to be new and not yet published. So I wrote to the show for a copy, and Collins kindly allowed NPR to release it to me. I strongly encourage you to look up Collins’s work—chances are you’ll like it.
Certainly the audience did last Saturday, there in the auditorium of the small-town senior center on a sunny spring day. Much of Collin’s poetry is funny. People spent a lot of time laughing, the two of us included. A woman near us had a lovely laugh, and she employed it often. But Collins’s work is haunting, too—finely crafted—and I knew we would all be thinking about it long after our laughter was a memory.
I’m ever so glad we had a chance to see and hear Billy Collins. And that we stopped for shakes at the Dexter A&W on the way home.
On the home front, the dog and I have been revisiting our favorite walking routes again, doing our best to make up for the weeks when I couldn’t go out with him. Our walks have an easy rhythm to them, developed over the years. Either of us can stop for a bit when something needs exploring, neither of us pulls, and I have final say in everything. That works.
Yesterday, we found the bloodroots blooming in the woods by Thurston Pond. This is a brief phenomenon, to be savored while it lasts. The flower is many-petaled, white around a yellow-orange center, one flower per stalk. But it’s the leaf that really gives the plant drama—big and fan-shaped, a single leaf curling around the single flower. The bloodroots by the pond grow where they’re backlit much of the time, giving eyes hungry for green and spring a real blast of translucent color.
We heard peepers on the pond yesterday during our morning walk. You don’t usually hear them during the daylight. They tend to start peeping as evening nears and keep right on peeping as night falls and into the wee hours. At this time of the year, we are just as happy not to live right next to a pond. That way, we can enjoy the song of the amorous little frogs and still get some sleep.
Rascal and I took our longest post-accident walk together this morning. We went up Nixon to Barclay Park, watched and listened for a while on the boardwalk overlooking the pond there, and into Oakwoods Nature Area. There’s a vernal pool in Oakwoods, just beyond the entrance to the woods, that was full to overflowing, fuller than I’ve ever seen it. This is true for all the bodies of water we’ve walked by lately, whether creek or pond or ephemeral pond. The corduroy walkway across this pond was slippery and about half-submerged.
Many stretches of the path through Oakwoods were seriously muddy—not usually a problem in that park. The dog sometimes had a hard time making headway. So did I. And the nature of paths through woods is such that, often, there is no alternate route; the choices are forward or back. We went with forward. By the time we got home, Rascal’s paws and undercarriage were thoroughly mudded, and so were my boots. Rascal doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other about mud. But the mud on my boots actually made me happy. It showed I had managed more difficult terrain. I hadn’t sought out the challenge, but I also hadn’t had to turn back. Not only are flowers opening back up—so is my world. Praise be.
29 April 2022
Glad to hear you are ‘off-roading’ once more.