My Darling Clementine

Wyatt Earp: Mac, you ever been in love?

Mac: No, I've been a bartender all my life.

oh, if only!

I wish this job still existed: "lector".

I could always just move to Cuba...

(via)

I want to read more.

"Always continue to learn--reading is a great way to intake information--and never think you're the best. You always have something to learn from someone."

- Murs

There are so many books, poems, stories, letters, articles, words to read, and I can't seem to take a moment to make any tiny dent.

"I'm fifty-six and still a Virgo."

- Liz Carpenter

real beauty

(via)

I'd like to move to the country. Live on a farm. Well, not quite a farm. We wouldn't have any livestock, only produce. Keep a couple chickens. Maybe a rooster for good measure. Have a few choice hounds to protect the henhouse. A cat that comes and goes.

Ideally it would be my grandmother's old house in rural Connecticut. Or some reincarnation of that.

The house served as a colonial inn and tavern during the Revolutionary War and onwards. Since then it's survived a couple of fires and the most basic modifications (modern plumbing, etc).

Out back my grandmother built a barn behind the garage. A big, hollow, red-brown wooden barn. A book barn.

Inside were four walls of floor to ceiling bookshelves. The two levels were delineated by a horseshoe balcony along the three walls facing the door. In the center were a few couches and chairs, a wood-burning stove. There was a desk too, a couple of rocking chairs and a bench or two by the windows on the upper floor, and a toilet room under the staircase.

It might be the most wonderful, ideal home imaginable. Nancy Phelps Blum was a phenomenal woman. She was a tiny woman, but she was mighty. Intelligent. Extraordinarily well-read. In the last few years of her life she researched and wrote her entire family history as well as a book chronicling the life of the Phelps Inn. She took full advantage of the abundant nature she surrounded herself in, fighting against paving the dirt roads of Colebrook, supporting the Nature Conservancy and Historical Society, exploring, truly knowing the teeming forests and brooks at her doorsteps, keeping her garden.

If I reflect any of the charming, dynamic facets of her personality by late in my life, I will be sincerely full and pleased with myself.

(here and here)

Touch-and-Go

by Sylvia Plath

Sing praise for statuary:

For those anchored attitudes

And staunch stone eyes that stare

Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot

At some steadfast mark

Beyond the inconstant green
Gallop and flick of light

In this precarious park

Where vivid children twirl

Like colored tops through time

Nor stop to understand

How all their play is touch-and-go:

But, Go! they cry, and the swing

Arcs up to the tall tree tip;

Go! and the merry-go-round

Hauls them round with it.

And I, like the children, caught

In the mortal active verb,

Let my transient eye break a tear

For each quick, flaring game

Of child, leaf and cloud,

While on this same fugue, unmoved,

Those stonier eyes look,

Safe-socketed in rock.

imagination

Succulents are my favorite plant group. It's pretty fascinating that such a diverse group of lusciously chubby little plants thrive in our arid, desert climate.

I think the texture of their leaves/stems/roots must be what dinasour skin felt like. Sort of leathery, cold, and tough but plump and with a little squish.

Close your eyes and the wrinkles of a dried out and dying aloe vera could just be an aging brontosaurus.

Maybe it's a stretch, but I'm okay with that.

(here) (via)

"Be a first rate version of yourself not a second rate version of someone else."
- Judy Garland

black and white are beautiful together

I used to play dominoes for fun. Mexican train.

There's something satisfying and soothing about numbers. Compounded with the no nonsense grace of basic black and white and the most simple geometry. Just about the most reassuring game there is.

(here)

Atlas

by Lucile Clifton

I am used to the heft of it

sitting against my rib,

used to the ridges of forest,

used to the way my thumb

slips into the sea as I pull

it tight. Something is sweet

in the thick odor of flesh

burning and sweating and bearing young.

I have learned to carry it

the way a poor man learns

to carry everything.