So, About a Month Later, and Poetry

Well, it's been awhile.  Yesterday I drove to Bangor and the Airline Road was bursting with colorful trees.  Had I not been worried about being late to my appointment, I could have enjoyed the drive more, but the more relaxed way back was glorious.  It seems like just the other day I was extolling the beauty of Spring.  Now Fall brings a different beauty with other emotional overtones.  I guess it is like late middle life when you compare it with a human life-span.  There is beauty without anticipation of more to come........an almost hysterical beauty brought on by knowledge of the looming Winter.  I've wondered if people experience the seasons as we do in other climates.  The changes are more subtle as you move away from the equator.  When I visited the southwest, I thought I understood why "manana" was such a pervasive idea.  With the days so much the same, there is really no reason to hurry.  What can be done today can easily be done tomorrow.  Of course my perceptions of life in hot climates is based on the very superficial observations of a perspiring tourist who couldn't believe anybody would chose to live there.

The top picture is the view from my window, magnified by the zoom of my camera.  In summer there are sailboat races in the bay, bringing gentility.  The rest of the year I see fishing boats and cargo ships in their place, working.  The bottom............a slice of Eastport life in warm weather.  There is a group of men who walk their dogs past my house almost every day.  Sometimes the group is bigger.  It is such a happy group of guys, most of them who are here only in the summer.  I asked them if I could take their picture, and then I did this painting of them.  It made me happy every time I worked on it, and now it makes me happy hanging on my kitchen wall.

As I got ready to sit down and drink my coffee this morning, I came across a book that came with a set of CD's I have of poetry being read.  The book talks about the authors of the poems, who wrote between 1888 and 2006.  It appeared among some forgotten books I was moving to a different spot.  As I thumbed through it, I wished that I was inclined to read more, and a bigger variety.  As it is I spend only about an hour and a half every day on the couch with a book.  I read mostly novels, but there was a time when I listened to tapes, and later CD's, of poems being read by their authors while I painted.  What a sad thing that I stopped doing that.  Poetry ads a whole new dimension to life.  It puts you in another place where things are contemplated and beautifully stated.  The words themselves are the same as what we hear coming out of our mouths every day, yet they are arranged in such a way as to elevate the language, and therefore our thoughts and feelings.

I really must get back to that.