Visitors from another planet.

They call it Nashville...

Our second visitors to NH... Our good friends the Claytons came up for Sai’s Suzuki violin weekend at the University of Evansville, and came and spent the night with us last night prior to the festivities. They brought Sai’s friend Nicholas Gambill with them.

We had a nice dinner last night at the White House (our friends’ lovely restaurant...not the White House currently occupied by the Bushes) and a good little tour of the town yesterday afternoon, though it was still a little chilly for pleasant strolling.

Lexie’s mom Torie came up a while back, helping Lexie drive a uHaul, and was our first official visitor. What does she win, Johnny? A trip to beautiful downtown Burbank, you say?

Ice, Ice, Baby...Pt. 2

Should be up to the 40s tomorrow and all this will vaporize, and things will be back to normal here in Bedford Falls.

Ice, Ice, Baby...

Take a lovely falling of snow and add a nasty dollop of frozen precip, and whattya got? Nobody goes out of the house today...

Wanted to walk over to the river for some recon. It’s still rising apparently. But couldn’t make it more than a few yards from the house. Every step like falling through the ice, but nothing to drown you underneath...just hard going.

Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row

—Robert Allen Zimmerman

Spend an hour watching swans.

[[This is a poem called Opinion, by Baron Wormser, from Subject Matter: Poems. It speaks a similar thing to me as my recent walks near the Wabash have, and something about my life in general...about what matters...about wildness and the overwhelming nature of modern life...whatever...just read it.]]


Halfway to work and Merriman already has told me
What he thinks about the balanced budget, the Mets’
Lack of starting pitching, the dangers of displaced
Soviet nuclear engineers, soy products, and diesel cars.

I look out the window and hope I’ll see a swan.
I hear they’re bad-tempered but I love their necks
And how they glide along so sovereignly.
I never take the time to drive to a pond

And spend an hour watching swans. What
Would happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty?
When I look over at Merriman, he’s telling Driscoll
That the President doesn’t know what he's doing
With China. “China,” I say out loud but softly.
I go back to the window. It’s started snowing.

Ah, wilderness.

Saw another bald eagle (and also a big old pileated woodpecker) on the river today.

The river which—according to the weather.com—is going to flood any old day now. Even after living in Nashville—technically a river city—for so long, I’m totally unfamiliar with the vagaries of rivers. All of the blues songs about the levees breakin’ start to come home to roost.