Living in Town

Here we are, behind the white picket fence, still hanging pictures, still shelving books, still opening boxes, still looking for the pink USB, the clock that hung in the breakfast nook, various bits and drills, things that got stowed away when we first arrived that we haven't seen since, and what we really search for is that sense of settlement that probably won't appear until the last picture is placed just so, and the book shelves have been sorted into some semblance of order and when we grow used to gazing across the street at the neighbour's pretty garden

rather than that lovely vast expanse of mountains and sky and the distant valley, stretching out into meadows and blue haze.  How lucky we are to have spent most of our married life in that environment.

And now, how lucky we are to have neighbours who come to visit and welcomed us with baking, and supply us with tomatoes and cucumbers and freshly picked carrots and beans out of their town gardens.

And how wonderful it is that Charles can get up and shower and dress and steer his cart up the road, around the corner, and arrive at the Senior's centre where they are always looking for a fourth for bridge and his social life has expanded just as wide as that lovely vast expanse of mountains and sky and distant valley.

We pick up the mail just around the corner and the library is a short stroll down the road.  A nice clear area of undeveloped parkland opens up to the benchland that rises behind us, and there are those mountains and bluffs and white clouds and  blue sky that we see now from a different direction, but they are as lovely as ever.

I look out my kitchen window into what seems like a deep forest of pine and fir, lightened by the sunlight on the leaves of nut trees and great long bamboo like shoots that slide their huge and glorious leaves through the fence into the side path that divides us.

Life doesn't always have compensations as fine and comforting as those we are enjoying in our ancient days, and so we are grateful for what each day brings, and maybe next time Charles makes a Grand Slam he will have been brave enough to have bid it!!!!

ABC Wednesday
August 31st, 2011

The letter this week is the auGust G

G is for Gratitude

Here is a litany of gratitude written by Anne Porter, poet, born in 1911

In Publishers Weekly David Shapiro observed that 'Porter writes what might best be called plainsong: short, unadorned works that, like gospel or folk music, cut directly to the ambiguous heart of things."

A List of Praises

by Anne Porter
"Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing, Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches, Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun, Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry living wild on the Streets through generations of children. Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning, Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh Of the wind in the pinewoods, At night give praise with starry silences. Give praise with the skirling of seagulls And the rattle and flap of sails And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. Give praise with the humpback whales, Huge in the ocean they sing to one another. Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, Give praise with hum of bees, Give praise with the little peepers who live near water. When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries We know that the winter is over. Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales. Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle And glossy tulip trees On quiet side streets in southern towns. Give praise with the rippling speech Of the eider-duck and her ducklings As they paddle their way downstream In the red-gold morning On Restiguche, their cold river, Salmon river, Wilderness river. Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow. Far, far from the cities, Far even from the towns, With piercing innocence He sings in the spruce-tree tops, Always four notes And four notes only. Give praise with water, With storms of rain and thunder And the small rains that sparkle as they dry, And the faint floating ocean roar That fills the seaside villages, And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood, And with the angels in that other country." I follow a friend on Facebook, and each day she lists five things she is grateful for. What a lovely habit, and one I think we should all cultivate. Visit here at ABC Wednesday for a wonderful variety  based on the letter G.

As August draws to a close a last entry in August Break....

Lush, ripe apricots lie on the roof of the neighbour's shed, dwarfed by a towering walnut tree.  

Sunlight dapples the leaves and I wait for the birds to discover this bounty.