Smiling while listening to the plurbling, blurbling stream
winding gently below me on the metal, see-through bridge
Looking up to the left as a black crow yaw-caws its
way over the field of faded golden cornstalks
Glancing to the right, suddenly noticing the hefty rain clouds
flying, swooping over fields and villages…towards me
After an afternoon walk in perfect pre-Thanksgiving weather, perfect sky, wispy cloud pieces, bright, cheery, I sat on the porch swing to catch my breath and saw:
On the electric wire across the highway, perched a long-beaked bird, looking around the world, being the size of a robin. A small sparrow flitted up and landed next to Long-Beak. Long-Beak glanced over, saw the sparrow, viewed him as an intruder, rude, crude, socially unacceptable, and flew up and up then glided over and over to the right down and down onto the other end of that electric wire, leaving the sparrow sitting goofily by himself. The sparrow fluffed his feathers, shook, then hopped over the pole on its left to the wire on the other side, hidden by all the wire coiling and knots. Then Long-Beak flew away.
Humans aren’t the only creatures that get rejected when the wing of friendship reaches out.
Walked this morning past brick buildings built
between 1817 and 1836…who built them…how did
they chose Hanoverton…what was happening in Ohio
back then…what was happening in America at that
time…who was president…while exercising my
body walking, my brain exercised overtime trying to
remember American history…boy, howdee…was I
ever exhausted upon reaching home!
Visiting Abe Lincoln’s boyhood home in south Indiana was just a way to stretch our legs, as we traveled cross-country during a hot, humid July.
The Husband and I toured a little museum, enjoyed some of Abe’s words carved on the outside walls over beautiful bas relief sculptures of his life, cried over a short movie of his beginnings, then took a mile hike into the hills, in the fermenting heat, to see where his family had lived.
The forest oozed, radiated, brimmed with quietness, except for birds, faded sounds of people, and the distant sounds of pop music. Who would be playing pop music way out here in the woods of Abe Lincoln’s home? Sacrilegious!
Sauntering past a small field of corn, we saw what it looked like in Abe’s day. After chugging up to where his cabin’s foundation still sat, we gazed at the bit of rock-chimney and the old boards in the ground (at most 150 square feet), surrounded by thick, stifling, windless forest. We then experienced life in Abe’s day, chatted with re-enactors, and toured some replica buildings with roughhewn logs and clay chinking. They had such a rough life.
Sweat dripped down our faces as we trekked the sweltering way back to the car, stopping often to rest, thinking and chatting about life in the “good ol’ days.” Both of us felt a rush of gratefulness to all those pioneers who paved the way for people like us to now enjoy cars, freeways, coffee shops, air-conditioning, and iPods—like the one in my purse that had somehow turned on to play the distant, pop music the whole time we toured, which I didn’t discover until reaching the car, much to my chagrin.
TR
On a walk this gorgeous afternoon
met all kinds of bugs
Beetles, crickets, small and large
Brown, bright-red, gray grasshoppers
Red ants, black ants
Absolutely everywhere
Hopping, crawling, flying
Never saw so many during one walk
Possibly gearing up for the extremely cold
rainy day predicted
tomorrow
tr
Prose Me 