• I played hooky for an hour-and-half in the middle of the day to watch one of my favorite movies: The Dead. It was originally shown in theaters 1987, but it wasn’t released on DVD until this week. It was as good as I remembered it was.
• This morning, I made myself a cup of tea (in my insulated travel mug), but didn’t realize until 30 minutes later, when I went to take my first sip, that I had never turned the kettle on. So what I really had was a mug of tepid water.
• In the mail today, we received a copy of Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion, a new book by our friend Katherine. I can’t wait to start reading it. We also (separately) received a beautiful, handmade necklace and a pair of earrings from Katherine’s daughter, Emily, as a donation for Hyla’s school’s auction.
• Hyla can play most of Ashokan Farewell on her violin from memory. She can also play it while lying on her back on the floor. I don’t know how often she’ll need that skill, but it’s nice to know she’ll be prepared, if and when.
• This afternoon, we started fantasizing about hiking Alta Via 1 in a couple of years.

I feel limp and tired this evening. I want to write something wonderful, but I have no wonderful inside me tonight. Instead I have lists of things I need to do, or am afraid to do, or want to do, but don’t know how.

So, just because of all that, I’ll give you tonight a favorite poem: one I love to reread, and read aloud, and think about. One that, on my better days, inspires me to write and makes me happy to know that someone in this wide world really knows how to put words together.

Oysters

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

— Seamus Heaney

The last few days have been so busy, I almost forgot that today was a new month, and the start of NaBloPoMo. How could it be November again already? Wasn’t it just November a few short months ago, when I was in the swing of blogging every day? Remember when I had that crazy idea that I could keep that momentum up because everyone says, “When you do something for 30 days it becomes a habit.”

Well.

Um.

Here we are again. And I’m happy to have at least written this much on the first day.

If I think about it, November is actually a brilliant time to start a project like this because, truthfully, I tend to feel pretty hopeless on the first day of November. I can no longer fool myself that it’s late summer, or even balmy autumn. Let’s face it, we’re on the brink of winter. I got my snow tires put on my car last week. The clocks changed this week. Evening falls much too early now. And we have nearly two months to go before we get to start adding minutes to our daylight tally.

I can use a goal like NaBloPoMo to keep me from climbing into bed every night as soon the dinner dishes are cleared from the table.

This evening, Michael told me that, since the months go by so quickly, maybe we should just think of November as the gateway to spring. It’ll take a bit to convince me of that, and my cozy bed sure sounds tempting, but here I am, writing this, and thinking ahead to all the other things I want to write about. Maybe more than 30 days’ worth. Maybe it’ll be spring before I know it.

Last spring, my sister and I had this idea to have a paving stone at the Montshire Museum engraved in memory of our mother. We were thinking it would be nice to have it installed around her birthday in July, so we talked to a very helpful and kind woman in the development office who gave us the facts as to how long it would take, how many letters per line we could have, etc.

We batted around a few traditional ideas — her name, a short statement “In Loving Memory of…”, that sort of thing — but those ideas seemed a bit flat. And then someone came up with the great idea of using one of her own quotes, one of those things she said that would make us laugh, or roll our eyes in embarrassment, or both. Lucky for us, we have a plentiful stock of those quotes. We figured that way, at least, whenever we saw the stone, we’d smile, and maybe laugh, and that would be the best tribute of all.

The quote we quickly settled on was the one that reflected the sentiment that probably drove our parents to Florida in the early 90s. She said it often through our childhoods: when the cold, November New England winds blew; on freezing weekday mornings in January when none of us wanted to leave our beds to get ready for school and work; while we were out raking leaves on a blustery October day. She’d say it, and laugh, and crinkle up her eyes with the laughter. Even though she was stating the obvious, the way she said it, with the long, drawn-out vowel sound in the middle, would always make us laugh, too.

I was a little worried to tell the nice woman at the Montshire what we wanted on the stone. But she graciously said she thought it was a great idea. I wonder what the engraver thought.

We had planned for July, but the stone wasn’t actually installed until sometime in August, and then we got busy. But a couple weeks ago, when my sister was visiting, we all went to find the stone. As it happens, it was a beautiful Fall day, warmer than the previous few, with the sun shining and a bright blue sky. Not quite winter, but almost there.