4/8: only

Thinking about the weirdness of the word only while sitting on a balcony among trees in the late afternoon light and mild air.

4/7: just a little bit away

I'm spending the night in a resort in Heber Springs, which is about an hour from my house.  I'm here for work this weekend, but the surroundings are a pleasure.  I arrived around sunset and got to sit on my room's private balcony amidst the dogwoods as twilight came on.  It was a tough day with some goings-on in my department, so I'm glad for the step away.

4/6: a good thing early

A number of years ago a colleague and I started a tradition at our school:  on the first 3 Thursdays of April--as a way of celebrating National Poetry Month--we have chalk available around the campus fountain so that people can chalk bits of their favorite poems on the pavement.  Since today was the first Thursday I took my bucket of chalk out to the fountain early, and my colleague was already there, chalking.  I didn't look at what she had chosen to write.  I had decided to write out Karen L. George's remixes of two Emily Dickinson poems (you can read them in Heron Tree's found poetry ebook, downloadable at this link).  And then it turned out that my colleague had chosen an Emily Dickinson poem, so there was unexpected/unplanned synergy between our selections.

4/5: qwc

A colleague referred to our "quiet writing community" with its initials today, and that made me smile.

4/4: reading and remembering

I read Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis (in English) tonight and had vivid memories of translating it in 1989.  I'm enjoying how this Trojan War class is stitching together different parts of my reading life.

4/3: sophocles

We're reading Sophocles' Philoctetes in one class and his Trachiniae in another, and I'm enjoying thinking about them side by side.

4/2: dogwood day

The annual trip into our woods to visit the flowering dogwoods is one of our household holidays, and it was today!  We went in the morning when the light was great and before the rain and thunder rolled in.

4/1: cascade

Chris and I took a visiting friend to Woolly Hollow this afternoon, and the water was running over the rocks.  We sat at the top of the cascade in the dappled sun and looked down at the jumping water.