Americans are not welcome in Europe this year, so our annual vacation at [cool] high altitudes is not available. We are trying to find comfort in the flourishing green spaces of Carlisle (below), tall drinks of iced water and the books we've been meaning to read, with frequent trips to local farmers' markets.
Speaking of farmers' markets, Atlantic magazine send us "nine poems for fraught times", including the following link to the Poetry Foundation website:
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
YUM. The joys and comforts of home.
