WE NEED A RAINY DAY...

There's a song that starts I LOVE A RAINY DAY, ... Well it's cold and wet and miserable today, especially since I turned the pilot off on my heater and cleaned up my wood stove for warmer weather.

I can't say I'm loving this rainy day, but we definitely need it. And, there is comfort to hanging out in your robe and slippers for half a day, to work on a project set aside and waiting. For me, a couple of unfinished rugs and one needing repair. And a chance to slog through saved scraps for quilts and begin another while other blocks lay forgotten and tucked away.

I took the time to read some poetry and I like this one enough to share. It is in the public domain.

Loveliest of Trees, The Cherry, Now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

By A. E. Housman

And, another:
I normally don't like poems that don't rhyme, but this one reminded me of journey's I've had on trains and it was just as described in this narrative poem.

The Dining Car of the Southern Crescent, By John Campbell

The Southern Crescent
snakes its way through
the rolling fog shrouded
piedmont landscape;
a young man on spring break,
returning home from
college, crosses the creaky
passageway that leads from
Pullmans to the dining car.
Breakfast smells give rise to
an ambitious order of fresh coffee,
country ham with red eye gravy,
grits, scrambled eggs and
biscuits with blackberry jam.
The waiter, agile and accomplished,
dressed in a white starched apron,
steadies himself against the swaying
motion of the train; with serving tray
in hand and balanced, he places the
piping hot breakfast on a table decked
with a linen table cloth, pewter
creamers, thick silverware, coffee
cups and saucers and plates etched with
a crescent moon insignia; a small
bundle of daffodils sit in a crystal
vase near the window.
The young man with the vittles before him,
relishes a feeling of adult composure
and delight. "How could life be this good?"
A breakfast fit for a king, waiters
eager to please, railway views of
rural Carolina: tenant shanties,
grazing black angus, abandoned junkyards,
brownstone depots and sleepy towns.
He, still unfamiliar with the niceties
of the wealthy elite, or even the
acquired dignities of his college
professors, avows, while pouring
coffee from a silver carafe into
a Syracuse China cup, that the
dining car of the Southern Crescent
is a place of utmost refinement.

John Campbell's poem was delivered to my mailbox by A Poem A Day, that I subscribe to. His poem is available framed from Poem A Day, and is not in the public domain.