It rained all afternoon and it's turning to snow now. Quite a panic, as usual, trying to keep the tortoise warm through it all. It's sure to be clear and 75F tomorrow.

I received my seller's permit in the mail, and my retailer ID number. Pretty cool. I've registered with some online wholesalers but can't actually buy yet.

We have a good fire burning in the small woodstove. Wind's howling. Three dogs snoring. Cats finally came in from the cold and are gorging themselves on late supper in the kitchen.

Tomorrow we paint the store's two end walls. I'll post some photos here.

BUTTERFLIES

Butterflies have no wings.
They fly by means of voluminous oriental shawls.
In this way nature has helped them.
She has created these beautiful shawls
so that the butterfly shall be harder to swallow.

—Harry Martinson, trans. William Jay Smith and Leif Sjöberg
7:22:50 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Top of the to-do list, though—keep Gunter alive, as we set up space heaters around his enclosure.

There's some big wood lying out near the bridge, heavy long segments of rafter. Brother and I will try to drag those to shelter before rain or snow starts. I need them in the bookstore. I'll show you why in a future photo post.
11:05:51 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Once there was a king who knew all things. But he had the strange habit at mealtimes of being served a covered dish after everyone else had finished eating. Finally his faithful servant could no longer contain his curiosity about the dish, opened it, saw a white snake, and ate a little bit of it. Immediately he could hear and understand the voices of animals. At the same time the queen lost her ring, and as suspicion fell upon the servant, he went to look for it and heard a duck admitting that it had eaten the ring. The servant had the duck killed for dinner, retrieved the ring, and won his freedom.

As he began his travels he heard fish crying that they were stuck in the reeds. After he put them back into the water, he avoided stepping on ants because they complained that humans and their horses always stepped on them. The hero killed his horse and fed it to baby ravens whose parents had thrown them out of the nest and left them on the ground to starve. Finally, he arrived in another kingdom and bid for the daughter of the foreign king. To win her he must first find the ring she had thrown into the water, then gather millet seeds she had scattered on the ground, and finally fetched an apple from the tree of live. The animals he had previously helped came to his aid. The fish found the ring, the ants put the millet seeds into bags, and the ravens got the apple for him while he was lying exhausted in the forest looking for the tree of life. In the end, he shares the apple with the princess, the two fall in love and live happily ever after.

10:18:55 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Last month, staff members of Salon.com published a list of poems about their bodies. "What we all did is write honestly about our bodies: banged-up and stretched, flabby and swollen," the Salon writers said. And further, they challenged others to do the same, to send in poems about their own bodies.

So we here at Poets.org decided to take up the cause and add to the conversation, exploring great poems about the body, beginning with Walt Whitman and continuing through Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Lucille Clifton, and other contemporary writers. These are poets who are awed at the mysteries of the body, who consider the body a story of genealogy and history, and who bare much more than their souls. As Whitman wrote: The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred, / No matter who it is, it is sacred.

Go to: www.poets.org/thebody.

[I would love to link to the Salon.com poems referred to above but 20 minutes of searching the Salon site using "poems," "body poems," "poems about the body by salon staff members," etc. , as well as clicking back through the archives, turned up zilch. If someone has a link to it, please send it on. Thanks.—Sam It occurred to me to go the poets.org site and they had a link to the Salon poems. Boy, Salon doesn't make it easy.]
7:59:40 AM    comment []  trackback []