Progymnasmata

I just returned from a week or so in the Rocky Mountains with my family. I grew up there -- in the foothills at the base of the mountains. I used to ride an ATV up the face on a dirt road that gets closed in the winter and turned into a snowmobile route.

We stayed with my mom and her husband.

While there we took our daughters on their first true mountain hike. My oldest was great. We gave her our little camera to take pictures of the wildflowers that she saw along ...

This poem was written for the Picture Poetry Contest. It is a response to this image:



Transparency

The sun behind the stones,
The people in the crag,
His hands in his pockets,
Her hands behind her gown.

We hide what we can see:
These people, the earth, and me.

The sun behind the clouds,
The rain ...

I also posted this in a thread in the General Chat forum. But I think it's a pretty good stand-alone blog too, so I put it here as well.

Summer Project #2

This summer I planned build a landscaping-block planter to, primarily, hide some unsightly septic vents in our yard. This project is now, more or less, complete. (The "more or less" means that we still have to add some plants, but the major construction is done).

First I needed my toolbox ...

This post was also made in the Book Reviews forum of this site.

Famous for authoring Watership Down, Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs rivals its more widely-read big brother in storytelling, thematic development, and playful sophistication.

Just as mythology (and the telling of stories) supports the narrative of Watership Down, linguistic dialect (that of the English lake country) structures the confusion and flight of the dogs Rowf and Snitter from an animal experimentation ...

This review was also posted in the Book Review Forum.

Navels. Valencia. Blood. Indian River. If your mouth is watering right now for some of that sweet juice, then you know what I'm talkin' about. That's right. Oranges: the Pulitzer prize winning book by John McPhee. As the title suggests the book is a natural history of the cultivated orange.

It's a wonderful book. As with all of McPhee's work the prose is sharp, witty, and direct.

Being a natural ...