Skip to the lou, my darling

I cannot skip. Something in my brain has always prevented my brain physiology from expressing such a rhythm. Laurie tried to teach me how to polka a few years ago at the Barton Fireman's Polka Fest and I simply couldn't do it. It's too similar to skipping. I did enjoy watching the couples of all ages as they danced and circled around to the music.

My second grade teacher Mrs Shreive insisted I could skip. I remember crying and her getting angry with me when I couldn't. I never liked her very much after that incident.

The snow carefully everywhere descending

I was hoping for more snow before bedtime. I was wanting to get outside on the tractor and plow the driveway and the roads in the neighborhood. I've never liked fast fancy cars or motorcycles and the like, but I've always been captured by the slow steady and powerful movements of a tractor. When I was little, I preferred to sit on the tractors on display at the county fair rather than ride the carnival rides with my sisters.



I've rebuilt and restored more lawn and garden tractors than I can count...from cheap discount house models to Wheel Horse, International Cub Cadet, Gravely, Ariens and John Deere. In 2006, I bought my first new one, a liquid-cooled X585 John Deere with 4wd, power steering and 3-point Category 1 hitch. I've got over 600 hours on it and it has been a great unit. Recently though, there are times when a tractor with a loader, pallet forks, and a backhoe would have been useful, so I've been considering a new Kubota B2601 compact tractor. I don't really need it and I certainly have no cost justification for it other than I can surely afford it.

So I'm in bed. She's out in the other room watching football, cheering and/or ranting with a few beers. I've never really cared about football much...it simply makes me feel anxious and empty. So I'm writing here and fancying playing in deeper morning snows.

* * *

[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands