Posted on Oct 10, 2014 5:16 PMMy grandmother would say it's pert'n-nigh a Poe day. I don't know how she knew much about Poe, but I do remember she had shelf after shelf of books, old books, dusty from time, but treasures to her. She taught me to read from those books, long before I discovered The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. So somehow she knew about Edgar Allan Poe. And since 'The Raven' has been hanging out in the corners of my mind for more years than I bother to count, I must have known about Poe all those years too, because it is for sure a Poe day, pert'n-nigh. (For those who don't know, pert'n-nigh means pretty near. Yes, I do speak a whole 'nother language; it comes from the branches and hollers of the Appalachian mountains, right proud of it, too, I am.)
It all started early this morning, 'while I pondered weak and weary', (Poe again) pondered over whether or not to get out of bed. It was as dark at 8 a.m. as it was when I hit the pillow at midnight. It was to be a daylily digging day. It's been windy, dry, coolish but with sun for a couple of weeks and try as I did, I could not make a dent in that sunbaked brown earth. So it rained yesterday, a real 10 minute downpour and I thought surely I could dig those daylilies today. Wrong again. The day has drizzled and rumbled and grumbled and groaned, all in darkness -- ominous - and the earth just spit my shovel right back at me.
For two weeks now the cottonwood tree has been talking, chattering in the wind, 'silken, sad, uncertain rustling,' (shades of The Raven again) and it's shed so many dried leaves you'd think it would be bare naked by now, but no. It is an old old tree. Actually it forks about 10 feet up and from up on the hill one can see that it should never have been allowed to grow because each of those forked sides has become a huge trunk, either one of them ready to fall at the slightest opportunity. I would not complain but on this mostly ominous day I'm looking at the branches that tower over my deck and my mimosa and my kitchen windows and I see that it might be incredibly dangerous. It's the bare naked branches I'm worried about and there are about 5 or 6 of them. Ominous. Foreboding. But it isn't my tree.
Seems that it might be on the strip between lots, the strip where utilities run underground for this little neighborhood. And if that's true, then the electric company is in charge of that tree. We'll see. I really hate doing battle with a conglomerate. Ominous. But to the right of the cottonwood, there stands my old redbud, with its black seed pods draping the limbs, dripping with raindrops, like too many stalactites from the roof of a cave. More ominous. And the leaves below, when the rains finally end, compost! Not so ominous.
'Deep into that darkness peering' . . . yeah, Poe again, I glimpse color up on the hill in a flowerbed, a rose or two beneath the cedar tree. I love the look of that cedar, it's almost perfect and during winter those thick evergreen branches shelter a few birds. Yes. It's a good tree. And that flowerbed, all that green, it must be the alfalfa pellets sprinkled among the daylilies. Not ominous at all up on the hill.
It's getting darker now, which has nothing to do with Poe since it's time for this day to end anyway. Funny how dark weather and old poetry raced their way into my mind and lingered there all day. I only wanted to dig a few daylilies today, 'merely this and nothing more'.
