keep off the grass

Life is different here, and has many months been so since October 10th that I've gotten used to it being this way and different is normal. In this temporary quarters live six of us instead of two. After supper, Some like to watch television that I can hardly bear to sit still through, so at three and eighty I try to suit myself at least for the early evening, after supper disappearing into the bedroom, push the door to but not closed tight, sit down in my chair, go online and read poems.

Poem-A-Day lists other poems by the day's poet, plus titles of other poems related or unrelated to a theme. Poems are a back door into others' privacy. One can chase around here and there, entering other people's memories, imaginations and longings of places, family, times, loves, hopes, griefs and joys, and go there too in one's own Times. 

It makes for good closings of the days. In Time, when I may be back at my Bay window in 7H, I'll not read poems but watch for ships again.

After staff meeting yesterday I drove over to the school and went into every classroom. All under reconstruction, nothing finished and ready. The old windows have been removed all over the building and carpentry done to make ready for all new windows when they arrive. In some cases the entire wall and studding was taken out leaving only the outside brick wall, and replaced with all new studding  making clear that everything will be better than ever as in "See, mother, I make all things new."

Then to check mail at the downtown post office. It would be ludicrous now with the solid spread of weeds, but when I was a boy growing up here, that ground in front of the post office had small signs set in the lawn, reading "keep off the grass". The lawn was nice and the signs were in red, white and blue, and it was federal property, and as a child going in to check our mail box, I knew better than to trespass off the sidewalk and take the chance of going to federal prison.

Just inside the lobby was a booth where a blind man managed a little shop. 

My other post office memory of the moment is the main downtown post office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we lived from spring 1976 to summer 1984, when we moved home to Florida, Trinity Church, Apalachicola. I frequently went in that Harrisburg post office evenings after hours, and huddled in the lobby was always an elderly black woman in rags, hoping for change. She never asked, never begged, except with her eyes. Once I realized she would always be there, I always had something for her. 

Tuesday morning this: crescent moon beneath Venus, rising from the morning cloud bank

T