I close the door
On the full moon
It hangs in the night sky
Like a dream not remembered
I look out the window
As it travels and sings
Glowing there
A reminder of past nights
The evening moves on
As does the grey orb
Filling me with yearning
Shining down tenderness
I am transfixed
Until the first rays
Of the yellow replacement
Sun rise, moon forgotten
2019 By David Jacobi
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird (1831-1904) is a book that began as a series of letters. Isabella was prompted to travel to improve her health, and she made stops in the United States, Australia and Hawaii, writing books about her travels. By 1873 she was in the US again exploring the Territory of Colorado, sending letters to her sister back home in England describing her adventures in the mountains. The letters were latter edited and assembled as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. The book gives the reader a glimpse of life in the sparsely populated area and descriptions of the beautiful scenery as she travels by horseback through the mountains. One of the main characters she meets is “Mountain Jim” Nugent, a local hunter, trapper and “desperado.” She is both morally repulsed and intellectually attracted to the drunken mountain man who can converse with her intelligently on any subject. There may have also been a physical attraction as well, as she writes, “He has large grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose and a very handsome mouth.” She arrived in the mountains in autumn of 1873 and made her 800 mile journey by horseback into the early winter, lodging with various locals, who she describes along with the magnificent terrain. A fun and fascinating tour of the mountains and the people who lived in them at the tail end of the old west.
A few hundred yards to the north of our acreage runs a strip of Highway 20, the longest road in the United States. Lucinda Williams has an album titled “The Ghosts of Highway 20”, using the highway as metaphor for memory. Traffic moves along on 20 unabated, day and night, despite the pandemic. If the wind is from the north we can hear it, but if it is from the south we can only see it. The robins are mating, hunting worms and singing down the sun at dusk. A pheasant will squawk now and then in the distance. A few weeks ago Shelly was driving around dawn and spied two glowing eyes off to the side of the road. When she slowed down to get a better look it was a fox. All of our white willow trees have leafed out while the other trees still have buds. The farmers have begun discing the surrounding fields, and our road has been busy with pickup trucks and tractors coming and going. We had a high of 81 degrees one day last week and a few days ago it was half that and now we are expecting snow, freezing rain and high winds on Easter Sunday. Old Man Winter is trying to come back but he will loose, more and more.
For the last few months I have been checking out a new site for news updates. Unlike the Drudge Report this site organizes by topic. From their About page: “Easy to use and free, Knewz offers a constantly updated menu of stories from a spectrum of substantive sources. We link directly to publishers’ sites, fully supporting the work of journalists. We honor original reporting, favoring genuine scoops over crass clickbait. Most important, we provide a range of perspectives in the stories we showcase, from publications large and small, liberal and conservative, niche and general, located in all 50 states.”
My wife is on the Keto diet, which puts me on a semi-Keto diet. That means trying lots of new recipes, most of which have been pretty tasty. This one substitutes zucchini for the pasta in lasagna.
Ingredients:
1 pound Italian sausage, cooked and drained
1 jar spaghetti sauce
1 15 ounce container Ricotta cheese
2 eggs
16 ounce bag of shredded cheese
2 medium zucchini, sliced lengthwise with a vegetable peeler
Parmesan cheese
Mix the first five ingredients together. In a greased 13 X 9 baking dish alternate layers of the mix and the strips of zucchini, as you would if using lasagna noodles. Top with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Bake at 375 degrees for 35 to 45 minutes.
Once a month I highlight a piece of art I have created and posted on my Fine Art America site. This one is titled Frozen In Time from the Collage Collection.
“Men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress, without ever having come to grips with the universe, without ever vividly realising the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us. We of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors down to the seventeenth century betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man’s existence in this risky universe.”
Herbert Butterfield
“Want to rediscover what made grandma’s house the fun place we all remember? Capper’s Farmer updates the tried-and-true methods your grandparents used for cooking, crafting, gardening and so much more. Discover the joys of homemade living and homesteading insight — with a dash of modern living — that makes up the new Capper’s Farmer.”
Bibliomania “has thousands of e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays all of which are absolutely free.” They also offer study guides and “an extensive library of reference books, biographies, classic non-fiction and religious texts.”
Here is an article about 20 of History’s Most Devastating Plagues and Epidemics.
The Simple Dollar “is a resource for anyone looking to learn real-life money management. Our expert contributors cover strategies, tools, and products that empower you to manage debt and build wealth. (And with eleven years of experience and counting, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works!)”
You hard charge
Then back off
There are curves ahead
Easy goes it
Suddenly
Over you go
Falling so far we can’t
Catch you!
Your orbit has begun
Spinning
Hurtling
Racing
So fast
Tumbling
Rolling
End over end
Until finally
Mama catches you
Nap time!
2011 By David Jacobi
I started reading the book A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe at the end of last year, after finishing In The Wake Of The Plague by Norman F. Cantor. The reason why I started reading them does not have anything to do with premonition of current unfolding events but instead simply paring down my book collection (again) by forcing myself to read, and then get rid of, books that I have had for years but not read. I was about half way through the Defoe book by the time the novel coronoviris spreading across China began to make the news. While it is titled a journal Defoe reconstructed the London plague of 1665 using books, Bills of Mortality, pamphlets, journals and other source materials. The book was published in 1722. The novel follows the progression of the plague and how the residents of the city and surrounding country respond to it. He describes how the infected were shut up in their houses, which were guarded by watchmen. Carts to collect the dead became common, which were emptied in giant pits for burial. People who had someplace to go outside of the city fled, locking up their houses behind them. Others who had nowhere to flee left the city anyhow to live in the woods. Those with boats lived on them, moored down stream from the city on the Thames. Some with the plague go mad and run through the streets, a few even trying to infect others by biting or kissing people. Business shuts down and people are out of work, relying on any food they have put up or bartering or begging for it. All in all it’s a gruesome tale, and one I might not have finished reading but for our current situation.
