Leaping

Today is February 28. Normally that would be the last day of February, but this is a Leap Year, so tomorrow is the date that happens only once every four years. It seems like we shouldn't have to work on a day that appears once and then disappears for three years. It's hardly a real day. It's an imaginary day, perhaps even a magic day. Now you see it, now you don't. It shouldn't be a Monday; it should be a none-day.

The Old Spinning Wheel

My siblings and I remember that sometimes our mom, while working around the house, would sing:

There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago.

That was as much of the song as she ever sang, so it's as much as I ever knew. I think she said her mom used to sing it. Tonight it occurred to me to look the song up, both the lyrics and someone singing it. I listened at youtube to a number of big band versions recorded in the 1930s, when my mom was a child, but they either had so much orchestration that they were overblown or they were so jazzy that they did not have that poignancy that I associate with the song. I liked best this very simple version sung by characters on the TV show "The Waltons."



The words are:

There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago,
Spinning dreams of an old-fashioned garden,
And a maid with her old-fashioned beau.

Sometimes it seems that I can hear her in the twilight,
At the organ softly singing "Old Black Joe."
There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago.

Joy's grape

Here is a picture of a pair of ducks in the creek behind my house. I took the picture a couple weeks ago.



I see these ducks fairly often when I walk my dog down by the creek, especially on weekends, when I walk him later in the morning. This morning, I saw them again. They were standing on a branch that extends from the opposite bank down into the water. They were just like a textbook illustration, standing side-by-side, out of the water so you could see their orange feet and all. I wished I had brought my camera, but I hadn't.

I've read a blogger who doesn't like to see people reaching for their cameras all the time instead of just living in and enjoying the moment. I think it's a natural impulse, now that we have the ability, to try to instantly retain what we are happy or excited or moved to see. We know that the moments are fleeting and we wish we could keep them a little longer. The camera is a way to try to fulfill this wish.

John Keats' poem Ode on Melancholy attributed melancholy to the fact that life's pleasures pass quickly, and he advised being conscious and mindful of beauty, to get the most out of it, while acknowledging its brevity. Keats was probably living with the knowledge, or at least the suspicion, that he himself would die young, so it was a strong feeling for him. The final stanza is particularly beautiful:

She [Melancholy] dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

I remember my English professor, Dr. Tiemersma, admiring the lines "him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine," and also his recommendation that we never pronounce "Proserpine" to rhyme with "poisonous wine" except when Keats demanded it of us.