Here Lie...

  This isn't my house thank God but I'll tell you what it’s really like living here in the growing season. I know I said it was like living inside the Keebler Elf tree and proved it with these actual pictures but an even better analogy is coming to mind now: It's more like what that nutty little genius Emily Dickinson wrote.See if you remember this poem, where she pictures herself and the mystery person she addresses lying side by side in their graves, dressed just in the clean white bones maybe, or maybe still in their starched Sunday best with the undertaker's makeup pale upon their cheeks. You know it I betcha :

I died for Beauty--but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room-

He questioned softly Why I failed? "For Beauty," I replied "And for Truth, Themself are One We Brethren are," He said--

And so, as Kinsmen, met at Night We talked between the RoomsUntil the Moss had reached our lips And covered up our names

Emily didn't do punctuation, aside from these crazy dashes every few words, but doesn't that ring a bell somehow? The image of us carrying right on with the talk while slowly - slowly and wonderfully in a way - Nature knits the green blanket that will cover us all in the end.

You saw the picture of the ivy outside my study window . Now here's the mother dove who sat on my window sill all last summer hatching babies; whose descendants may sit here still when I and that boy I fell in love with lie all quiet in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, beneath the grand old trees and under the wide cold sky.