shine jar

Full-on laughter, the kind that makes your sides hurt, eyes water, and pee imminent—a laughter that cannot stop until it’s done.

My favorite things about this chameleon season (besides my birthday): a nip in the air, colors changing, football, nutmeg, Thanksgiving, and the year closing its book.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

On days when I miss Smyrna, when I miss my grandmother and her waft of Chanel, such elegance in a small town, I think of this poem. She introduced it to me as a child.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR
Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

In memoriam, Joyce Eaton Brandon (1927-1994)
She would have been 84 today.

I’m not a blogger, but I like to throw randomness into the universe on occasion. My name is Tanya and this is my minutiae…