Walt Whitman: A Song of Grass and Fields

Walt Whitman has been called “The Father of Free-Verse”, as a writer in the mid-1850s who was pulling away from traditional rhyming poetry.  So very talented, Whitman was a teacher, a government employee, journalist, and a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Walt Whitman was connected to the earth, the soil, and he wrote passionately about its beauty, as well as its cycles of life and death.  Toward the end of his life, he moved to Laurel Springs, New Jersey, which he called “the prettiest lake in: America or Europe.”

I took these photos in Bremgarten bie Bern, Switzerland, when I visited my new grandson (and his parents) in 2012.  The photos reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

One day....

...and then the next.

A song of the grass and fields!

A song of the soil, and the good green grass!

A song no more of the city streets,

A song of the soil of the fields.

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers

        
             handle the pitch-fork,

A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

Please notice the next field over is green and tasseled with stalks of corn.

This was posted in 2014, but I decided to bring out the dusty archives for today.

Mattel's New Trend toward Modesty

Every Wednesday, I go to my daughter’s house to watch my granddaughters when they get home from school.  It used to “baby-sit” but now they are in school.  Often, I feel that they view me as the one needing care, especially if I have a migraine. 

My husband works near my daughter’s house, so he and I drive up together; he drops me off in the morning.  Then, in the mid afternoon, we pick up the girls.

This means that I spend a lot of morning time at my daughter’s house.  I use her computer, check email, read the paper, write, watch TV, or even do some light housework.  In the course of my time here, I have learned many things about my ‘little girls’, but will share just one observation.

I'll just take a quick bath...

The cleanest things in my daughter’s house are the Barbie dolls. 

Those buxom babes are stripped naked and scrubbed clean whenever the girls take baths.  Then they lie in sun-bathing nakedness to dry.

The tutu comes off, but the leotard stays on...

Lately, Mattel has been incorporating clothing as part of the Barbie construction.  Nothing major, just a built-in bikini or leotard.  Why they started doing this, I don’t know, don’t really care. 

Note that the bikini bottom is permanently on.

Since the Barbie has only pretty firm boobies as a sex indicator, I wonder if this move was part of the costuming.  If you have had a girl who dresses her Barbie multiple times a day, in a variety of cheaply-made-but-flashy-dresses, then you realize that parts of those dresses are all over the house (especially the shoes, those stupid high heels that never stay on, and tend to get sucked up in the vacuum in nothing flat).

Who will keep track of this?

Those shoes?  Gone in one day!

While this post reveals no big epiphanies or great human event, I enjoy writing about the trivial and the minutia parts of daily life.