The More You Read, The More You

Write About Winter In The Summer. Describe Norway As Ibsen Did, From A Desk In Italy; Describe Dublin As James Joyce Did, From A Desk In Paris. Willa Cather Wrote Her Prairie Novels In New York City; Mark Twain Wrote Huckleberry Finn In Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, Scholars Learned That Walt Whitman Rarely Left His Room.

So The Midwest Nourishes Us [...] And Presents Us With The Spectacle Of A Land And A People Completed And Certain. And So We Run To Our Bedrooms And Read In A Fever, And Love The Big Hardwood Trees Outside The Windows, And The Terrible Midwest Summers, And The Terrible Midwest Winters [...]. And So We Leave It Sorrowfully, Having Grown Strong And Restless By Opposing With All Our Will And Mind And Muscle Its Simple, Loving, Single Will For Us: That We Stay, That We Stay And Find A Place Among Its Familiar Possibilities. Mother Knew We Would Go; She Encouraged Us.

Today Is One Of Those Excellent January Partly Cloudies In Which Light Chooses An Unexpected Part Of The Landscape To Trick Out In Gilt, And Then The Shadow Sweeps It Away. You Know You're Alive. You Take Huge Steps, Trying To Feel The Planet's Roundness Arc Between Your Feet.

Our Life Is A Faint Tracing On The Surface Of Mystery.

I Alternate Between Thinking Of The Planet As Home - Dear And Familiar Stone Hearth And Garden - And As A Hard Land Of Exile In Which We Are All Sojourners.