WELL whadaya know. fred is back in america. that is why there’s been a tragic lack of blogging of late. we’ll be co-blogging soon, i hope. but i was thinking of giving this blog a little mouth to mouth, when i realized that this post somehow never got posted, even though i wrote it over a month ago. so here she is… better never than late, i always say. so here she goes:
“To Spring”
By William Blake
O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn’d
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth
And let thy holy feet visit our clime!
Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumèd garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.
O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish’d head,
Whose modest tresses are bound up for thee.

now we all know that poetry is about as valuable to everyday life as a smashed souvenir penny from dolly’s splash country (no offense to fred or ed who paid for fred’s education, but i really do think that is the perfect metaphor. pause and reflect on it, please… you pay 25 times the worth of something to smash it into something mildly cute but useless that you lose in your purse within a week) but this poem has to be the largest crockpot of meatloaf i’ve ever read. william blake clearly did not live in knoxville.
sure, we all thought we wanted spring to come a few weeks back. after a long, cold, rainy winter, i was just as excited on that first warm day to put on shorts and try to get a farmer’s tan while walking the boulevard, but spring is like a stranger with candy. it tastes sweet at first and then you pass out and wake up locked in a trunk with a really bad headache.

a constant, warm, yellow snow rained down on market square for two weeks from the trees above shed their pollen to form drifts on the sidewalks. every morning pollen fell into my coffee as i walked to work. every night i combed the pollen strands out of my hair.
i didn’t even get over the winter sniffles before allergy season struck this year. my annual cold rolled right into allergy season in a cacophony of mucus that was the perfect storm of a sinus infection. i started to lose hope. i started to think that living in knoxville was worse than living in north dakota. i might’ve been quoting blake to Spring, but it was “did he smile his work to see? / did he who made the Lamb make thee?” i considered setting fire to the dogwood festival booths being set up in market square. my heart shrunk two sizes too small and i almost resorted to this:

things were getting desperate. but then i got some more drugs and the sidewalk chalk contest in the dogwood arts festival began.



and i saw this.


and i was glad to be living in knoxville.
p.s. at least us knoxvillians can brag about suffering the worst this year. the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America named Knoxville the #1 worst place to be for allergies this year and over 6,000 particles of pollen per cubic meter were measured earlier this spring. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/spring.allergies/index.html
Posted in daisies, dayquil, heart two sizes too small, mucus, peyton manning, side walk chalk, spring, Uncategorized
Tags: heart two sizes too small, mucus, side walk chalk