Every Third Thought Read Online Free PDF Page A

pity’s sake! Back to our “pre-trip” routines (and bemused by the extra voltage on that adjective as we laid upon friends and colleagues our travelogue and its culmination in G.’s Henley Street trip-and-fall), we relished our new perspective on our Stratford, our Avon (County), our Bridgetown (whereof more to come, Muse willing-maybe-please?). Before each afternoon’s errands, chores, desk-business, and recreation, we went as usual each weekday morning to our separate workrooms in hope of inspiration, and as usual . . .
    Well: As usual, September sang its song and became October. In synchrony with Delmarva’s agribusiness feedcorn harvest, the migratory geese returned in strung-out V’s from Canada and honked along our Matahannock, bringing with them brisk cool-weather fronts to relieve Tidewaterland’s drought-stressed but blessedly hurricane-free summer and remind local “snowbirds” that it was time for them to shift south to their winter HQ’s in Florida. As StratColl’s fall semester got under way, the fine maples, oaks, sweetgums, and sycamores on campus and along the town’s streets showed first signs of autumn color. Ideal weather for end-of-season yard work (if one owned a yard) and the battening of hatches for cold weather
to come; for the year’s maybe-final bicycling, or canoeing and kayaking from the college’s waterfront facility; for enjoying the long late light with sips and nibbles on porch, patio, or pool deck before November’s chilly shift back to Standard Time, and for savoring one’s own autumnality before winter comes. “Can’t last, of course,” one acknowledged over clinked wineglasses: neither good weather nor good health nor one’s happy though less-than-ideally-productive life with mate nor for that matter the nation’s already-overstrained economic prosperity and the planet’s dwindling natural resources. The “American Century” was already behind us, followed by those quagmire wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an alienated international community, a declining dollar and rising energy costs, Gilded Age excesses and inequities, climate change, economic recession—the list went on (and on and on, as G.I.N.-lists tend to do). Meanwhile , however?
    Meanwhile, the news media busied themselves with the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election—the primary campaigning for which was gearing up already a full year in advance, both parties relieved that the Incumbent could not succeed himself for a third term in office—and the Newett/Todd muses sat on their Parnassian butts (the Newett one, anyhow: Mandy, more indifferent to Her output-rate than George to His and more shrug-shouldered about publication, prefers to keep her poetical musings pretty much to herself). In the weeks following our return from abroad, even as his very slight headachiness dissipated and his brow-wound healed to where no further
bandaging was required, G. found himself preoccupied to the point of obsession with that fall/fall/Yom Kippur/birthday coincidence and its Adamic echoes, of which he was inescapably reminded every time he looked in the mirror to shave, floss his teeth, or check his attire.
    “I think the wench is trying to tell me something,” he’d report at morning’s end. “Like those mumbling monsters in the old Hollywood horror flicks.”
    “So stay tuned,” recommended Mandy. “Me, I’ve got a class to teach, a batch of papers to grade, and a hung-up villanelle-in-the-works to straighten out in my spare time.”
    Been there, done that, changes changed: Arrivederci , love, and Muse be with you while Hubby turns with relief to such accomplishable after-lunch tasks as vacuuming the floors, picking up as many of the items on our grocery list as he can with confidence as the house sous chef , and then re-meeting her at the campus tennis courts for an hour of mixed doubles (sweatsuited against a cool late-afternoon breeze off the river) with another pair of StratColl-connected Heron Bay