Binoculars

These binoculars have been in our place in Deltaville for as long as I can remember.  

That would be about 30+ years. 

 My guess is that they were there long before that.  

They belonged to my grandfather, and they always had a prominent place on one of the tables

 by the window in the old trailer.  

Or the kitchen table in the new house.  

They are great for checking out how rough the river is or trying to identify a bird or animal 

or movement in the water, 

and they're even handy for seeing what people are doing.  

Not that I would ever use them to spy on people, 

but you can see clearly across the creek and also down to the community pier.  

Not that I have first hand knowledge of this. 

I used them just this past weekend to see who was walking out on one of the neighbor's pier 

identify some ducks. 

It reminded me of my grandmother and how she liked to 

see what all the neighbors were up to

watch the wildlife.

And it reminded me of all those times growing up where my cousin and I would 

fight over who got to use them first.

We would have to sneak them out of the house if we wanted to take them anywhere.

Allowing them to cross the threshold was clearly verbotten.

We did it anyway.

Now I realize that had a lot to do with them being my grandfather's 

and my grandmother not wanting to lose something of his after he passed.

There's a lot of memories in those old binoculars.

In many ways I imagine you could claim that they let you look back in time.

More Poetry

So now that I have discovered how easy it is to come up with a blog post if I just throw a poem on here... well look out because I'm too lazy busy sometimes to think of something brilliant to write.  So I pulled out something I wrote many years ago.  It does have to do with Deltaville as that is the "setting" of the poem so to speak.  Oh, and the definition of psithurism is the sound of the wind whispering through the trees (found that in the Balderdash game... love that game)

                                  Psithurisms

                    On nights when the pines talked

                    We shared whispered secrets

                    Behind heavy olive drapes.

                    "I think we should go swimming

                    off the pier," you'd say.

                     "Hey let's scare the neighbors with our cap guns,"

                     I'd offer.

                     Each summer we whispered

                     Staring up at the ceiling of the ancient trailer.

                     At 13 we discovered boys.

                     "Randon held my hand while roller skating,"

                     you offered like a confession to a priest.

                     "Was his hand sweaty?"

                     I wanted to know.

                     At 16 I was alone in the living room.

                     Our great-uncle dying in the house next door.

                      "Do you believe in God?" I whispered

                      to no one but the ceiling.

                      At 20 I was getting a divorce

                      Faced with raising a child alone.

                      It was the first year

                      I wasn't able to go to the trailer.

                      At 22 I visited the new house standing

                      where our old trailer used to be.

                      I stood outside with familiar pines

                      Staring up into the blind eye of God

                      Like the eye of a storm

                      silent with no wind.

                      The pines quiet like you and I

                       -- cousins grown too old for whispers.

We're still close, just not like we were when we were little...