… and on the morning after a dinner party with old friends, UD records this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, with commentary.
************************
Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
***************************
The poet sends his book of verse to the world with best wishes.
Let’s see:
Flowers in the garden.
A few white flowers remain on one of my potted geraniums on the deck. Some of the hydrangea out front still seem flowery, though strictly speaking they’re not. Do pyracantha berries count? No.
Meat in the hall.
Karyna, a gourmet cook, prepared a meaty Argentine stew for the evening. All I had to do was heat it on my stove.
A bin of wine.
“Get a good Rioja,” Karyna said, so Mr UD bought a Campellares Rioja.
A spice of wit.
The night was heavily spiced.
One of the guests recounted how, when she was a little girl, “old men were always coming up to me and saying dirty things. To this day I don’t know why I attracted so many. It happened all the time.”
This encouraged UD to recall how, decades ago, she and her mother were taken up Mt. Vesuvius by a guide, an old peasant. At one point the man directed UD‘s attention out to some distant hills, and as she gazed, he felt her up.
Another guest said that when he was young and beautiful, a drunk old guy on the subway tried to hump him.
Okay, none is this is what Stevenson meant by wit.
A house with lawns enclosing it.
Here I’m on extremely solid ground. Faithful readers know of UD‘s small Garrett Park house entirely surrounded by – at the moment – leaf-strewn lawns.
A living river by the door.
River of leaves? Leaves lie along the edges of the street by UD‘s door… And when it rains hard, a living river of water pours down the Rokeby Avenue hill… And if you’re willing to stretch things quite a bit, Rock Creek lies a quarter mile or so behind UD‘s house…
A nightingale in the sycamore.