Christ in the Desert (1872)

There are countless depictions of Jesus in art, but few that dare to show him as utterly human as Ivan Kramskoi does in Christ in the Desert. Painted in a restrained, realist manner that borders on the ascetic, Kramskoi’s canvas strips away the iconography of miracle and divinity. No halo breaks through the dawn, no angels or demons crowd the scene. Instead, we find a solitary man seated upon the rocks, his head slightly bowed, hands knotted in thought, surrounded by the colorless expanse of an indifferent wilderness. It is as though the entire universe has fallen silent, holding its breath to witness a man’s decision.

The painting belongs to a particular current in nineteenth-century Russian art, the Peredvizhniki or “Wanderers.” Kramskoi was their moral compass, their philosopher-painter. The Wanderers sought to reject the ornamental idealism of the Academy and instead reveal truth: moral, psychological, and social. In Christ in the Desert, that realism reaches an almost metaphysical purity. The landscape is as severe as conscience; the horizon, an unbroken line between doubt and illumination. The sun has not yet risen: the light is gray and rose, a liminal hue that mirrors the inward threshold of the figure himself.

This is not the triumphant Christ of Resurrection, nor the suffering Christ of Golgotha. This is Jesus before he is Christ. Jesus before the miracles, before the message is spoken. The historic Jesus, the wandering exorcist and healer who proclaimed that the world would be turned upside down, has not yet stepped forward. He sits, poised on the edge of decision, uncertain of what form his destiny will take. Will he be a prophet, a ruler, a madman, or merely another voice lost in the desert wind? Kramskoi captures that moment of suspension, when potential has not yet hardened into purpose.

To me, this is the image of the hero before the myth. Every sacred narrative has such a moment. The Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, beset by temptation; Odysseus on the shore, torn between home and sea; Moses in exile, hearing nothing but the silence of his own doubt. The desert, in every mythology, is the place of stripping down. It is the crucible of transformation, where the soul must face itself unarmed. In that sense, Kramskoi’s Christ joins a lineage older and wider than Christianity: the archetype of the one who wrestles alone with vocation.

Kahlil Gibran captured a similar truth in Jesus, the Son of Man when he wrote, “The silence of the night spoke to him, and in the silence of his own heart he heard the cry of the world.” Gibran’s Jesus, like Kramskoi’s, is not the serene figure of doctrine but the contemplative man who feels the full gravity of choosing to love a world that will not understand him. There is anguish in that decision, the pain of foreknowledge. To take up one’s calling is to take up one’s cross long before the nails appear.

Kramskoi paints this recognition into every line of Christ’s body. The tightly clasped hands, the weary feet, the eyes darkened with sleepless reflection: all speak of a man who senses the cost of compassion. The rocks around him are painted with such tactile realism that they seem to press upon him, emblematic of the world’s weight. Yet just beyond the frame, the first faint light begins to touch the stones. Dawn is coming, quietly, as if to promise that even this desolation will not be forever.

As I look at this work, I see not only the figure of Jesus, but a reflection of my own inner landscape. Even now, at forty-three, I find myself sitting in my own desert, no less real for being inward. I am not fasting or tempted by kingdoms, yet I, too, am poised between what has been and what might yet be. Life, at mid-age, is full of such thresholds. We come to points where the roads diverge and must ask, as he must have asked, Who shall I become? The silence that follows that question can feel endless, but it is the necessary silence of transformation.

The older I get, the more I realize that every life contains its desert period. Youth gives us the illusion of momentum, but maturity confronts us with stillness. With the place where decisions can no longer be postponed. In those moments, I understand Kramskoi’s Christ not as a distant divinity but as a fellow pilgrim of uncertainty. He sits as we all must sit, in solitude, caught between fear and faith, between what is known and what must be risked.

Perhaps that is why this painting endures for me above all others. It captures the sacredness of hesitation. Kramskoi does not show us a miracle, but the possibility of one. The painting is an icon of potential, of a humanity that trembles on the edge of transcendence. The desert is barren, but it is also the birthplace of vision. The man who sits there is not yet the Christ of the Gospels; he is the man deciding whether to bear that name.

Art, at its most profound, reveals the eternal moment before becoming. It stops time not to glorify the end but to make us dwell in the weight of choice. Christ in the Desert is not simply a religious image, it is a mirror of consciousness itself: the moment the self sits alone, facing its own infinite horizon, and whispers, Let it be so.

The Other Side (2025)

“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Richard Ahnert’s The Other Side captures that quiet ache of distance that defines so much of what it means to love. A cat sits on a swing in a snow-covered yard, gazing toward a small house aglow with lamplight. Inside the window, another cat sits its silhouette softened by the golden curtain, its warmth implied but unreachable. Between them stretches a field of snow and silence, the thin and tender line between belonging and solitude.

Ahnert’s genius lies in his restraint. The scene is not sentimental but contemplative. The composition invites us into a threshold space between domesticity and wildness, intimacy and isolation, the remembered and the unreachable. The swing, motionless in the cold, becomes a meditation on suspended love: the kind that cannot move forward, yet cannot disappear. It is both longing and peace, the still acceptance that not all warmth can be possessed.

Tonight, as I look at this painting on National Cat Day, the image feels especially close to my heart. The air outside has turned crisp; the first frost will not be far off. I think of Katy, the feral cat who has made my porch her home for the past three years. She is not mine, not in the way most people mean that word, but she belongs to my days and to the rhythm of my evenings. Every night she scratches gently at the window beside my chair, and every night I rise to fill her bowl. When I return home, she is waiting by the porch light: patient, expectant, familiar.

Two of my cats are her kittens, raised indoors and utterly content in their domestic ease. But Katy remains what she has always been: watchful, wary, free. I’ve tried to woo her closer, and she has allowed it at times, sometimes sitting near me as I smoke my pipe, sometimes brushing against the edge of my shoe. Yet she always stops short of letting me touch her. She knows the comfort I offer, but she also knows what it would cost her to accept it. And so, I have learned to love her as she is. I learned to love her on her own terms.

In this, I see Ahnert’s painting not just as metaphor but as mirror. The cat outside the window is not exiled, only self-determined. Its distance is not rejection but identity. The snow between us becomes the language of boundaries: a recognition that love can exist without enclosure. She has her feral house, warm against the cold; she has me, her constant presence; she has the freedom that makes her who she is.

There is a lesson in that: for how we care, and for how we love. We live in a culture that often confuses affection with ownership, compassion with control. Yet love, at its truest, requires the humility of letting another being remain themselves. It asks us to fill the bowl without asking for gratitude, to open the door without insisting it be walked through. To love Katy is to honor her boundaries as sacred; to see that my care need not conquer her freedom.

Philosophically, The Other Side becomes a meditation on the ethics of affection: the way love occupies the space between autonomy and belonging. It asks us to reimagine care not as possession but as presence. In phenomenological terms, it is a call to dwell with another being without erasing their difference. The act of love becomes the act of waiting, of showing up, of lighting the porch lamp against the dark.

And so, as fall deepens and the nights grow cold, I find myself worrying for her. I wonder if she stays warm enough, if she feels the bite of the frost. Yet beneath that worry is acceptance: she will live the way she must. She will cross that snowy yard or not. She will remain, as she always has, on the other side of the glass. She remains close enough to love, distant enough to remain herself.

Each evening, when I hear her soft scratch at the window and step out into the chill, I think again of Gibran’s words. Love directs our course. It leads us not to possession, but to reverence. Sometimes it calls us to open our homes; other times, simply to keep the porch light burning for the souls, wild or weary, who choose to stay just beyond the threshold.

It: Welcome to Derry

Techno Cat

Techno Cat

By Betsy Franco

Send to: techno_cat@catmail.com

From: me@catmail.com

When writing friends an email

I sometimes &p*&%^$#

           have a fit

    if Mitchell walks across          the keys

k:j^$% and adds a note

                 vpq#peifgu3gy               to it!

Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

Autumnal Mirror (2025)

It began as a moment of pause. The kind that asks for nothing but attention. I sat on the porch, pipe in hand, listening as the soft rain whispered its way through the trees. Each drop seemed to find its place, tracing invisible paths along the branches until a gust of wind released it all in a sudden, joyous cascade. The marble walk before me became a shallow pond, a mirror to the gray sky. Scattered across it were the fallen leaves — some resting flat, others curled in on themselves — their rust and amber hues blooming against the pale stone.

I didn’t intend to take a picture. It was the kind of beauty that belongs to stillness, not spectacle. But as the rain softened and the smoke from my pipe drifted forward, I noticed how the marble, water, and sky folded into one another, how each surface reflected the other until none of them could be easily separated. It felt like a truth too fragile to last, and so I lifted my camera to bear witness.

In that instant, I wasn’t composing so much as joining the scene. The photograph revealed itself: a quiet balance between what endures and what fades. The marble was cool and permanent, the leaves were temporary, and I was somewhere between them, breathing smoke into the rain. The act of photographing became less about capturing and more about participating in the rhythm of impermanence.

As I looked later at the image — leaves adrift, colors muted by the gray sky — I was reminded of Whistler’s nocturnes, where atmosphere takes precedence over form; of Monet’s water lilies, where reflection blurs the boundaries between air and earth; and of Hiroshige’s rain scenes, where the world is both motion and stillness at once. My photograph, though far humbler, shares something of their intent. It is not about objects, but about the space between them. The space that elusive tension where time and perception meet.

The composition rests on accident and grace. The leaves fall where they must; the rain gathers where it will. I am there only to notice, only to see how beauty organizes itself without my control. It is a study in what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, the art of imperfect transience. Every element — leaf, stone, drop, breath — belongs precisely because it will not last.

Sitting there, pipe in hand, I felt an uncommon peace. The smoke curled upward, pale and temporary, before dissolving into the same damp air that carried the scent of earth and rain. In that small act — breathing in, exhaling, watching the smoke disappear — I found myself mirrored in the scene before me. The photograph, when I look at it now, is not just of marble and leaves; it is of that feeling, that awareness, that moment when I too became part of the composition.

I call it Autumnal Mirror because that is what it reflects. It reflects not only the sky upon stone, but the quiet recognition that everything, myself included, belongs to the same fleeting beauty. For a few minutes, I sat content to simply be: rain above, marble below, smoke between. A man, a moment, and the soft applause of water finding its way home.

The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body (1914)

Kay Nielsen’s illustration for The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body has always felt like a dream I half-remember. The blue cathedral arches, the attenuated figures, the jewel-like restraint of line and color. Even now they speak to me in a language of elegance and ache. I’m drawn to Nielsen’s fusion of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, where ornament becomes emotion and precision becomes grace. His worlds are immaculate and haunted, as though beauty itself is holding its breath.

The story that inspired it is one of the strangest and most resonant of the old Norse tales. A giant, terrified of being hurt, hides his heart outside his body. He locks it away through layers of distance — an island, a chest, a duck, an egg — until he is safe from harm and also from feeling. In this way, the story externalizes something profoundly human: our instinct to protect what is most tender in us, even at the cost of becoming less alive.

What makes the tale strange is precisely what makes it true. The heart is not stolen or broken, it is hidden. And in that hiding, life becomes mechanized, powerful but hollow. The prince’s quest to find it is not a battle but a process of empathy. He shows mercy to a raven, a fish, and a wolf, and each act of compassion later opens a way forward. His triumph is not achieved by force but by alliance with feeling, instinct, and nature. By allying with the very things the giant has exiled.

When the prince finally finds the heart, enclosed in its absurd chain of containers, he must crush it to free those the giant has turned to stone. In that moment, the fairy tale touches something sacred: the truth that to recover the heart often means to break it open. There is no restoration without wounding; no wholeness without the return of pain. The death of the heartless giant is also the rebirth of life and love.

Nielsen captures this psychic architecture with visual psychology. The scene is both sanctuary and mindscape. The prince kneels before a distant, illuminated figure. We dont know precisely who, perhaps the captive princess, perhaps the heart itself made human. The vaulted arches rise like ribs; the chandelier burns like intellect above emotion. The entire composition is a meditation on separation and the longing to bridge it.

I recognize myself in both figures. The giant who hides his heart to avoid being hurt; the prince who dares to recover it. There are times I have lived as one and times I have struggled toward the other. The story feels personal because the journey toward feeling always is. To live fully means to risk, to ache, to let the world touch you again after disappointment or loss.

That is also where I see the quiet power of art therapy and art itself. Art becomes a way to move toward the heart without demanding we tear it open all at once. Whether we are creating or simply looking, art allows us to approach feeling through form, to give shape to what we cannot yet say. Each of us finds that differently, and different in each moment. Sometimes I am the maker, sometimes the viewer; in either case, art gives me permission to be whole again.

When I gaze upon Nielsen’s image, I am reminded that beauty is not decoration but a doorway. It us a way back to the self we once hid. The fairy tale tells me that to find the heart is to risk breaking it; the art shows me that even in breaking, there is light and hope. 

Cats, Coffee, and Roses

My favorite things in three poems. 

By Dave

Cats

In the window light
a tail moves once,
then stillness.

Coffee

Steam drifts.
A small ring darkens
the page.

Roses

Some open early,
some not at all.
Bees decide.

Hanging out with Otto

Lord Huron at Cable Dahmer Arena

The Kiss of the Siren (1882)

Tonight, I found myself at a restaurant called Twin Peaks. I had never been before, but I knew what awaited me: a sea of televisions, cold beer, and young women who made their living through the performance of attention. It’s a place where the architecture of desire is laid bare, built on the quiet understanding that beauty, charm, and the illusion of connection can still make a man feel something, even if only for the length of a meal.

I don’t usually frequent places like that. I’ve never felt comfortable where women are put on display, where their value is traded in tips and glances. Yet, there I was, sitting among men my age, each of us perhaps looking for something unnamed. When our waitress appeared — luminous, confident, and practiced in her role — I couldn’t help but feel a jolt of dissonance. She was beautiful, yes, but it was the way she saw me that startled me most. The practiced smile, the soft laugh at a passing comment. For me, it created a brief illusion of intimacy, and in that illusion I felt something ancient stir.

It was later, thinking about the experience, that Wertheimer’s The Kiss of the Siren came to mind. In the painting, a sailor clings to the wreckage of his ship, exhausted, as a pale siren rises from the storm-tossed sea to kiss him. The scene is both tender and terrifying. Her embrace promises warmth, but the waves around them speak of ruin. He reaches for her even as she pulls him under. Desire and destruction, comfort and oblivion: bound together in the same moment.

That is what I saw reflected in that restaurant. Not lust, but longing. Not for the body, but for connection. The siren in modern form doesn’t sing from the rocks anymore; she smiles from behind the bar, meets your eyes, and makes you feel seen. For men like me — single, middle-aged, not unhappy but occasionally overcome by loneliness — that can feel like a kind of salvation. It’s easy to understand the pull, the way men line up to hear that song, to feel that spark of being wanted.

But like the sailor, we know what lies beneath. The transaction is transparent, the illusion temporary. The song is sung, and down to the depths we go, not drowned by her, but by the recognition of our own yearning. The siren’s kiss, then, is not always the kiss of death; it’s the kiss of memory. It awakens the parts of us that still crave tenderness, that still remember what it feels like to be desired, and what it costs to lose that.

Psychologically, it’s fascinating how easily we fall into archetype. The siren represents what Jung might call the anima: the inner feminine ideal, the image of completion that draws the male psyche toward wholeness. But in its shadow form, it becomes a lure, leading us into projection rather than integration. We mistake the reflection for the real thing. In that moment of longing, we don’t want her, we want the part of ourselves that once believed love could save us.

I left Twin Peaks with that thought lingering. The storm of laughter and neon behind me, I stepped out into the quiet night. The world felt still, almost tender in its indifference. I realized that what I had encountered wasn’t temptation in the moral sense, but a mirror. The siren is not a villain. She is a symbol of the deep and difficult human desire to be known. That desire to have someone reach back across the void, even if only for an instant, before the sea closes over us again.

And perhaps that is why Wertheimer’s painting still haunts me. Because in that embrace between sailor and siren, between man and illusion, I see not condemnation but recognition. Both are reaching for something just out of reach. Reaching for a touch, a connection, a reprieve from the endless storm. It is the same reach that lives quietly in all of us, the human ache to be seen before we disappear beneath the waves.

Twin Peaks

Frankenstein (2025)

Screenland Armour Theatre

District Biskuits

North Kansas City

North Kansas City sits just across the river like Kansas City’s stubborn younger sibling — the one who refused to be annexed, built its own utilities, and made a living hammering, hauling, and canning while the big city chased jazz and skyline dreams. It began as a deliberate act of separation in 1912, born from the simple fact that the Missouri River flooded too often for anyone to build a bridge of politics across it. So they drew their own lines on the map, paved their own streets, and wired their own grid.

A century later, I’m standing in the echo of that independence. The proposed Royals stadium site is still what it has been for decades — warehouses, gravel lots, and rusted fences that hum faintly when the wind comes off the river. There’s nothing to see yet, but it doesn’t take much imagination to sketch a ballpark here. From where I’m standing, home plate would face the city skyline, a perfect postcard view across the water. For now, though, it’s all potential — the quiet before the branding and the blue seats.

I walked from there to Chappell’s, a bar that feels like a museum curated by someone who loves sports not for their glory, but for their stories. Helmets line the ceiling, some dented, some gleaming, each one holding a whisper of a season or a team that once meant something. The walls are crowded with photographs, ticket stubs, and faces that remember when baseball was slower, more human. The place smells faintly of wood polish and nostalgia.

Outside, North Kansas City hums in that peculiar midwestern rhythm — not bustling, exactly, but alive in its own steady way. The streets are clean, the buildings squat and practical, the air tinged with grain dust and brewery hops. This is still a working town, even if the work has changed.

If Kansas City across the river is the showpiece, this side remains the workshop — the part of the story that keeps its sleeves rolled up. And maybe that’s why the idea of a new stadium here makes sense: a return to the workbench, where something lasting might be built again.

The Little Store on Knox

Rose in the Rain

Rose in the Rain

By Dave

The sand is an ocean without mercy.

For forty days it has named me Son.

Each grain a whisper of what I must become.

I asked for bread and was given silence.

I asked for light and was given fire.

I asked for God—

and the wind answered wait.

Then a rose grew in the stone.

No water, no root, only will.

Its red bled against the pale of the world,

a wound that refused to close.

I knelt before it.

It smelled of both heaven and rot,

and I knew the kingdom would be the same.

Temptation came not as the serpent

but as the bloom—

beauty promising meaning,

color promising truth.

I touched its thorns and felt my blood begin.

“Is this how You speak?” I asked.

And the sky broke open.

Rain—

first a single drop,

then the whole heaven collapsing.

It filled my mouth like a name I had forgotten.

It washed the rose into the earth,

and me with it.

I could not tell if I was saved or undone.

Only that God was in the rain,

and the world was beginning again.

Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive

Nosferatu

Lunch Date

Misbehaving (1897)

Today I took a personal day. Not to go anywhere, but to stay home. That meant I got to be at home with my four cats and the slow rhythm of the house. The day unfolded quietly: the smell of coffee, the creak of the floorboards, the sound of small feet padding behind me. My cats followed me from room to room as if to remind me that even in solitude, I am not truly alone. They napped, played, and scattered moments of movement through the stillness. I watched them without hurry, grateful for their presence.

Later, I looked again at Henriëtte Ronner-Knip’s Misbehaving. A mother cat lies draped across an ornate cabinet while her kittens tumble in the drawers below. At first it seems a gentle domestic comedy, but the longer I looked, the more I felt the quiet tension beneath it. I could feel the mother’s watchful fatigue, her half-closed eyes seeing both the chaos and the comfort of her small world. It is a painting about the quiet work of care, about love that endures without applause.

In my own life, I often feel that same weariness: an affection tinged with solitude. As a divorced man in midlife, I live between past and future, looking backward with tenderness and forward with uncertainty. My days are full: students, colleagues, meetings, plans. And yet, beneath that fullness runs a current of loneliness, not born of emptiness but of awareness. Psychology names this the existential loneliness that accompanies consciousness itself. It is the recognition that no matter how intertwined our lives may be, we ultimately stand alone in our own experience.

Erik Erikson described midlife as the stage of generativity versus stagnation; it is a period when the self seeks meaning through creation, care, and contribution. To give of oneself to the next generation, to build something that outlasts you. Teaching fulfills that in one sense; my work is full of faces and futures. But Erikson also warned that when the need to nurture collides with the limits of intimacy or belonging, a sense of stagnation can take hold. It's not failure, exactly, but a pause, a lingering question: Have I done enough? Have I been seen?

I recognize that tension in myself. In the classroom, I am surrounded by others, yet sometimes feel peripheral, unsure of where I fit. In church, I am part of the gathering but not of the faith. At home, my cats curl close, their warmth filling the room, but their companionship cannot replace the intimacy of shared history or human touch. Loneliness, in these moments, isn’t despair, it’s simply the echo of what it means to keep caring in a world that doesn’t always return the gesture.

And yet, there is growth in that awareness. Winnicott spoke of the capacity “to be alone in the presence of another” as one of emotional maturity’s quiet achievements. I think that’s what Ronner-Knip’s mother cat embodies: a composed solitude that holds affection without losing selfhood. She knows that love doesn’t erase solitude, it lives beside it.

As I sit in my own quiet house, I realize I am not unhappy. These moments of loneliness don’t define me; they remind me that I am still capable of depth, of reflection, of reaching toward others. Perhaps that is generativity in another form: the willingness to keep giving, teaching, creating, even when the house grows still.

The mother cat rests above her misbehaving brood, her eyes neither tired nor sad, but aware. I find comfort in that awareness. It reminds me that life’s meaning often gathers not in the noise of company, but in the quiet spaces we learn to inhabit gracefully. Today, I let the loneliness settle, soft and unhurried, like light across the wood. And in that quiet, I felt something close to peace: not the end of longing, but its gentle transformation into peace.

Dirty Harry

Paul McCartney at BOK Center

Liquid Death: Mountain Water

Ruby D’s Burger Joint

Miller Pecan Company

Orb-Weaver Spider and Web

Fresh from the Greenhouse (1913)

I have always loved the quiet beauty of flowers — their way of filling a room with presence, their calm ability to bloom without spectacle. Jessica Hayllar’s Fresh from the Greenhouse embodies that same stillness, yet beneath its domestic tranquility lies something profoundly existential. It is a meditation on time, fragility, and the delicate act of preserving life through art.

Hayllar’s story feels inseparable from the flowers she paints. After the accident that limited her mobility, she turned away from the populated scenes of her youth — the bustling parlors and tea tables — and began to paint flowers. Her world became smaller, yet her gaze became infinite. The greenhouse and the drawing room became her universe, and through them, she continued to see beauty in motion, even if her own movement was curtailed.

The azaleas here are not wild or accidental; they are deliberate, cultivated beauty — grown, pruned, and placed with intention. The vase and the lace curtain frame them like the lines of a poem. This is not nature untouched; it is nature translated, disciplined, and offered to the interior world. Hayllar’s art transforms care into creation — the artist as gardener, tending both life and light.

Yet what moves me most is the paradox her work reveals: these flowers, so alive in her painting, have long since died. Their blossoms have withered, their stems turned brittle, and the greenhouse that nurtured them is likely gone as well. But through Hayllar’s brush, they continue to bloom. Art, in this sense, makes impermanence permanent — it catches a moment just before it passes and allows it to linger forever.

But that permanence, as Emily Dickinson reminds us, is never without its ache. Dickinson too lived a largely interior life, her garden and her room serving as twin sanctuaries of observation. Like Hayllar, she cultivated the infinite within confinement. Her poem “A Light exists in Spring” captures the same fragile transcendence that Hayllar paints:

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period —

When March is scarcely here —

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope you know —

It almost speaks to you.

Dickinson’s light, like Hayllar’s blossoms, is temporal — a fleeting presence caught at the edge of perception. Both artists ask how one can hold beauty when it is destined to vanish. The answer, perhaps, lies in the act of attention itself. To notice — to see, to paint, to write — is to preserve.

And yet there is humility in that preservation. Art does not defeat time; it witnesses it. The flower in Hayllar’s vase will never scent the air again. The light in Dickinson’s line will never quite return the same way. But both remain as traces — gestures of reverence toward the transient.

In Hayllar, I see an echo of Dickinson: two women enclosed by circumstance, creating worlds of extraordinary depth from the smallest of spaces. They remind me that beauty does not require freedom, only presence. Art, in its quietest form, is not about conquest but about care — a way of saying, this mattered, even if only for a moment.

More than a century later, I sit before Hayllar’s azaleas, still fresh, still radiant, and I am reminded of what Dickinson wrote in another poem:

Forever — is composed of Nows —

The flowers have wilted, but this “now” remains — a small, painted eternity.

Betty's a Goober

Roses