that perfect spot
justam
Posts: 21,410
That perfect spot
She had chosen the lot with care. She liked it because it was green and on top of a hill. (But it wasn’t steep at all!) She’d cleared it just for the project and the foundation had been laid in cement. The home was to be built above and the building materials had been delivered.
There was a good supply of wood, bricks, copper wire, but there was an unexpected occurance.
The builder went off to another project.
He didn’t show up one day, but she had such love for the home she imagined that she thought he did too. So she left everything there, thinking he’d come back when the interruption was done. People passed that cozy empty lot wondering who left that foundation and a home unbuilt.
It stayed untouched all that Spring, and that first summer the sweet happy young woman reassured herself that he was only waiting for the heat to leave to get back to work. When Fall came, she thought maybe he had something else going again.
She started to worry a bit but she left everything as he’d left it so he could pick up construction quickly. That strong wood survived the Winter snow, the bricks were unbeaten, and that copper is a good metal and merely changed color!
But by the second Spring, she had to make a decision. At this point she decided to leave everything as it was but for a new reason. She chose to believe that what she really wanted was to use that perfect spot for nothing but this purpose. As a solid work of art to represent an unfinished project.
And she enjoyed that for a while.
As more years passed, not mysteriously, the plants grew around that sturdy stuff. The foundation got covered with flowers, grass grew tall, and birds appeared on the plot.
One Spring day she decided to dig up that foundation. She felt happy with the thought that if she wanted to build a house there, she could always begin again. But in the mean time, she’d rather have a garden.
She had chosen the lot with care. She liked it because it was green and on top of a hill. (But it wasn’t steep at all!) She’d cleared it just for the project and the foundation had been laid in cement. The home was to be built above and the building materials had been delivered.
There was a good supply of wood, bricks, copper wire, but there was an unexpected occurance.
The builder went off to another project.
He didn’t show up one day, but she had such love for the home she imagined that she thought he did too. So she left everything there, thinking he’d come back when the interruption was done. People passed that cozy empty lot wondering who left that foundation and a home unbuilt.
It stayed untouched all that Spring, and that first summer the sweet happy young woman reassured herself that he was only waiting for the heat to leave to get back to work. When Fall came, she thought maybe he had something else going again.
She started to worry a bit but she left everything as he’d left it so he could pick up construction quickly. That strong wood survived the Winter snow, the bricks were unbeaten, and that copper is a good metal and merely changed color!
But by the second Spring, she had to make a decision. At this point she decided to leave everything as it was but for a new reason. She chose to believe that what she really wanted was to use that perfect spot for nothing but this purpose. As a solid work of art to represent an unfinished project.
And she enjoyed that for a while.
As more years passed, not mysteriously, the plants grew around that sturdy stuff. The foundation got covered with flowers, grass grew tall, and birds appeared on the plot.
One Spring day she decided to dig up that foundation. She felt happy with the thought that if she wanted to build a house there, she could always begin again. But in the mean time, she’d rather have a garden.
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this is very good. thanks for sharing.
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Thanks for reading it.
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry --
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it . . .
Someone's road home from work this once was,
who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse, but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
"Directive" by Robert Frost (The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1946!). Nature is taking it over again here too -- both human and the earth, the human is returning to his childlike innocence; the earth is returning to its natural state. Much like the place where the foundation is in Justam's peice, nature goes on in spite of the things that we try to do to change it -- I agree with Being Enlightened, in that what I like about it is that nature prevails-- it always does. I think that is what is hopeful about both the frost poem and Justam's peice. Not so much that we change things, but that in time nature changes things