Emily Brisse

Friends, tomorrow is June. June! Which means the students I didn't teach these past months are celebrating their freedom, the crab apple blossoms I blinked and missed this year are ripening into fruit, the thunderstorms I love — the big and juicy ones — are crackling on the horizon, and I must sneak in one more post before spring turns to summer, if only to share a few green-season quotes with you from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Quite by chance, it was the first book I read after Elliot was born, and I can't imagine I'll ever forget that serendipitous match. I read this story of Mary and Colin and Dickon when I was a young girl, of course, but I had forgotten how much truth swirls off every page. There were grand intentions of writing an essay about it, or at least a poem, and sharing that with you all, but instead I have become a master at the art of clipping small fingernails and mining out ticklish spots between the delicious rolls of my son...

This is a scene from last Monday . Hubs and I are giddy. It is 88', and humid, the kind of humid you complain about in June, July, and August, but in May, it is all good, baby, in fact it is down right sublime.  "Give me more of this stuff!" I yell out at the edge of the deck--I am perched there, reveling in the sensation of sweat--and the words fly back at me atop hot, fat wind. See, along with the humidity, the 7:00 night is cooking up a whole mix of tight, angry air. Dark clouds are rising higher and higher along the south skyline. It's storm weather. Yet this doesn't bother us. Anything severe usually comes our way from the northwest, and we simply cannot stay in on such a summer-like night. So we pull on shorts and t-shirts, strap into sandals, and hop on our bikes. For the record, I do look back and up over my shoulder more than once. I notice it: the clouds aren't just dark. They're a kind of a pink-orange black. One of us says, "Are you s...

Listen, The wind is still, And far away in the night -- See! The uplands fill With a running light. Open the doors. It is warm; And where the sky was clear-- Look! The head of a storm That marches here! Come under the trembling hedge-- Fast, although you fumble... There! Did you hear the edge of winter crumble -- by Mark Van Doren