Synchronicities

A fun poetry group meeting in Port Townsend yesterday. We had a picnic lunch first, with chicken-pear-curry soup, tomato salad, potato salad, bean salad, olives, wine, rice crackers and salsa. Then we sat in Kathryn's back yard around a little campfire pit, on huge cedar logs, and read each other's poems. Gorgeous and sunny and warm. All of us able to sit in shorts and short sleeves. A fitting end to summer.

It's always amazing to me how even though we write in relative isolation, we often have recurring themes in the work we bring to group. Synchronicities. Yesterday we had poems about: raking/burning leaves and the coming of fall; leaping salmon, spawning before dying; reading obits; a bombed library with burning pages falling from the sky; dreams of darkness; the line of midnight. It sounds a little heavy writing it now, but they were all really beautiful poems.

Missed one ferry on the way back and had to wait for the next. Puget Sound a deep dreamy blue, and dotted with sailboats. Mount Rainier and Mount Baker all icy and white and saying "hello" to each other across the waves. A lovely chat with R and T in the car. You can't really ever be in a hurry when a ferry is involved.

Now . . . back to the working week.