quiltersmuse.com Blog

In anticipation of Memorial Day, Jim and I went to Murray’s Greenhouse in our home town to purchase flowering plants to plant at the graves of my parents and brother. The greenhouse is an amazing place – so fragrant and full of life with sound of the birds who roost in the rafters and the colors of so many different growing things. The graves are unshaded and need sturdy plants so after looking around we settled on the old standbys of geranium, petunias and argeratum.

The cemetery is about a 40 minute trip. No one else was there. While Jim was preparing the soil, shaking out old sods and adding compost we brought along, my eyes wandered to a flat black granite stone that I had never noticed before. Evidently, the stone belongs to a relative of our nearest neighbor on South Rd. where I grew up. I was drawn to give a closer look at the words written upon it:

Teach me your mood o patient stars!
Who climb each night the ancient sky
Leaving on space no shadow or scars
No trace of age, no fear to die.

R. W. Emerson

I assumed that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the poem and I thought it fitting that it appears on a New Hampshire grave because in my research about Ellen Webster, I learned that Emerson had stayed at the Tavern/Inn in Bridgewater, NH, just like so many of other important folks of the day like Daniel Webster, and other poets whose names you would recognize. What a lovely surprise to find this piece of writing for someone like me who loves meaningful words.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, but please take a moment to remember those who have gone before and all of the trials and sacrifices in their lives.

God Bless!

Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications

Much of the folklore of childhood as well as its perception by adults, in retrospect, can sometimes center on the poetry associated with those long ago days. That idea could be the subject of a lengthy discussion! Suffice it to say that this morning I woke up thinking about a poem that I was required to memorize in its entirety during the first years of my formative Catholic education. Only the first two lines have remained easy for me to recall from memory:

My Shadow

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head,
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow–
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow,
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes get so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

During the time that my mother was growing up, there was much emphasis put on memorization of poetry and recitation. In fact, she was tutored in “elocution,” a fact of which she was always proud. Her penmanship was exquisite and in the early schools I attended, students were graded on how well they could implement the Palmer method of penmanship. These early forays into expressing the written and spoken word seemed vital to a good education. I suppose that in today’s classroom, this emphasis has probably gone the way of the dinosaur.

Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications