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Scientology has proved that there is money in establishing a phony religion.Phony or not, the bottom line is profit. 
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I recite this poem often to my kids. It's the first poem that each of them committed to memory.
Slightly ironical: I never liked the poem birches when I was a kid, though when I was very young I used to get in trouble for doing that thing - and now I'm too afraid of heights and too heavy to attempt it. Finally, I appreciate the poem.
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Opinions differ, but I find Randall Thompson's setting of this poem in his Frostiana to be nothing short of exquisite.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Last line of Frost's poem "Birches":
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
I can remember swinging birches, but my kids never got to do it. The once prevalent birches are now few and puny
because of leaf miner disease. I am fortunate to have had
much of the best of two worlds. I had hundreds of acres of
woods I could roam in with complete freedom. Before my kids
were old enough to go into the woods, the goddam drug dealers had forced police to put all woods off limit to anybody.
Kids today can have no idea what Frost was talking about.
Nostalgia can be bittersweet.
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Hi Bill!
You wrote:
I had hundreds of acres of
woods I could roam in with complete freedom.
How lovely! I grew up on an 800 acre farm in the Ozark Mountains. It was a beautiful childhood that taught me the value of nature and conservation. Maybe this is why I've always enjoyed Frost's poetry. He deals with so much that I grew up exploring; though his experiences with wood and animals were in New England.
It's a little more difficult to teach my son the value of ecology on a suburban lot, but I'm giving it my best shot.
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It's a little more difficult to teach my son the value of ecology on a suburban lotYou can teach him a lot more on a lot less than 800 acres, gift horse. Less is more, especially in the environmental movement.
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Carpal Tunnel
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i grew up in the bronx, (right next to the park that houses the small cottage that EAPoe rented when he lived in the bronx.
about half the park was paved over. the other half trees and straggly grass.
the area, (near Fordham Road and the Grand Councorse), was very urban. Fordham was a stop on Metro north, an express stop on 2 subways, the terminus for several bus lines.
i was also less than a mile (as the crow fly's) from the Bronx botanical gardens. i grew up in on the 5th floor of a 5 floor walk up. i could look out windows, and see a panarama of NY metro area (front windows gave a view of GW bridge to NJ, back windows let me see the East river bridges, (Whitestone & Throgg's Neck)
but i had primal forest too, and water falls, and the bronx zoo, for much of my childhood was total free. i had green houses, and orchids, and rock gardens. city scapes often a wonderful environment. (i spent the first earth day at Br. Botanical gardens helping to do a spring clean up)
my kids grew up in a more suburban area, (still inside NYC) and we assisted researchers from Woods Hole by collecting, they tagged and took blood samples from horse shoe crabs.) we pick wild strawberrys, raspberries and mullberries, in a city parks. we kept a compost pile, and i always could find the egg mass of the prey mantis, and we would watch them emerge.
every environment has riches, there is beauty in trees, but also in bridges and wonder works of engineering. grapho, you are right, even small things, can make a very big difference. the bronx botanical gardens has a scant 40 acres or so of ancient hemlocks, (virgin forest) but it was forest enough.
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even small things, can make a very big difference
Yes, de Troy. Let us celebrate "small things which make a big difference" ... like the Bronx Zoo, a nearly miraculous oasis, which I have visited myself.
Too often we make a big thing out of a lot of things which make no difference at all.
What would St. Louis be without its arch?
What would Vancouver be without Stanley Park, or Manhattan without Central Park.
Certainly, these Parks are a small thing within the totality of their urban mass, but those urban areas are almost unthinkable without those Parks, at least unthinkable as leading centres of civilization.
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"And the time of the singing of birds is come," from Henry Purcell's setting of My Beloved Spake: The Song of Solomon
I can't find the text on-line, just vendors of the music.
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