• Full Moon

    10 signs you’re probably a vampire (a.k.a. an extreme night owl)

    In case you’ve ever wondered, here are the tell-tale signs:

    1. Your body wants to go to sleep as soon as dawn breaks.

    2. On the rare occasions that you’re up during the day, you do everything you can to avoid having sunlight touch your skin.

    3. Your morning shows are “The Tonight Show” and “The Daily Show.”

    4. Your bedroom looks like a cave (cold and very dark).

    5. Breakfast is served at 7 p.m.; dinner at 7 a.m.

    6. Your favorite day of the year is the end of Daylight Saving Time because it means you get an extra hour of darkness.

    7. You actually prefer to work the night shift.

    8. You believe all grocery stores and diners should be open 24/7.

    9. Holy water and garlic don’t bother you, but leaf blowers and jack hammers in the middle of the afternoon drive you mad.

    10. You’re most inspired when everyone else is asleep.

    –Photo by Julie Elliott-Abshire

  • lighthouse at night

    “The sound of the sea” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
    And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
    I heard the first wave of the rising tide
    Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
    A voice out of the silence of the deep,
    A sound mysteriously multiplied
    As of a cataract from the mountain’s side,
    Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
    So comes to us at times, from the unknown
    And inaccessible solitudes of being,
    The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
    And inspirations, that we deem our own,
    Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
    Of things beyond our reason or control.

    –Photo by Hydromet

    National Poetry Month

  • Cemetery seraphim

    “Autumn Valentine” by Dorothy Parker

    In May my heart was breaking-
    Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
    And bitter it beat at waking,
    And sore it split in sleep.

    And when it came November,
    I sought my heart, and sighed,
    “Poor thing, do you remember?”
    “What heart was that?” it cried.

    National Poetry Month

  • old couple

    “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks” by Jane Kenyon

    I am the blossom pressed in a book,
    found again after two hundred years…
    I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper…
    When the young girl who starves
    sits down to a table
    she will sit beside me…
    I am food on the prisoner’s plate…
    I am water rushing to the wellhead,
    filling the pitcher until it spills…
    I am the patient gardener
    of the dry and weedy garden…
    I am the stone step,
    the latch, and the working hinge…
    I am the heart contracted by joy…
    the longest hair, white
    before the rest…
    I am there in the basket of fruit
    presented to the widow…
    I am the musk rose opening
    unattended, the fern on the boggy summit…
    I am the one whose love
    overcomes you, already with you
    when you think to call my name…

    National Poetry Month

    –Photo by cjhallman