Curse you, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and your sprung rhythm, too.

A refrain of "Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?" has been lodged firmly in my brain for about seven hours now.

I've never particularly loved Hopkins, or this poem, but something about it captures my mood right now. I'm leaving Chicago by train tonight, going east to Kalamazoo, Michigan. My parents have bought my paternal grandparents' farmhouse, and they're in the process of moving there from Colorado. We used to live right down the road, and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents until we moved away when I was six.

Slowly, we've unearthed a century's-worth of my grandmother's collections, opening the boxes I found so mysterious as a child. Secrets revealed: great-grandma's rubber girdles, enough white gloves to outfit a ladies' auxiliary, tiny handbag mirrors, leather wallets from the Chicago World's Fair, scrapbooks of greeting cards, Native American arts traded to my great-grandfather, steamer trunks with unfamiliar monograms. The force of these everyday items accumulates until the modern world begins to look strange to me. We drink the metallic, earthy water drawn from the well that stains the sinks brown; the smell is so familiar.

So, I'm going back, back, back. I think I might get lost somewhere in 1963...if I don't post again by Tuesday, send a search party.


"Spring and Fall, to a Young Child"

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.