April is the cruelest month . . . — T.S. Eliot
I’m sorry about April. About not writing in April, that is. It must have been a busy month. But I’ve let all of us down.
When you start this blogging thing, you make explicit promises to yourself and implicit promises to your (wished for) readers. I promised to write every week, and I did just that for almost a year. Then I got a fairly regular paying writing gig for almost four months, and all bets were off. Weekly turned to bi-weekly turned to monthly and then all of a sudden, five weeks went by with nothing. What was I doing? Mostly planning for my upcoming trip to Italy. When you travel with a group and you’re the instigator, all the questions funnel into you, eventually. And most of the planning. And all of the worry. And there’s been a whole lot of that since the activities of last Sunday night! So I’ve been worrying a lot, I guess.
But I also did some amazing things, culturally, in April. Saw Madame Butterfly at the Virginia Opera (not the best production ever, but not bad). I saw one of my all-time favorite plays, A Thousand Clowns, with Richmond’s own thesbian master, Scott Wichmann. And I got to see a rare appearance of Mary Oliver, whose poetry has inspired me and moved me to tears for years.
She’s a lot funnier than I expected her to be in a reading, although there’s certainly a great deal of humor in her poetry. She read from a number of her books, covering oldies but goodies like The Journey and Wild Geese. And she read from several of her “Percy” doggie poems. As a dog momma myself, I greatly appreciate these, but no more than masterpieces like The Journey, which has probably saved my own life a few times.
She recounted regularly running down Commercial Street in her pjs after Percy (all of them) escaped — a sight, she says, that Provincetown locals are quite used to. Wish I was there! And, flipping madly through volumes, she muttered that she’s such a big shot now that it’s hard to manage a reading, what with poems lodged in so many different books. Would that I had such a problem!
Assisi-bound (hopefully!)
So I guess you could say that I’m back. But you could also say that I’m going forth very soon. To more adventures in Italy. First to Abruzzo to sample first-hand what has been called by some the best food in the country. Then to an agriturismo in Le Marche that I’ve been reading about for more than a year in the blog La Tavola Marche. Then off to Verona, with a stopover (I hope) in Assisi. There will be cooking classes and tours of confetti factories. There will be visits to vineyards and olive oil producers. There will be history absorbed, photos taken and stories written, and you will be privy to all of it over the summer.
For now, I will leave you with one of Mary Oliver’s “Percy” poems. Enjoy!
Percy
(One)
Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,
ate a book which unfortunately we had
left unguarded.
Fortunately, it was the Bhagavad Gita,
of which many copies are available.
Every day now, as Percy grows
into the beauty of his life, we touch
his wild, curly head and say,
“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”
Buon viaggio!
Linda Dini Jenkins is a card-carrying Italophile, travel planner, freelance writer, and amateur photographer. Travel is her passion, so writing about her travels just comes naturally. She hopes all her travelers find a way to express their joys, surprises, and fears as they travel and gives every traveler a nifty journal to help smooth the way. Learn more…
