See What Pooh And His Common Little Friends Can Do? Well, Beloved Leader comes home from the games, notices that an friend has been maimed, and moves some boats around, and gives another ally some missiles to play with. He speaks in a very loud voice and tells the Big Bad Bear he’d better beware. That bad bear does not care one hair and bears always bite back. Everyone knows that! So the Big Bad Bear says he’s going to sell toys too- missiles, and guns, and maybe tanks-so there! And so, sigh, Beloved Leader speaks in a louder voice that he’s going to see that Big Bad Bear is not invited anymore to the Teddy Bear picnics! Oh my! Big Bad Bear goes right on maiming. BUT Pooh and his common little friends say this won’t do and they proceed to take out of the Bear’s den eight billion in jars of honey in just one week! Now everyone knows that bears like honey and so the Big Bad Bear declares victory! He turns and leaves but he leaves his stink behind. Tomorrow, no doubt, Beloved Leader will throw a parade and wave a piece of paper in his hand on which is writ, Peace In Our Time! © 2009 by E.D. Ridgell	Lying on the Three Seater Swing I liked to lie on the three seater swing on the screened porch of the Spanish styled house listerning to the electirc trap zapping mosquito after mosquito, a popular fad of the fifties. I’d contemplate the exposed beams running parallel to one another in the ceiling above just visible inside the door to the living room. The wet, dog smells and the snoring of damp, dozing Collies lent company to solitude usually preferred by an only, lonely child. The frogs croaked to the background sounds of wetland bogs that exuded a perfumed stink all their own of a Maryland night, and drew me further down into a lulling so perfect I remember it today. In the distance I heard the breaking of the waves belonging either to the Potomac or the Bay or both, each nearly equal in distance away so as not to betray which wave belonged to which bank that bordered the narrow peninsula. Frequently there was a welcome breeze gently intermingled with the whispers of the Confederate ghosts, the prisoners who did not survive to saunter home after brother finished killing brother too exhausted and broken to go on. I often fell asleep only to be awakened by what to this day is my favorite sound, the sound of a wooden screen door slammed. When I die know that my ashes will be strewn with the better half of my soul on that Palace Green before the Governor’s Mansion at Williamsburg, in fair, neighboring Virginia, but my heart, broken so often and patch quilt, mended, will feign to beat to the sound of the waves breaking the banks to that peninsula where the Potomac collides with the Chesapeake night after night after night. © 2008 by E.D. Ridgell
Untitled There are noises that fetter moments plucked out the white background, The sweet sounds settling into the recesses of the mind, Like nuts being lain down for winter; Sounds that bookmark memory, Echoes to sooth the tempest tossed, Sounds that mark your journey, past and present- The slamming of the wooden, screen door on Grammy’s porch, The cicada in the grasslands at Dad’s at sunset. The honking geese flying over the fall festival that year, You took time to be grateful of your life’s course.   Tonight, I listened to footfalls of grandchildren’s little feet, Scampering over floorboards above my head in my house. Tonight I am sixty two years old and I cross myself For the, final, comingling, last chords caught out in the din of old age.   © 2009 by E.D. Ridgell	Emily Dickenson's Homewood Emily, tomorrow we will walk that path you described as “just wide enough for two who love” from the Homestead to the Evergreens; then shake the ghosts still roaming Hancock before dining at Deerfield’s, deserving inn. Could we marshal more congenial company at close, old prospects that in the mind’s eye are, at both one and the same time, faire but false fronts of history? © 2008 by E.D. Ridgell In the summer of 2008 Rudy and I visited Western Mass. and Connecticutt- Deerfield, MA; Samuel Clemon's Home in Hartford Conn.; Emily's adjoining houses, etc.
Come the Mating Season,   the winds of autumn egg on, scents, smells: spice among the dried, standing stalks of jealous husks; vaporous fingers beaconing, come deeper into the wood. Dewy eyed does, innocent and alluring, perfuming the air, briefly taunt at the meadow’s edge, gesturing with their white flags- eager, atypically bold.   Stags snort the stages of the rut in the chilly, pre-dawn- eyes, blood shot circles with bulls-eyes, stalk even as they scrape and mark with glandular warnings their fiercely, guarded territory; wood, corn field, secluded meadowland- fields of battle to shame and tame the bucks.   Caution, no consideration; only the mounted delivery- estruses serviced, eager, so eager for the seed. The instinct to breed- the chaotic performing of rites; natural prescriptions of some source?   There is that encumbrance on all that is born. Everything living feeds off of something else living- one dying for the needs of the other, or just for being gotten caught out in the cycles that must turn just so. Death is prescribed and constant.   And so, that lowered guard, so uncharacteristic, becomes a hole spewing and spurting the life blood of any caught in the centered sites of the adamant. He dies, carcass flung, hung, and pieced per need or want, the morality of it dismissed as nothing more than the feigned, feminine mask of Eve.   Come the first season, if the last be not lethal, the, once again, cautious and retiring does deliver with a mystery as old as their lines, running back to the beginnings of time, their evolutionary results of some Big Bang, or simply the birthing of the little fawns of spring.                                      © 2008 by E.D. Ridgell