A Single Autumn
By W.S. Merwin
The year my parents died
one that summer one that fall
three months and three days apart
I moved into the house
where they had lived their last years
it had never been theirs
and was still theirs in that way
for a while
echoes in every room
without a sound
all the things that we
had never been able to say
I could not remember
doll collection
in a china cabinet
plates stacked on shelves
lace on drop-leaf tables
a dried branch of bittersweet
before a hall mirror
were all planning to wait
the glass doors of the house
remained closed
the days had turned cold
and out in the tall hickories
the blaze of autumn had begun
on its own
I could do anything
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cidercupcakes came over in the morning and we indulged in more Arrested Development, which is the only non-animated half-hour comedy I've ever watched beyond a couple of episodes (unless The Brady Bunch in my childhood counts) and is really wonderful. It's a bit bizarre for me to watch because I realized that one of the executive producers is someone with whom I went to elementary school! I was expecting 
perkypaduan for lunch, but we had an ice storm forecast for the area and she opted not to try to drive through it, so cidercupcakes and I went to California Pizza Kitchen, where we did not have pizza but hummus, soup, and chocolate souffle, mmm.I spent a lot of the evening importing my journals to Wordpress; I have one of them on Blogger but I really don't want personal entries there, and Wordpress makes it much easier to import over five years' worth of daily entries, anyway. I am in a bit of a panic about what will happen to my photos if LiveJournal disappears; I have them all backed up in two different places, but the URLs in many years' worth of entries point to LiveJournal's Scrapbook and there's no way I could go back and change them all to point somewhere else. I also can't stand the idea of losing my memories and tags, which make a very comprehensive index.
While I was futzing with this stuff, we watched the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, which looked very cheesy at first -- it was very fun to see the Smithsonian looking exactly the same, and Union Station surrounded by old cars, with the world's silliest flying saucer overhead -- but Patricia Neal was fabulous enough that I stopped caring about the visuals! Then I remembered that we had actually seen the robot at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, and moreover that I never posted most of the photos from that trip in any journal, so here's a blast from the past. (We stayed in Forks while visiting the Olympic Peninsula but did not see any vampires!)
The monorail leaving the Experience Music Project, which also houses the Science Fiction Museum.
The Space Needle above the somewhat controversial Experience Music Project building.
Hens parade in front of the Country Village Shops in Bothell.
Sculpted cranes in the creek that runs through the Country Village Shops.
The bead shop, in a British double-decker bus.
A bunny waits to cross the path between the shops and the creek.
They're very proud of their bears in the Pacific Northwest.
