Fine Weather
May 21 - June 5
Join Alexis and Kit for a sunny day in the garden in this episode celebrating “the season when the weather becomes fine and everything starts to go well,” or Fine Weather. Birdsong and the delight of growing things await us during the brighter days of this fine season. In Hiro’s Corner, we look at three rare kigo of early summertime.
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Fine Weather Companion Playlist
Poems & Prose Featured in this Episode
“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”
— From The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
***
Seed-Time and Harvest by E. Nesbit
I'll plant and water, sow and weed,
Till not an inch of earth shows brown,
And take a vow of each small seed
To grow to greenness and renown:
And then some day you'll pass my way,
See gold and crimson, bell and star,
And catch my garden's soul, and say:
"How sweet these cottage gardens are!"
***
Red Geraniums by Martha Haskell Clark
Life did not bring me silken gowns,
Nor jewels for my hair,
Nor signs of gabled foreign towns
In distant countries fair,
But I can glimpse, beyond my pane, a green and friendly hill,
And red geraniums aflame upon my window sill.
The brambled cares of everyday,
The tiny humdrum things,
May bind my feet when they would stray,
But still my heart has wings
While red geraniums are bloomed against my window glass,
And low above my green-sweet hill the gypsy wind-clouds pass.
And if my dreamings ne'er come true,
The brightest and the best,
But leave me lone my journey through,
I'll set my heart at rest,
And thank God for home-sweet things, a green and friendly hill,
And red geraniums aflame upon my window sill.
***
dressed in a summer robe
the pleasant breeze
wraps me up
-- Nakamura Teijo
***
A seasonal change of clothing--
Travelers through the green fields
Slight dots in white.
-- Yosa Buson
***
that worm-eaten fan
looks charming too --
first summer clothes
-- Enomoto Seifu
***
The Green Cornfield, by Christina Rossetti (excerpt)
The earth was green, the sky was blue:
I saw and heard one sunny morn
A skylark hang between the two,
A singing speck above the corn;
A stage below, in gay accord,
White butterflies danced on the wing,
And still the singing skylark soared,
And silent sank and soared to sing.
***
To a Skylark, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (excerpt)
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
. . .
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
***
May Song, by E. Nesbit
BIRDS in the green of my garden
Blackbirds and throstle and wren,
Wet your dear wings in the tears that are Spring's
And so to your singing again!
Birds in my blossoming orchard,
Chaffinch and goldfinch and lark,
Preen your bright wings, little happy live things;
The May trees grow white in the park!
Birds in the leafy wet woodlands,
Cuckoo and nightingale brown,
Sing to the sound of the rain on green ground--
The rain on green leaves dripping down!
Fresh with the rain of the May-time,
Rich with the promise of June,
Deep in her heart, where the little leaves part,
Love, like a bird, sings in tune!
***
The deep purple and blue of lupines
Studded, amid the dewy green of the hills
Trimmed, with the wispy grey and white clouds
Pinned, against the fresh blue of the sky
Billowing, up and up,
Mysterious, castle in the air
Of childhood
— Alexis
***
From the car seat
I spy
Regal Lupines,
Joyful poppies,
Frenzied mustard,
Prim buttercups,
Rambling Indian paintbrush,
Waxy miners lettuce,
Dusty asters,
Alluring magenta thistles,
Hazy blackberry blossoms,
These, the roadside flowers
— Alexis
***
Hiding in the forest of broadbeans, Peter Pan
— Kakihara Kanegome
***
Four hands and a bowl
Pop, pop, pop go the broadbeans
Grandma and I sit
***
Weeds by Edna St. Vincent Millay
White with daisies and red with sorrel
And empty, empty under the sky!—
Life is a quest and love a quarrel—
Here is a place for me to lie.
Daisies spring from damnèd seeds,
And this red fire that here I see
Is a worthless crop of crimson weeds,
Cursed by farmers thriftily.
But here, unhated for an hour,
The sorrel runs in ragged flame,
The daisy stands, a bastard flower,
Like flowers that bear an honest name.
And here a while, where no wind brings
The baying of a pack athirst,
May sleep the sleep of blessèd things,
The blood too bright, the brow accurst.
***
Why, he was met even now
As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud
Crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn-
Search every acre in the high-grown field.
— William Shakespeare, King Lear (Act 4, Scene 4)
***
Virtue? a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Or bodies are our gardens; to the which, our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuces; set hyssop, and weed up thyme; supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry; why the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.
— William Shakespeare, Othello (Act 1, Scene 3)
***
Pear and Peach alike decorated with bags, the swallow flies above the field
- Sumio Mori
***
With sharp edges, fruit bags dampened by the rain
-- Toshio Hisaki
***
The red paper of hanging bags, the bungalow
— Awano Seiho
***
The Ladybird, by Enid Blyton
Ladybird, you’re very neat
From tiny head to little feet,
I like your coat of red and black,
I like your clean and shining back.
Do you polish it each night
To make it shine so gay and bright,
Or do you keep a tiny fay
Who rubs it up for you each day?
Beneath your shiny back there lie
The gauzy wings with which you fly,
You’re spreading them – oh please don’t go,
There’s such a lot I want to know.
Your house is burning, do you say?
Ah, well, of course, you mustn’t stay!
***
Little Folks in the Grass by Annette Wynne
In the grass
A thousand little people pass,
And all about a myriad little eyes look out,
For there are houses every side
Where the little folks abide,
Where the little folks take tea
On a grass blade near a tree;
Where they hold their Sabbath meetings,
Pass each other, giving greetings,
So remember when you pass
Through the grass;
Little folks are everywhere;
Walk quite softly, take great care
Lest you hurt them unaware,
Lest the giant that is YOU
Pull a house down with his shoe,
Pull a house down, roof and all,
Killing children, great and small;
So the wee eyes look at you
As you walk the meadows through,
So remember when you pass
Through the grass!
***
Garden Dusk by Grace Hazard Conkling
This stillness made of azure
And veiled with lavender
Must be my daylight garden
Where all the pigeons were!
Blue dusk upon my eyelids,
Your drifting moods disclose
The moth that is a flower,
The wings that are a rose.
Make haste, exhale your sweetness,
For you must vanish soon:
The garden will forget you
At rising of the moon
A glory dawns predestined
Of old to banish you
And bind you fast with rainbows
In dungeons of the dew.
And who will then remember
Your cool and gossamer art?
Ah, never moon may exile
Your beauty from my heart!
Music Heard in this Episode
Paul Laraia, Theme of Fine Weather I & II
Berceuse by Frederick Chopin, performed by Christine Hartley
Bach, Awake the Voice Commands, Busoni
Ludwig von Beethoven, Sonata Waldstein
US Coast Guard Band: At the Jazz Band Ball
Debussy, Pour Les Agrements
Debussy, Preludes Book 2
Paul Lauria
Violist Paul Laraia is enjoying the early stages of a multifaceted career as soloist, chamber musician, and quartet violist. Acclaimed for offering “long lines with lyricsm and poise”, in recent seasons Paul has soloed with the Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Bogata, New Jersey, and Nashville Symphonies, traveled all over the world as a principal member of the International Sejong Soloists, and has given hundreds of performances globally with the rising Catalyst Quartet, which Paul joined in 2013. Additionally, he is in demand as a freelance chamber musician, and has been guest artist at many major festivals such as the Yellow Barn, Sarasota, Festival Del Sole, Sitka, Banff, Grand Canyon, and Vail, where he has collaborated with artists such as Donald Weilerstein, Roger Tapping, Anthony Marwood, Michael Kannen, Maria Lambros, Natasha Brofsky, Daniel Phillips, Barry Shiffman, Robert Vermuelan, Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, Cho-lang Lin, and Stephan Milenkovich.
Visual Examples of Seasonal Words
