I woke this morning to learn that I've got a new poem up on Vox Populi . . . yet another elegy to 1970s western Pennsylvania. I don't know when I'll ever be done with that topic. It surfaces and resurfaces. It gives me no choice.

Another Monday. With school out, my walk will be quiet this morning. Deering Center features an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, and a college campus, all lined up, one after the other, on Stevens Avenue. It is the most educational of neighborhoods, and on school mornings and afternoons the streets are afloat with hand-holding parents and kindergartners, gaggles of lurching sixth graders, high schoolers clutching giant sugar drinks, jogging college students encased in headphones.

So in the summer the sidewalks are notably empty--just middle-aged trudgers, and dog servants, and strung-out parents with babies, and self-flagellating exercisers, and the occasional grouchy teenager muttering into a phone.

Speaking of self-flagellating exercisers, I did finally roll my bike out of the shed yesterday, dusted it off, pumped up the tires, and then T and I went for a spin--a delightful ride; I don't know why I took so long to get around to riding season. It was nothing but fun, and I'm not at all sore today, so why was I so slow?

Possibly because I was too busy writing the same poem for the twentieth time.