Saturday

I had a very enjoyable day, running errands and grocery shopping with my husband in the morning and going to a movie and doing some shopping in the afternoon with my friend KC. We went to see the movie Bright Star, which tells the story of the British romantic poet John Keats and his love affair with Fanny Braune before his early death. He died of TB at 25, before ever getting married. The movie was very good, although very slow and very British. You may need to be an English major (or a British) to enjoy it, but it was reflective and well written. It's interesting that Keats was penniless and basically a failure before his death and is now one of the most well-known British poets from the Romantic period. Here's the poem the movie is named after:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as though art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the mores--
No, yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon in death.

While I was at the movie, Mike spent the afternoon working in the yard and playing with Aspen. I came home in time to see Aspen guarding a tree. She'd chased a squirrel up said tree and was staking out the bottom of it. She's come close to catching the squirrels recently. I hope she never does catch one!