December 2018.
That’s B&D Comics at the end of Elm Avenue, right before the street turns into Main Street Bridge as it crosses over the railroad tracks and the Roanoke River. There’s something indefinably quaint and cool about the town’s comic shop being “down by the train tracks.” To answer the sign’s query, comics were 75 cents when I was a kid.
The shots of the bridge and river here are poor. (Sorry.) But it’s actually a pretty spot in Roanoke on a nice day.
It’s the categorically quiet Southern city. New Yorkers, this is midday during the holiday shopping season.
It’s an odd impression to get, but sometimes I feel as though I am walking through a university campus during Christmas break. (All the buildings are there, but all the students are away.)
But when you do run into people, they are the friendliest and most cheerful that you could ever hope to meet. I was just walking by and a local friend called out to me from her car on 1st Street. I love this sleepy town.
Pretty avant-garde, no? I’m calling it “Snowfall.” Bring on the accolades. (You know how I always want ’em.)
I’m … actually not sure that I could fully define “avant-garde” if you put me on the spot without Google. It’s a lot like “postmodernism” that way.
Anyway, this was the winter’s first snowfall here in Roanoke today, just two weeks ahead of Christmas 2018. Look at the size of those flakes. They are so big that you can actually hear them striking the ground. I’m serious! Play the video with the sound on!
Grandin Village in Roanoke, Virginia. November 2018.
Pictured is Grandin Road.
The Wall Street here has a different feel to it than the Wall Street in New York.
It’s a sleepy Southern city, but it’s nonetheless easy to love — especially on an encroaching Autumn morning.
I ordered my copy of the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018 this morning, and the poetry gods were evidently pleased enough to thank me via emissary. (The little lady below accosted me at the stores a little while ago and made it clear she wanted to be my new best friend.)
She was a weeee bit scratchy for someone hoping for human companionship. But I didn’t hold that against her, even if I couldn’t take her in.
What’s weird is that there are very few stray cats at all in Roanoke — it’s not like New York, where they’re everywhere. (Rabbits, deer and groundhogs are far more plentiful; it’s just a different ecosystem. And I might have seen a badger once.) But this is the first stray cat I’ve seen since I arrived a year and half ago.
Hey, if you want to order a copy of the anthology, you can find it right here.
The setting sun turned last night’s twilight storm clouds first to stained tobacco and then to vague violet. It was weird.
So how about a poem about a windy, rainswept morning?
“This Windy Morning,” by Eric Robert Nolan
The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.
Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.
Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.
If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.
You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.
© 2017 Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit: By Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina (Raindrops on the window) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 