Check out these awesome Christmas presents I received from some totally cool Roanoke friends — bookstands for displaying some of the publications that have featured my poems. 🙂
Also among the Yuletide goodies were an Irish coin and a piece of Connemara marble — ideal for setting up beside my copy of The Galway Review 12.
The picture below illustrates something that I still find novel about Southwest Virginia, simply because it is so different from the interminably flat landscape of my native Long Island. When viewed from a distance, mountainside buildings have the illusion of being at the level of treetops.
Those look like really nice townhouses, and they are indeed on level ground. (There is a road beyond them.) But their position at the top of that rise makes them seem a little bit like mountain fortresses to the kid in me.
Campbell Avenue.
Well … it WAS snowing in Roanoke a little while ago. And it was coming down pretty hard too. Then the sun came out and it vanished completely.
Campbell Avenue at Market Square.
I never noticed this before — there is a Ukrainian flag flying at the Roanoke Valley War Memorial.
So I noticed recently that there’s a new ice cream joint on South Jefferson Street. (At least I think it’s new; it takes me forever to notice anything.)
It looks auspicous. I might just go looking for a tall chocolate milkshake into which to drown my sorrows.
October 2024.
It’s those damn weird ketchup packets! They’re too hard to open! Squeezing them as hard as I could always worked out well before!!
Not today.
It looks like I had lunch with a certain former president on one of his bad days. (And you know he’d dodge the bill.)
Just once I’d love to leave the house without embarrassing myself in public.
The Sears people were a proud mercantile empire that dominated much of the 20th Century. The civilization’s ruins still evoke the opulence of a past age.
October 2024.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 