Traipsing
What I love the most
after traipsing through dark, dusty rooms
in old Victorian mansions
and stumbling along
root-strewn woodland trails,
the bees and horse-flies working hard
to impede our progress,
is to sit here in our quiet room
in the Inn first thing in the morning, sipping
that first cup of steamy coffee,
listening to the soothing, sonorous sounds
of my wife’s sweet, delicate snoring,
while writing my observations
and ruminations about life
in my journal. James Boswell kept
a journal, too, you know, and Thomas Merton,
John Muir, Charles Darwin,
Henry David Thoreau, and Captain Cook.