Thanksgiving Leftovers for POETS Day – Reheated Christina Rossetti

There’s not much to Piss Off Early from, despite tomorrow being Saturday. I’m probably wrong about this but to me “seizing” implies taking from. Most people are off work the day after Thasnksgiving so…can you seize the beginning to a weekend if it’s uncontested? Unless you are mid-melee in an epic struggle with a fellow Walmart shopper vying for the last Play Station 5.2 I don’t see much seizing going on today at all. There’s no boss pressing you with a deadline and the threat of late Friday hours. You haven’t hit any stir-crazy milestones because it’s bound to have been a light week. There’s nothing of the standard annoyance to escape from.

Normally I suggest using your reclaimed time in a carpe diem way – hit the bars early, enjoy the park, etc. None of those things hold as much Friday afternoon appeal when they are permitted. I’m going to watch the US play England in the World Cup and do some laundry. My kids are going to the movies but I’m not joining them. I hate theaters now that they all sell nachos; might as well hand everybody a set of maracas. Also, they won’t pause when I have to go to the bathroom and the drinks are really expensive and big so I have to go to the bathroom at a wine bar like dollar to urination ratio. I have a pretty good mystery novel I’m midway through and I see that There Will Be Blood is available streaming on Paramount Plus and I’ve never seen that. It’s ho-hum, but I’ll be okay.

I used to write a food column for an unofficial University Alabama sports site. I’d feature grilling or party suggestions for football crowds. Not all of them were themed but some dishes had a tie in with either the team we were playing or the circumstances surrounding the game. Follow this link to a Turkey Tetrazzini recipe if you’re undecided on what to do with your Thanksgiving leftovers. I wrote that years ago so there are some dated digs at our instate rival that won’t make any sense to the non-fan, but that’s all in the intro. The cooking instructions are non-fanatic friendly. We went over to my mother-in-law’s yesterday so we’ll be eating regular food leftovers while we cook a small Thanksgiving dinner at our house for future leftover purposes only, but you might enjoy the tetrazzini. I certainly will in a few days.

On the subject of Thanksgiving leftovers, I featured Christina Rossetti in last week’s POETS Day article. I’d read her stuff before but in passing. In the last two weeks I’ve become fawning. I hope nobody minds, but I’m double dipping.

She wrote in 1884, “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” Her grandfather sold that house in 1839 when she was only eight or nine and she lived most of her life in London. Learning that, my first thought was that her limited exposure to country living was hard to reconcile with the confident and familiar voice she carried when writing about nature. On consideration I can see how her short time in a place she found full of wonder and intrigue at an impressionable age and the mentioned exhilaration any kid experiences at an early “liberty to prowl” combined in her mind to cement a bountiful querencia.

Below is Rossetti’s “One Swallow Does Not Make A Summer.” No delve this week into structure or context. It’s music. I hope you enjoy it, both the poem and the day off.

One Swallow Does Not Make A Summer

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

A Rose which spied one swallow
Made haste to blush and blow:
Others are sure to follow:
Ah no, not so!
The wandering clouds still owe
A few fresh flakes of snow,
Chill fog must fill the hollow,
Before the bird-stream flow
In flood across the main
And winter’s woe
End in glad summer come again.
Then thousand flowers may blossom by the shore,
But that Rose never more.