Introduction by Ted Kooser: Here David Wagoner, a distinguished poet living in Washington state, vividly describes a peacock courtship, and though it’s a poem about birds, haven’t you seen the males of other species, including ours, look every bit as puffed up, and observed the females’ hilarious indifference?

Peacock Display

He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune,

Perfectly cocksure, and suddenly spreads

The huge fan of his tail for her amazement.

Each turquoise and purple, black-horned, walleyed quill

Comes quivering forward, an amphitheatric shell

For his most fortunate audience: her alone.

He plumes himself. He shakes his brassily gold

Wings and rump in a dance, lifting his claws

Stiff-legged under the great bulge of his breast.

And she strolls calmly away, pecking and pausing,

Not watching him, astonished to discover

All these seeds spread just for her in the dirt.

Reprinted from “Best of Prairie Schooner: Fiction and Poetry,” University of Nebraska Press, 2001, by permission of the author, whose most recent book is Good Morning and Good Night, University of Illinois Press, 2005. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

Let’s take a break from the everyday adventure of blog redesign to bask in the simple pleasure of a new book!

I got this little beauty in the mail this week:

I’ve been waiting impatiently for it since I used part of my Mother’s Day gift card to preorder it. I loved Paris Letters, and I’m happy to say A Paris Year, while different in format, is also completely delightful.

MacLeod’s love of Paris shines on every page. It’s the love of a woman who has spent time getting to know her beloved intimately through the year’s seasons, through dark and light, through frustrations and delights. Amazon accurately describes it as a love letter to Paris.

Set up in diary format, each page holds photos or art—or both—as well as wonderful little snippets of information. So far, I’ve learned about the Wallace fountains (page 19), “le macaron” (page 59), the Arago Rose Line (page 61), and salt harvesting (page 75). 

My photos don’t do the book justice, but I wanted you to see a little bit of what’s inside.

This is the type of book I’d love to write. Where each page is a delicious little morsel to enjoy, that satisfies a longing for beauty and inspiration.

I’m doing my best to read just a few pages a day so I can savor the experience, rather than gulping it down in one swallow. Something tells me, though, I’ll be finished soon—maybe I’ll go back and reread it, then reread Paris Letters. Why, yes, I’m in the mood for some escapist reading, why do you ask?

Where are you escaping to this summer?

*“Life is full of small pleasures”

“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold

over the grassy hillside.”

—Maud Hart Lovelace

Yesterday I found myself near tears in the produce section of my local Publix supermarket. No, I don’t have a strange phobia related to cantaloupe and corn on the cob. Let me explain.

For the past 150 years (it seems) I’ve been working on a redesign of Catching Happiness. I’m trying to update its appearance, provide a way for readers to subscribe to posts, and come up with some new goodies for you. These things sound simple, and taken individually they might be, but taken all at once, by me, an impatient, tech-ignorant, semi-perfectionist, they haven’t been simple at all. Just when I think I’ve got one item sorted, some other thing pops up to derail me.

I’m in the messy middle. The messy middle is where you find yourself when the first flush of enthusiasm for a project has drained away, and you can’t quite see the finish line and draw energy from being almost done.

The messy middle is where it gets…messy. Messy with possibilities, both pursued and cast off, messy with decision-making. There is often confusion. Sometimes there is crying. Or cursing. The messy middle is where fear lives.

After taking the afternoon off in favor of grocery shopping and having two cracked teeth repaired at the dentist (if you can call having one’s teeth drilled “taking the afternoon off”), I decided that instead of weeping and tearing my hair out—and writing long, whiny emails to Laure Ferlita—I am going to grit those newly repaired teeth and figure out how to get through the messy middle so I can learn from it, and maybe even find some happiness in it.

Here are some things I came up with to help—maybe they can help you then next time you face the messy middle:

While I was writing this post, I did a quick Google search of the term “messy middle” because it felt so familiar. I found 72,500 references to the phrase, related to topics like spirituality, management, and creative projects. Apparently the messy middle is A Thing. It’s not just me who struggles during the period between “started” and “done.”

In the past I’ve been guilty of rushing through life to get to the “good parts,” only to find that what I rushed through was the good part. I have a feeling that I’m rushing through this blog redesign just to finish it, rather than taking the opportunity to learn something every step of the way. Laure kept urging me to have fun with the process, and until today, I couldn’t even imagine being able to do that.

So despite the fact that I’ve been talking about and working on blog redesign for 150 years, it’s going to take a bit longer, and I should just get used to it. As Brene Brown writes in Rising Strong, “The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”

I think it just did.

Are you in the messy middle of anything? How are you coping?

Photo courtesy swimswim

Introduction by Ted Kooser: Here's a touching father-son poem by Jennifer Gray, who lives in Nebraska. If you're not big enough to push a real mower, well, you make a mower of your own.

Summer Mowing

He has transformed

his Tonka dump truck

into a push mower, using

lumber scraps and duct tape

to construct a handle

on the front end of the dump box.

One brave screw

holds the makeshift

contraption together.

All summer they outline

the edges of these acres,

first Daddy, and then,

behind him

this small echo, each

dodging the same stumps,

pausing to slap a mosquito,

or rest in the shade,

before once again pacing

out into the light,

where first one,

and then the other,

leans forward to guide the mowers

along the bright edges

of this familiar world.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2015 by Jennifer Gray, “Summer Mowing,” from Plainsongs, (Vol. XXXV, no. 3, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Jennifer Gray and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Happy Father’s Day to my husband, my dad, my father-in-law, and all the other dads out there!