Word-Wednesday for May 20, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 20, 2020, the 21st Wednesday of the year, the 141st day of the year, with 225 days remaining.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 20, 2020
Sunrise: 5:35am; Sunset: 9:06pm; 2 minutes, 21 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 5:02am; Moonset: 6:58pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for May 20, 2020
                Average           Record           Today
High             65                   93                  80
Low              43                   26                  60


May 20 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Be a Millionaire Day
• National Pick Strawberries Day
• National Rescue Dog Day
• National Quiche Lorraine Day
• Emergency Medical Services for Children Day
• National Juice Slush Day
• Eliza Doolittle Day

May 20 Word Riddle
What is always spelled with 4 letters, sometimes with 9 letters, and always with 6 letters?*


May 20 Pun

May 20 The Nordly Headline:
Roseau Apartment Building Has Only One Opening: It’s last, but not leased.


May 20 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1293 King Sancho IV of Castile creates the Study of General Schools of Alcalá.
• 1609 Shakespeare's Sonnets are first published in London.
• 1882 Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts premieres in Chicago.
• 1916 Saturday Evening Post cover features Norman Rockwell painting.
• 1990 Hubble Telescope sends its 1st photographs from space.
• 1991 44th Cannes Film Festival: Barton Fink directed by Ethan and Joel Coen wins the Palme d'Or.

May 20 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1799 Honoré de Balzac.
• 1806 John Stuart Mill.
• 1924 Archie Bunker.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words: 

• bumbledom: behavior characteristic of a pompous and self-important petty official; eponym after Mr. Bumble from Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist.
• coddiwomple: to travel purposefully towards a vague, as-yet-unknown destination.
• drumble: move in a slow, sluggish way.
• frugivore: an animal that feeds on fruit.
• growlery: a place to which to retreat, alone, when ill-humored.
• imberb: beardless; cleanly shaven.
• mook: a stupid or incompetent person.
• pseudery: intellectual or social pretention or affectation.
• rhathymia: the state of being carefree; lightheartedness.
• tregetour: a juggler or magician; a conjuror; a trickster.

May 20, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Tree

trEE, noun, a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.

Some definitions fall far short of the essence of what they describe. Writers recognize that people can develop very intimate relationships with trees at any stage in one's lifetime, where trees become places or characters central to a story's development—such as in the Bible, To Kill a Mocking Bird, The God of Small Things, and the poems of Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, and Jack Pine Savage, to name but a few. Stop reading, and picture one of your own favorite trees.

Holding your own tree in mind, now enjoy Herman Hesse's A Passage About Trees, and see what relationships you have in common.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

From A Year with Rilke, May 20 Entry
Never Yet Spoken, from The Book of Hours I, 12.

I believe in all that has never been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

Be better than yesterday,
visit a tree today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.

*Yes, when “what”, “sometimes” and “always” are spelled correctly.