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Today’s endeavor, friends, is sort of an amalgam of prose and poetry, by my Incomparable First Wife’s grandmother, Nellie Miles Paul.

And yes, I have written about her, and her prodigious pen previously. Her talent was nonpareil regarding her love for our little town. It ran true and deep.

To wit: ^,vO little town of Washington, Beside the Pamlico. Blessed by jasmine-wreathed woods, Where pine and myrtle grow. Within your spell I came to dwell, One day so long ago.

* ‘Twas here I spent my happy youth – oh, golden yesterday! And here my heart’s forever caught, and cannot get away, Entangled fast within the past, And has no wish to stray.

^v^ Here I shall lay me down to rest beside the ones I know, on Oakdale’s silent, sun-kissed hill, While seasons come and go, and years drift down upon the town, Like flakes of cosmic snow”

Newspapers are really not suited for sharing poetry, because they can’t be identically formatted.

Let me share just a bit more from the pen of this remarkably talented lady.

“Happy days gone by, Happy moments fled, Ne’er to come again, Naught but memory in their stead. Happy words and thoughts, Numbered with the sleeping, Only come again in dreams, That with the morning sun are dead.”

This “Poet Laureate of Washington” did not write only of our town and of her childhood memories. She wrote about diverse subjects, and did so extensively in her inimitably talented way. Hyperbole this is not.

Would that I had the talent to more fully convey just how gifted she was.

Nellie Miles Paul. How I would have loved to know her.

Speaking of gifts, it has been said that we are each given gifts. Perhaps so. Some choose to use them, some don’t. Whatever gifts we may have been given, not to share them is unfortunate. So it goes.

Thanks for being with me here today. Let’s do this again next week.