All posts by David Todd

Writing

It’s October 1st – I Should Blog

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Fall is in the air, as the saying goes, and this is my favorite time of year. There’s something about the transition in Autumn that appeals to me more than the transition in Spring. Since I tend to like colder temperatures more than hotter temperatures, perhaps it’s the anticipation of those cooler temperatures and actually feeling a little bit of it.

Why, you ask, if I like colder temperatures, did I sojourn in the Arabian deserts for five years, and now lived twenty-four years in the South? In truth I’ve found I can be happy in all temperatures, though I have my favorites.

Today has been a good day. Over the last several days at home I drafted an article for Suite101.com, on construction dispute mediation. In mediation on Monday; article written by Friday. Art imitates life, I guess you could say.

On The Writers’ View 2, a Yahoo e-mail loop I’m on, the current discussion is on excuses to doing what needs to be done in order to succeed as a writer. The answers are fear (both of failure and success), busyness, lack of skill, lack of industry contacts, etc., etc. Lots of excuses, none of them that should be made. The discussion leader had some poignant words for us, the great unpublished masses of writers: butt in chair, fingers on keyboard. And, on occasion, eyes in book.
So I have no excuses. I just need to get at it harder and get it done. Write articles. Work on my novel. Capture ideas in a retrievable way. Update my submissions log. Research the market. Submit some poems and short stories to literary magazines. Work on my Bible studies, especially the new one in research. Read to improve craft. Read to be inspired. Hobnob with writers (probably less than I’ve been doing on-line, more IRL). Get my weight down and my body better in tone. Finish the downstairs bathroom. Finish preparations for the new downstairs carpet. Trade some stocks.

The first of the month is always an occasion to begin anew, not quite as much as the first of the year, but still a time to focus on doing things better, smarter. One thing I’ve done better and smarter, at least I think so, is to finally come up with a writers diary of sorts.

I’ve tried journaling, and usually do that in fits and starts. I’ve tried weekly log sheets, with a little success, but usually set it aside after a while. In July I developed a monthly writing log. It’s just a table, 32 columns across and about 20 rows down, with lots of white space at the bottom. I use a row to identify a writing task (which will include whatever reading I’m doing), and check the day I worked on that task. I use footnotes when necessary to explain exactly what it was I did concerning that task. I’ve used this log for three months now, and like it. Here’s to many more months of documenting my progress.

And here’s to a good October, enjoyable in season, fruitful in tasks completed, abundant in words assembled into sentences, paragraphs, lines, chapters, and sections. May computers work, the Internet remain stable, modems and routers not fail, the electricity not hiccup, and all things writing-related work in harmony.

book reviews, C.S. Lewis

Book Review: On The Incarnation

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As I wrote in this post, C.S. Lewis advised us that the ancient books are not only for professionals. They can be understood by the modern reader, and “first-hand knowledge [from the ancient books] is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but it is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”
So Lewis wrote in the Introduction to On The Incarnation: The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, by Saint Athanasius [St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, my copy is from 2002, ISBN 0-913836-40-0]. This Christian classic was written around 318 AD, when Athanasius was only 21 to 23 years old. I found it while foraging in a thrift store; it cost me either 25 or 50 cents. I bought it because I had reviewed a seminary paper my son-in-law wrote about De Incarnatione Verbi Dei [DIVD], and decided, years after reading the paper, that maybe I should read the source material. Little did I know that C.S. Lewis was about to tell me I was doing exactly the right thing.

 

DIVD was Athanasius’ second major work, after Against the Heathens [Contra Gentes]. At that time Christianity was in search of orthodoxy. Constantine had recently converted to Christianity and brought the whole empire with him. The persecutions were over, but a greater calamity was about to befall the Church Universal: the influx of government influence, including huge numbers of new “converts” by virtue of the emperor’s conversion, who had no background and no grounding in the faith. The Council of Nicaea would take place in 325 AD, and orthodoxy would be defined. How much of a role would this book play? Was it written…well, why was it written, and what does it tell us?

 

In the prefatory “Life of Athanasius, a scant eight pages long, the editors says DIVD “sets forth the positive content of the Christian faith, as [Athanasius] has himself receive it. …It is not speculative, it is not original; …it is not even controversial…it is a statement of traditional faith…, there is…nothing of Athanasius in it….” This may be true, but I cannot say so after one reading of DIVD and without reading many of it’s antecedents.

 

What I can say is that the book is worth reading, though it is not an easy read, even in this modern translation. During the first three chapters I often found myself glossing over the text, reaching a stopping point and having little or no retention of what I had read. The fault is mine, not the book’s. I believe I could re-read these pages now and grasp the meaning. The gist of Athanasius’ argument: God had a dilemma in that mankind failed to relate to God, his creator, as God intended; God addressed (or solved) the problem by coming to man in the form of a man, Jesus Christ. Jesus was God, separate from the Father yet part of the Father—a mystery.

 

The later chapters were more understandable, especially those on Christ’s death and resurrection. Athanasius’ discussion on how this changes man’s relation to death was excellent. I found many parallels to John Wesley’s sermons on death. Might DIVD have been a direct source for Wesley? Or was the notion of death having been conquered by Christ and as a consequence man’s facing down death so common that the language and concepts couldn’t be anything but similar, even in works fourteen centuries apart? I’m not sure.

 

The later chapters, in which Athanasius refutes objections to the Incarnation, and the entire Christian faith, was less beneficial for doctrine but perhaps was so for history. It gives us a window into what opposing groups of the 4th Century were saying about Christianity. Appended to the book is a long letter Athanasius wrote to Marcellinus, about the Psalms. This too gives us insight into the era, and how Christians viewed and used the Psalms at that time.

 

I will re-read this book. Perhaps not right away, but soon. I’ll like go through one other book on my reading pile than come back to this. I think full understanding is not beyond my grasp. I may have understood it better than I think. It is foundational to the Christian faith by one of its giants. Many others have written on the same subject, including modern works of incredible scholarship, but I’m with C.S. Lewis on this one. Read the original if you find it.
Buildipedia, freelance writing, Suite 101

Freelancing – Can this Rose Bloom Again?

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It isn’t all as bad as the title of this post sounds. Actually, my Buildipedia.com writing goes well. I had a conference call with the editor this afternoon, and he gave me another assignment. Don’t know if it will be a $100 or $250 article, but I suspect the former. Ah well. But, with the articles already turned in and in the queue to publish, I’ve earned in the four figures there in just two months of publishing, three of writing. This new one and the one on asphalt pavement solar collectors will make it all the more. Can this continue? I hope so.

Unfortunately, Suite101.com does not go as well. Page views have recovered. They are up 46% in September over this time in August. September revenues, unfortunately, are barely ahead of August. I guess students clicking on my history and poetry articles don’t click on ads. Oh, for the detestable flat belly ad to come back, and a bunch of anorexic high school girls viewing my poetry articles to click on it!

There’s something I’m not getting about web writing for profit. For fun, yes; all my articles are enjoyable to write. But either I’m not getting the concept of search engine optimization, or writing to lead people to click ads, or finding profitable niches. The graph I’ve added to this article is a new stat I’m tracking, page views per article per day, for 2010. It’s now below where this was in 2009.
I could accept this easier if my page views were strong and growing. But they are not. In this blog post I gave the same stat. Comparing the two graphs you can see I’m no where near the peaks I was at late last year. If I grasp for a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that I’m about equal or a little ahead of last September based on page views per article per day. I guess I can get motivated for a while based on that.
The most disappointing aspect of freelancing is complete absence of any work other than these two gigs. The one I thought I had in March fell through. I find solace in that it wasn’t for much money. I don’t want to do more content writing. If I have to freelance to build a platform so that someday I can sell a novel or non-fiction book, I need more than what I’ve got. Why don’t I have more? Mainly time, I suppose. Time to find and study markets. Time to formulate ideas geared to those markets. Time to prepare dynamite pitches. Could I get work—even print work—if I could find the time to pursue it? I think so, though of course I have no guarantees.
So maybe the bloom hasn’t come off freelancing so much as it isn’t reforming on life in general, as measured by time to do what I want to do. Not much I can do about that, I suppose, except to carry on and hope for a window, somewhere, sometime, that allows for a bit more of what is needed for a writing career.
construction, Engineering

Mediation Brings Mixed Results

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Yesterday most of my work day was spent in a mediation of a construction dispute. This was my second one of these. The first, in December 2007 (or was it 08?), was for a client of ours that I had worked with. I started the project, got under construction, and turned it over to another engineer when I took our training position.

This one was not my client. Another engineer in our office handled this project. It wasn’t even our design. We took over a few months after construction had begun, to help out a new client. But I was involved in helping that engineer make decisions throughout the project, was familiar with the issues, with construction in general, and with the mediation process, so he asked me to participate and the client agreed.

In the first one, the parties were $450,000 apart on a $2.3 million project. I thought no way could these two come together and a settlement be reached. It’s going to court for sure, I thought. But the mediator’s job it to help the two parties find some point in the middle where both feel it is worth not going to court if I can get or give that much.

A normal mediation session begins with everyone in the same room. Each side states their claims, and their response to the other’s claims. Then the two parties go to separate rooms, and the mediator goes back of forth between them. His job is not to determine who is right and who is wrong. He doesn’t reveal details of discussions in the other room. He does summarize the other sides arguments, and helps each side to see where the other might have a valid concern. He keeps pushing for a settlement. “What is it worth to you to avoid going to court?” he’ll ask.

Last time the issues and amount involved were clear. The settlement was reached fairly easily. A lot of back and forth, but in the end our client didn’t have to yield too much to avoid court. This time the issues were clear, but the dollar amount in dispute was not. It was about $300,000 on a $1.2 million project. So it was really a lot bigger than the last one as a percentage of the project. Since the parties had already had several meetings in an effort to resolve this, the mediator dispensed with the normal statements of positions and had us go immediately to separate rooms.

Since all involved in the mediation are subject to a confidentiality agreement, I can’t reveal specific discussions. We took most of the morning just defining the amount of the claim. It turns out neither side had understood what the other side was really claiming. They started farther apart than we thought. Our side consisted of us two engineers, the client’s chief executive, and the client’s attorney. After a working lunch the mediator said the main problem on the other side’s part was they were disputing a claim that some work was defective, a big chunk of the project, in fact. They admitted to one, smaller piece of defective work which they offered to fix, and wanted a certain number of dollars to change hands in their favor. It was still way far away from where we were at.

About 3:oo PM I concluded it would not be settled; we were headed to court. If that happened, both sides would sue the other. I felt that our client was in the right and would most likely win in court. But a jury is a crap shoot. They don’t always side with the one in the right. We considered the likely success of lawsuits. The mediator finally asked the question: What is it worth to you to avoid going to court? Our client suggested what he was willing to do. He gave up much more than I would have had I been in his positions. The mediator shuffled back to the other room and was gone a long time. Had the other side refused the large concession?

When the mediator finally did come back, he had a typed agreement in hand. It needed one modification, but it basically ended. it. Well, not quite ended, since the clients board of directors has to approve it. But it’s mostly over.

I would not describe either of these mediations as pleasant. But, they were probably better than being a witness at a trial. I’ve done that too, and it isn’t always fun. Having been through two of these is better experience than just one. Hopefully I won’t have another in the next 7 years, 3 months, and 2 days, but who knows? Construction can lead to disputes; disputes have to be resolved; meditation is cheaper than other remedies. So I guess bring it on if needed.

home improvements, Writing

The Leaners Are Down

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Some posts ago, earlier this year, I talked about a leaner tree that I was trying to bring down to the ground. This was at the back of our lot, actually on common POA property. There are three leaners there, or maybe only two since one was bifurcated right at the ground. I took out the smaller of these, about 7 inches diameter, early this year. The bigger one was 12-14 inches diameter. This is the one I wrote about earlier. I cut it all the way through except maybe a 1/4 inch. It fell a little, but a major branch kept it from going to the ground. I sawed on that major branch, but it’s up high about at the end of my reach. Let me tell you, that’s tough sawing. I had it sawed 3/4 of the way through but the branch gave way a little and close up the sawcut. At that time I just left it.

Why do I want that tree on the ground? It’s far a way from the house, not even on my property (though easily visible from the house). My only half-way reasonable answer for that is I want it to come down in the way I want it to so that it doesn’t take out a struggling pine tree on the way. We have so few pines around here, with the oaks taking over and crowding out everything, that I work to save the pines. The on-so-good answer is I just wanted to do it. It was my project—kind of like the stump in Shane. It’s not that it needed to come down but that I wanted it to come down.

The third tree, a 10 incher that is leaning the other way from the bifurcated pair, can stay or not. I may saw on it through the fall and winter or I may not. It’s not as if I don’t have outdoor work without worrying about that.

Well, I looked out the back of the house last weekend and saw the leaner was on the ground. Or, not really on the ground, but fallen off its stump. It appears to be wedged between the pine and something, a few feet above the ground; I haven’t yet gone down there to look. At least it appears to be at a point where I can say “mission accomplished”, with the help of wind and rain.

That brings me to the leaner I haven’t talked about, a 8 or 10 inch diameter oak on the wooded lot south of us, the lot that came up at auction but I was unavailable to bid on it that day. This tree was leaning towards our lot. I began sawing on it, got a third of the way through, or maybe half, then thought I’d better check and see if it was tall enough to reach the house when it came down. I used the various methods I learned in boy scouts for determining the height of a tree, and decided it was a little too short to miss the house. But, would it take out another tree on its way down, and that other tree hit the house? That I couldn’t tell, so I decided to leave this tree alone for a while. To cut it higher up would take a ladder and much arm extension, and I wasn’t interested.

Friday I noticed that this tree had come down as well, again thanks to wind and rain. And to vines, which had grown up the tree, choked it, and perhaps pulled it some. It did not split at my partial cut, but rather fell from the roots, as I feared. The top of the tree landed about eight feet from the house, and it took out a branch or two on the way down but not a tree. So I was right in my assessment. I spent a little time yesterday cutting the top of the tree away. How thick the vines were up there!

Widowmakers. That’s what the folks in the Piedmont area of North Carolina called leaning trees. They treated them with respect, but never hesitated to take them down and use them for firewood. Our fireplaces don’t burn wood, but I do cut the downed trees and stack them in a woodpile. It seems a worthy thing to do.

So that yard work is done. No, wait, on the lot north of us I see two more leaning trees that seemed straight before. Maybe that will be next year’s needless project. Meantime, I shall keep writing my articles. From this blog I will go to MS Word and type the last article in the series of construction contract administration. Then, what? Maybe work on my novel a little. Or read some in a writing book. Or go to Absolute Write and critique a poem. So many paths to take.

Buildipedia, Engineering, home improvements, Suite 101

Good Days and Bad Days

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I have so many facets to my life that it’s sometimes difficult to say, “Today was a good day,” or “Today was a bad day.” It might be good in one sense but not in another. Take yesterday for example. Was it a good day? Here’s the things that suggest so:

  • My weight was down to the lowest it’s been in months, back to that set-point weight I always bump against but can’t seem to get through. I think I have motivation to break through it this time.
  • The mediation preparation in the morning went well, although I think the City (our client) is too willing to compromise. If they let the contractor sue them and they counter-sued, I think the City would win on 14 points out of 15. What some people do to avoid litigation.
  • I had a pleasant lunch with our Transportation department leader, after the mediation prep. He’s leaving us in a couple of weeks, going back to Texas, so this was sort of our goodbye lunch. He’s a good friend, and an excellent engineer. Hmmm, should this be on the good list or the bad?
  • I studied some floodplain issues I had been putting off studying, since our young engineers have been asking me questions about these issues. I’m aiming to give a training class on this within a month’s time. And, I found I could probably get three articles for Suite101 out of my prep. Of course, the bad news part of this is that my Suite articles still aren’t earning much.
  • The editor at Buildipedia e-mailed me, asking me if I wanted to write a certain article for publication in late October. I believe this is the first time that an editor has solicited me, which is a good feeling. Now I just have to see if I can write the article he wants.
  • I prepared a mailing to our former pastor, returning a book I borrowed from him. I included copies of the adult Life Group lessons I wrote from the book. To the P.O. today to mail. One more item checked off the to-do list.
  • I balanced the checkbook, an easy task this month. I had one $2 error, on the third-to-last entry. Took less than 1/2 an hour.
  • Even though I was tired in the evening, I went to the basement bathroom and did the trim work on the painting. I had finished the primer touch-up the night before, so this is the finished color, a nice lavender the wife picked out. In fact, she came down and helped me with some of it. I’m sure we’ll need two coats, but it’s looking quite nice. Progress in home improvements by inches and feet.
  • Went to bed at the time I wanted to, and fell right to sleep; slept well until 5:15 AM, when the arthritis pain woke me and let me sleep only fitfully thereafter.

But in other ways, it was a bad day.

  • After a morning without too much pain, my rheumatoid arthritis flared up by the end of the evening, and I went to bed in considerable pain in my right wrist and arm, the place of “Arther’s” current interest. Woke up in the night with much stiffness (guess I said that already), and worse this morning. Typing is quite painful. Oh, wait, I can’t put that on yesterday’s good and bad list, can I?
  • My powers of concentration at work were poor. After the mediation prep took up the entire morning, I was not terribly productive. Yes, I did the floodplain issues study, but what should have taken me 2 hours took 4. I’ve got to recover my powers of concentration.
  • With the evening activities, I did almost no reading and no writing. The Suite floodplain article was 90 percent done, but I couldn’t push myself to pull up the article editing screen and do the work. I have two Buildipedia articles under contract, but I couldn’t push myself to spend even 15 minutes working on one of them.
  • I did nothing on stock trading. I had no trades on to take advantage of the recent market run-up. And I call myself a stock trader.
  • I missed my noon hour walk, although I walked 12 minutes in the evening, two laps around the circle plus up to the stop sign once. So maybe that wasn’t all bad.

So was it a good day? I say yes, though in many ways it good have been better. Today, except for the arthritis, is starting well.

Buildipedia, Engineering, home improvements, Suite 101, Writing

Improvements to Body, Home, and Writing

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The “hit by a bus feeling” I wrote about on Monday has ended. By bedtime on Monday I was much better. Woke up on Tuesday with the normal morning stiffness, but my right wrist and arm felt much, much better than it had for several days, perhaps even a week. When I weighed in at work on Tuesday I was down 5 pounds week over week, back on track for a net loss by the end of the year. Maybe the better eating, more exercise, and general level of activity did something positive.

Monday evening I was able to write an article for Suite101.com, the next in my series on stock trading. Tuesday noon I was able to finish the article on the Crystal Bridges Museum for Buildipedia.com and submit it. That leaves me two still under contract at Buildipedia, and of course as many as I want to write at Suite. The money at Buildipedia is nice, at Suite not so much, but I see little signs of improvement there. Perhaps these recent articles are generating ad clicks at a higher rate than some of my early ones.

Last night, instead of writing, I finished the primer coat in the downstairs bathroom. Well, almost finished. I found some places I missed on the trim, and other places I had failed to wipe away the dust of sanding. With wet paint in the room I didn’t dust and paint those. So looks like tonight will include a little more painting, maybe no writing.

And on both Monday and Tuesday, as the day ended, I had enough energy and brain power to read a good amount in Athanasius. I really liked Monday’s reading. It was in the place where Athanasius speaks about the Christian’s attitude toward death, basically that he despises rather than fears death. This was so close to one of John Wesley’s sermons on death that you know this is either a source work and derivative or the treatment of the subject hadn’t changed much in the 1,450 years between the two. I found it interesting reading.

So what will today hold, in this adventure called life, juggling devotion to God, being a husband, being an empty-nest father and grandfather, an engineer, a writer, and trying to maintain a house and property? I’ll be writing today, items needed for one of the papers I’ll present in February. So that’s good: any writing is worthwhile writing. I always feel good when I make progress in whatever I do.

home improvements, miscellaneous

Slogging Through Athanasius

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I had a very busy weekend, it would seem, yet the amount of accomplishment I had, now that I look back on it, was not all that much. On Friday I learned I would have to teach our adult life group on Sunday, due to a death in the family of my co-teacher, who was scheduled to teach. So some time Friday and Saturday evenings went to that, actually close to three hours.

Saturday was a work day. We cleaned up the mess from our downstairs ceiling demolition, and the downstairs bathroom wall paper stripping and spackling. This turned out to be a good sized task. The plastic sheeting I put down to catch the demolition mess was old, old, old. It shredded in a lot of places, and much material went through to the carpet. Still, it caught a lot of the mess. I carried two of the four demolition trash bags up to the garage for setting out on trash day. We swept and vacuumed the carpet in the computer room and bathroom, and an hour later it all looked good. This carpet is coming out due to water damage in the family room, but we want to keep this undamaged part to make throw rugs or use in a storage room.

Then I tackled the primer trim in the bathroom. This went okay, but took me twice as long as it should have. I have a painful rheumatoid arthritis breakout in my right hand, wrist, and arm. I can grip a paint brush with it, but can’t twist my wrist as needed for brush work. At least, I can’t twist it very much. So I was stuck using my left hand even in places when my right hand would have made more sense. Laying on the floor around the toilet, stretching my left arm to places unseen by human eyes for years, was not my idea of a good time.

The trim is done, except for one place where I found some of the wallpaper not stripped. Tonight I’ll strip that, and maybe finish the trim. Don’t know about the rest of the primer yet. This morning I feel like I was hit by a bus, or how you feel after playing softball the first time in the spring. Muscle aches. Bone aches. General weariness. This kind of body function is ridiculous. I’m only 58. What’s it going to be like when I hit seventy?

Despite that, I managed to complete an article on construction contract administration for Buildipedia.com and submit it. In that series that makes four down, one to go. I did not get the article finished on the Crystal Bridges Museum, but that should be an early one for today. Nor did I work at all on my poetry. T’is the season for submittals, and while I’m not giving poetry much effort these days, I ought to submit a few to literary mags.

It’s very painful to type. I’m still working through my morning stiffness (it’s 8 AM), so maybe it will get better during the day. Blogspot is down right now, so I’m typing this in Word. I just remembered, however, that for some reason Blogspot has not allowed me to paste text in lately, so I’ll probably have to re-type this all, on my noon hour—assuming the site is up by then.

What, you wonder, does all this have to do with the title of my post? I managed to spend about an hour reading Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, my foray into original works by the early Christians. This is supposed to be one of the more accessible early works, but I found it hard going. Perhaps it was tiredness of the body which did not allow my brain to fully engage. I understood the words fine, but the overall message escaped me. I was really slogging, not rising above and conquering the book. We’ll see how it goes, in a time when mind and body are in sync and properly functioning.

Engineering, Writing

New Assignment – am I a glutton for punishment?

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A couple of posts ago I wrote about how I was preparing (or maybe had already prepared) a pitch to Buildipedia.com for a long article about asphalt solar collectors (ASC). This was a bit of emerging technology I came upon, somehow, that looks to have a lot of potential. I began looking at it and saw some advantages and pitfalls. In three on-line articles, two on-line research summaries, and a press release by Worcester Polytech I didn’t see any mention of the things I thought of. Immediately my mind said, “If you don’t see an adequate article on-line, write your own.”

So I made the pitch. This morning I had a call with the editor, and he assigned the article to me. A bit smaller at first than I planned for, but with two potential follow-up articles covering the other things I wanted to say. This will be a feature article, so for the better money they pay.

The research on ASCs (which, BTW, should really be APSC for asphalt pavement solar collectors, since it’s the pavement that we’re interested in) seems to be in its infancy. WPI has done computer modeling, and lab-scale tests, and larger-scale tests of the technology. They’ve determined the potential is there for significant energy recovery from asphalt pavement. But are ASCs economical? Or do they have the potential to be economical? That question has not been answered. Much research will be required, including a full size demonstration project with the asphalt under load and energy being used.

Given what I’ve written the last two days, with my work and home time about to be under a busyness siege, why would I take on such an assignment? Well, the article won’t be published until November 4, and the due date will be October 21 (or 28th if I need that long). It fits in well with a theme they planned on for November. I need the money. I need the writing credit. I suppose I need the goal to keep me on the straight and narrow of time management. And I see considerable spin-off type articles coming from this, coming over several months or a year.

So, all things considered, I pitched the article and accepted the assignment. I don’t have a contract to sign yet, but I should receive that on Monday. Looks like my writing career isn’t dead. I just hope all this magazine article stuff someday pays off with creative writing assignments.

poetry

At Sunset

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At Sunset

On icy roads I drive with caution toward
my home, still seeing piles of work not done.
With traffic all around I can’t afford
to look behind to see the setting sun.

I speed the mower recklessly along
the field and hope the dark holds off a bit
to let me cut it all. A sparrow’s song
breaks through—oh, shoot, is that a rock I hit?

The fading light gives me so little time
to harvest luscious berries, blue and black.
I spent the day’s best part in corporate climb.
It isn’t fruit, but daylight hours I lack.

Oh Lord, you’ve blessed me much, but tell me when
I’ll watch, in peace, an evening sky again.