Let the Streak Begin

How Now, Brown Cow?

“Balloon-Prospect”, featured in Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia (1786), from Public Domain Review

This is Emily Writes Back, for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Dear friends,

First of all, thank you so much for subscribing to this little ole newsletter of mine, in which I’ve published around three books’ worth of material—letters, poems, essays, and short stories—since I started it in 2019. That YOU are on the other side of this screen taking a moment out of your week to read what I’ve written—and on top of that you sometimes email me back or leave a comment!—is one of the top three joys of my life. Truly.

OK, but I’ve done it again: promised a hard thing with the purpose of forcing myself to do that hard thing I said in public that I would do.

As a fundraising stunt for Women Swimmin’ for Hospicare, the annual fundraiser my office puts on for the support of our hospice, I have pledged to write and publish here something every day until the 1.2 mile swim across the lake on August 9. (I will not be one of the 325 women swimming, which is why I had to come up with an alternate fundraising activity—writing to you.)

What does that mean for you? That you’ll be getting more mail from me this spring and summer, and some of it will be weird.

Only paying subscribers to EWB will get all seven stories/poems/letters/cartoons a week. The rest of you readers will see three or four a week. Anyway, thank you all for being here.

And if you would like to support this literary stunt, or rather you’d like to support high-quality end-of-life care for terminally ill patients and compassionate support as well for their friends and families, please consider making a donation of any size to my Women Swimmin’ for Hospicare campaign, here. Your gift will make a real difference in the lives of people facing one of the most meaningful but also often difficult and sad times of life.

OK, a little poem to kick things off:

The Story Streak

One long streak of stories,
Tongue-throng week of worries,
Song-strong beak of berries
claims the blackbird on the branch.

"Well, I can fly up high and see a lot,"
admits the bird on a call-in show
for birds and beasts
called How Now, Brown Cow?
(But not all the guests are cows or crows,
sometimes there are dogs.) 

The blackbird says, "I see rooftops glint
and burglars sprint,
rivers S and girls undress by open blinds.
I see cats criss-cross and traffic crawl,
chimneys smoke and moonlight glow on roofs.
I see treetops shimmer, 
their leaves flipping from light to dark.
I see old men trip and fall.
I see paper scoot across the land by power
of the wind. I see plastic bottles roll like time,
quick and bouncing.
I see fields of wheat lean, and parking lots stare
back at me unblinking. I see tops of heads
and tops of cars, tops of poles, and at night
the bottom of the stars. 
But I cannot hear much at all--just a
passing plane, the hiss of wind, the distant clank of
a construction site. The loudest sound is my own
"shrill, rising scree" carried off from my ear fast by the moving sky
as I dive down fearlessly--down, down to the pond
for cattail whispers and the conversation of the frogs."

One long streak of suppositions,
Tongue-throng week of erudition.
Song-strong beak of bugs,
claims the blackbird on the branch.

The DJ says, "This is WRFI, and you're listening
to How Now, Brown Cow? Up next, Wilbur Menzer,
who is a dog, will tell us what he sees."

And that's a story for another day. 
Because this is a story streak.