idyllic april interlude.

the perfect weather and a little mid-spring slow-watching obsession in case you need it too.

Apr 22, 2025

A grid of 11 black dots some dark and some faded across brown paper. — Life in a series of dots. Ink on paper. 2025.

It’s a perfect spring Sunday afternoon. 60 degrees, cloudy, and windy. Just on the edge of balmy. And the clouds, the clouds are fantastic, rippled sheets across the sky.

Copper and I went for a walk. He had a good poop, in case you’re conncered, I’m always concerned with his poops. They’re informative. But I think he’s experiencing pain.

We walked through the alley on the last stretch where a loving citizen has hung bird feeders, and though the three or four birds near them scattered as we slowly came through, the chatter from the tree had me dragging my feet.

I could have stood there for ages just listening.

When we arrived home, it seemed a good time to take down the snow fence installed in the yard in the autumn, though hardly necessary this winter. The neighbor’s dog, Frenchie, cried for me, so I gave her some pets over their fence. And then one of the kids came out, 12 or so yrs-old, and hopped on the trampoline in sandals and a floral dress, I presume she was wearing for Easter.

I waved, she nodded, Frenchie ran about their yard, crunching a plastic cup, I worked on pulling stakes out of the ground and releasing the fence from them. Around us, the wind blew, Grandma’s many windchimes sang, and the birds, too. It was idyllic, the kind of idyllic that requires a slow camera pan.

Maybe a close-up, slow-mo of the dog shaking the plastic cup. A close-up of a wind chime, a bird somewhere in a tree. A squirrel hunting for food.

The kind of idyllic you might see in a commercial or a horror film just before something cray happens. Because it was just that perfect and pleasant.

It’s the kind of spring day where setting up the hammock or strolling through a park feels like the only thing that should be on the to-do.

We don’t get many days like this before the bugs, the humidity, and the heat come along; it feels prudent to stop time in it. To move slow. To sit. To listen. Allow it all to expand around me in the everythingness that it is.

Though, of course, once the fence was rolled up and stored in the garage, all three of us went back into our houses. Me to my basement where it’s still cool and dim.

If you’re feeling like the transition from winter to spring is just a bit much or you’re recovering this week from holiday time and need a bit of indoor slowness, may I offer my current obsessions?

I have increasingly found it difficult to watch regular TV, as if processing audio AND visual is too much for my brain, but it doesn’t stop me from trying! I’ve found some pleasant, slow things to watch that don’t require much thinking or processing, except for the beauty:

All Aboard! is a BBC series you can find on Britbox, or find the first episode, a two-hour British canal journey, on YouTube. The three episodes of this series take you on a real-time Kennet and Avon canal journey, a coach tour through the Yorkshire Dales, and a sleigh journey across the arctic wilderness in Norway (super cute reindeer butt in this one.) There’s no music and no voiceover. Just real sounds of the environment and occasional text on screen offering information about the environment or historical data.
Sam Messersmith
introduced me to walking tours on YouTube. Just folk holding a camera and walking in real-time through probably whatever city you’d like to explore. Some put up text identifying buildings or scenes of interest, but the audio is the sounds of humans walking and talking around you (which I find quite nice when I can turn the volume down!), animals, ocean sounds, wind, etc. I’ve been indulging in everything Italy, considering my desire to be there, so might I suggest this long video of the Amalfi Coast? (Camera speeds can be a bit jerky if the videographer’s equipment isn’t quality, so keep that in mind when looking around for other options.)
PBS Living, found on Amazon Prime, offers a variety of Visions of episodes in which aerial video (and occasional on-the-ground shots) are taken with high-def cameras over a variety of cities and countries. There is music and quite a lot of voice-over talking with information about what’s being filmed, which is useful if you’re into that kind of thing, but I also watch with the sound off. Shot in the late 90s and early oughts, they’re a bit dated, but still pretty cool. Sincerely, I have looked for these episodes on the PBS website and can’t find them. You might try Visions of Italy: Northern Style (1998), which is one of three episodes on YouTube. If you’re not obsessed with Italy, you might like one of the other episodes: Israel, Germany and Austria, Greece, France, Britain and Ireland, or The Great Cities of Europe

I suppose the most optimal and effective path forward for me is to free myself from TV altogether, and probably generally screens as much as I can, but for the moment, I’m relishing being transported elsewhere with so little effort. For the moment, I’m savoring the possibilities in this contemporary world.

april giveaway

Just three days left to register for poet Ricki Cummings’s giveaway. Friends, family, and current subscribers are encouraged to enter. There are eight books of poetry (four of Ricki’s newest collection The Failure Experiment and four are hand-printed and bound books by me!), a zine with an essay by me, and 90 days of the new unraveling, unmoored comped. Click through to find the registration link toward the bottom!

Ricki Cummings On Practice

in the post

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invitation to collaborate

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