My buddy, WalkingRaven, emailed me the following, including appropriate highlighting. (I added one highlight.) Hall describes the ideal life that is not all that different from my life with Mer, if one substitutes ‘blog/blogger’ for ‘poem/poet’. Little does WR know that Donald Hall is a favorite poet of my oldest friend, John Stewart. I recommend you follow the link to read Church Fair, by Jane Kenyon.

Church Fair by Jane Kenyon | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It’s the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon (books by this author), born in Ann Arbor, Michigan (1947). She married fellow poet Donald Hall, whom she met as a student at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor. They lived in his family farmhouse in New Hampshire. Hall wrote: "[W]e got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn’t ring all day. In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding."

She published only four books of poetry before she died from leukemia at the age of 47. She was the state poet of New Hampshire at the time.

Church Fair by Jane Kenyon | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor