Gathering Leaves
by Robert Frost

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use,
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?


“Gathering Leaves” by Robert Frost. Public Domain. (buy now)

Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution began on this date in 1917. It ushered in the first Marxist government in the world and it eventually led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — the USSR. The Bolshevik Revolution was also known as the October Revolution because Russia was still using the old-style Julian calendar, and the date under that calendar was October 25.

Russia was in bad shape in 1917. The czar, Nicholas II, was increasingly unpopular.

The military — poorly equipped and poorly run — was suffering crippling losses to Germany in World War I. Food was scarce and what little there was became subject to sky-high inflation. Food riots and labor strikes broke out in Petrograd and set off the first revolution of 1917, the February Revolution (which took place in March). Troops from the Petrograd garrison were ordered to put down the unrest but many of them defected to the side of the protestors. Czar Nicholas was forced to step down. The provisional government that succeeded him gave people a brief taste of democracy, but the main cause of the unrest — Russia’s involvement in World War I — remained unchanged, so things didn’t improve.

Vladimir Lenin, who had been living as an exile and fugitive for 10 years, led the revolution. He had sneaked back across the border about six months earlier, and he rallied the Russian people with his slogan “Peace, land, and bread!” Lenin convinced the leaders of the rapidly growing Bolshevik Party to vote for an armed uprising and gave the order for the workers’ militia to seize all government buildings. Unlike the February Revolution, this one was virtually bloodless; the military was away fighting World War I, the czar’s palace was almost deserted, and there was almost no resistance from the Russian people, who were ready for a change. Later the Soviet propaganda machine revised the official story and turned it into a glorious, heroic battle.

It was on this day in 1805 that Lewis and Clark first saw the Pacific Ocean on their great overland expedition that began at St. Louis the year before. They were near the mouth of the Columbia River, not far from today’s town of Astoria, Oregon. They wrote in their journal: “Great joy, we are in view of the ocean which we have been so long anxious to see, and the roaring or noise made by the waves breaking on the rocky shores may be heard distinctly.” They built Fort Clatsop there, a log stockade 50 feet square, and spent the winter in it before heading back to St. Louis.

It’s the birthday of Canadian songstress and painter Joni Mitchell (1943), born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to a grocer and a schoolteacher. Raised on rock and roll radio broadcasts out of Texas, she bought a baritone ukulele for $36 because she couldn’t afford a guitar. Eventually she did buy a guitar, complete with a Pete Seeger instruction booklet, but she dumped the booklet after only a few tries. “I didn’t have the patience to copy a style that was already known,” she said. Her fingers were also affected by a bout of childhood polio; Mitchell had to devise alternate ways of playing and tuning her guitar.

After a year at art school in Calgary, Mitchell found herself in Toronto working at department stores during the day and playing in coffeehouses at night for $15 a week, “singing long tragic songs in a minor key.”

She married, moved to Detroit and then to New York City, where she found the folk scene heavily weighted toward men. She didn’t despair, though: her songs were being covered by folk artists like Judy Collins and Tom Rush, and by 1966 she was performing at the Newport Folk Festival. Mitchell was an unknown when she walked on the stage. She sang “Chelsea Morning” and “Michael from Mountains,” and when she was through, the audience was dead silent. Then they broke into applause and gave her a standing ovation. Mitchell was 23 years old.

Mitchell’s albums Ladies of the Canyon (1970) and Blue (1971) are considered seminal albums of the 20th century and even inspired the musician Prince, who went to a Joni Mitchell concert in Minnesota when he was 15. He wrote her fan mail with little hearts on the paper.

On songwriting, Mitchell says, “I do a lot of night-writing. I need solitude to write. I used to be able to write under almost any condition, but not anymore because I have to go inside myself, so far, to search for a theme.”

It’s the birthday of Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie (1867). Curie discovered radium, without which we wouldn’t have X-rays or certain cancer therapies. Curie was born in Warsaw, which is now Poland, but used to be part of the Russian Empire. She went on to win two Nobel Prizes but she always donated her prize money and remained humble about her achievements. She once summed up her potential biography as, “I was born in Poland. I married Pierre Curie, and I have two daughters. I have done my work in France.”

Curie came from a family of teachers who believed so strongly in education that her father brought home discarded test tubes from the laboratory at his school and encouraged Marie to perform experiments. Because she was a girl she couldn’t go to University. So she began studying clandestinely at what was called a “Floating University,” a secret set of informal, underground classes held in Warsaw.

She met her husband, Pierre, after moving to France to further her studies. They set up a lab in a decrepit warehouse outside their atelier. The warehouse had an asphalt floor, a glass roof broken in several places, and was heated by a cast-iron stove in the winter. They worked on worn-out tables, often eating simple meals of bread washed down with water.

Curie often stirred the heavy and hot molten mass of radioactive products in a caldron herself, sometimes slipping samples in her pockets and forgetting about them. No one knew then about the harmful effects of radiation. When she died in 1934 it was attributed to four decades of exposure to radioactivity.

Curie and Pierre discovered radium and polonium in 1898. A watchcase containing a speck of the radium was exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900. The label read, “Radium, discovered by Mme. Curie.”

During World War I Curie and her daughter suggested that the armies equip automobiles with radiographic apparatus to treat the wounded, inadvertently inventing the X-ray and the ambulance at the same time. The X-ray could locate bullets and fragments in wounded soldiers, which meant quick, life-saving removal.

All of Marie Curie’s research materials and notes are too dangerous to examine because of their high level of radioactivity. They are kept in lead-lined boxes.

Today is the birthday of Danish author and poet Benny Andersen (books by this author), born in Vangede, a suburb of Copenhagen (1929). He’s the most popular poet in Denmark — indeed, a national literary hero — but most people in the United States have never heard of him. He worked as a pianist in a bar after he finished school and published his first book of poetry in 1960. Since then, he has published 21 poetry volumes, as well as screenplays, children’s books, story collections, a novel, and a play. He’s also a musician and a songwriter. He has often collaborated with singer and musician Povl Dissing and the two released an album, Svantes Viser (1973), with Dissing singing Andersen’s poems. The album has been included in the Danish Culture Canon, a collection of 108 works of excellence in fields like art, architecture, literature, film, and music.

Anderson wrote:

“We have twelve clocks in the house
still it strikes me there’s not enough time
You go out to the kitchen
to get chocolate milk for your spindly son
but when you get back
he has grown too old for chocolate milk
demands beer girls revolution”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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