Arty Didact
Ahhh ... Now that the brutal heat has given way to a gentle late summer mildness here in Minnesota — a chill in the air, even, that proffers a foretaste of fall — sunny afternoons have become lovely and inviting again. A time for late summer picnics, and visits to the park, and leisurely outings on the water, like the sweet little boat trips that Lewis Carroll used to take on the Thames with Alice Liddell and her sisters, which he describes in his epigraph to Alice in Wonderland, and which became the occasions for those eponymous stories that he eventually wrote down for his little friends, and for us, too.
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| "Wooden Boat" by Jean Larson |
"All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide. ..."
You can read the full poem here, along with a little context that briefly describes how the stories came about.
For a collection of handmade objects evoking such golden afternoons, please visit this treasury featuring Minnesota artists on Etsy.
(Click on the image to go to the treasury.)
