Category Archives: Uncategorized

Yes, Virginia, ‘Ball Drive’ Is Back

by Woody

Editorials are generally as disposable as the newsprint on which they are printed, yet one that appeared in The New York Sun in 1897 might as well have been carved in granite because it remains timelessly relevant still.

Headlined “Is There a Santa Claus?” it began with a letter from young Virginia O’Hanlon:

“Dear Editor –

“I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”

The Sun’s reply included the now famous line, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” and continued: “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

Alas! How dreary the world would be if there were also no Sarahs, Davids, and Briannas who have contributed in years past to “Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive” that kicks off once again today to give brand-new sports balls to local disadvantaged youth.

Life’s highest beauty and joy was 10-year-old Sarah emptying her “Jar of Chore Money”; 14-year-old David using his birthday gift cards; and 9-year-old Brianna collecting and redeeming recyclables for a full year; to buy a small sleighful of gift balls.

The germination of this endeavor occurred nearly 30 years ago at a local youth basketball clinic when former Ventura College and NBA star Cedric Ceballos awarded autographed basketballs to handful of lucky attendees. Leaving the gym afterward, I happened upon a 10-year-old boy who had won one of the prized keepsakes . . .

. . . which he was now dribbling on the rough blacktop outdoor court, and shooting baskets with, while perhaps imagining he was Ceballos with the game clock ticking down to the final buzzer.

Meanwhile, the real Ceballos’ Sharpie signature was wearing off.

Curious why the boy had not carefully taken the trophy basketball home to put safely on a bookshelf, I interrupted his playing and asked.

“I’ve never had my own basketball,” he answered, matter-of-factly, between game-winning shots.

At Christmastime that year, visions of the boy – and other boys and girls without their very own basketballs to shoot, soccer balls to kick, footballs to throw – danced through my head and I asked you dear readers to help make their holidays happier. You responded like champions and have done so every year since.

Let’s do it again!

To be an MVP – Most Valuable Philanthropist – drop off new sports balls (no batteries required!) at a Boys & Girls Club, YMCA, Toys For Tots, or similar organization . . .

. . . or, through December 14, drop balls off (weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) at Sanbell (formerly Jensen Design & Survey) at 1672 Donlon St., near Target, on Telephone Road in Ventura; online orders can be shipped to this same address; and I will see the bouncing gifts wind up in deserving young hands.

Please, please email me at woodywriter@gmail.com about your donations so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally and also thank you by name (unless you request anonymity) in a future column.           

Together, we can prove The Sun’s long-ago words ring ever true: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and ball-giving MVPs exist.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Pedicure Is Hands Down Heavenly

by Woody

For her recent birthday, My Much Better Half wanted to get a pedicure.

For a number of reasons, a handful of chosen companions — a dear friend, our daughter, our oldest granddaughter who at age seven has been begging to get her first pedi — one by one begged out.

“Will you come with me?” MMBH asked me.

“Sure, I’ll keep you company,” replied I.

“No, I mean get a pedicure with me,” MMBH said, humorously, except she did not laugh. She was as serious as a bad bunion, an ingrown toenail, and a cracked callus combined.

In our 44 years of marriage, this was the most outlandish Honey-Do request My Much Better Honey has ever made. I say this not because of gender stereotyping or fragile masculinity, but because no one, not even a nail technician who gets paid and tipped generously, should have to touch my homely (to be kind; hideous to be honest) toenails.

Ever since running my first marathon four decades ago, I have typically had at least one or two dead-and-black toenails at all times and a personal record of seven once. It is not that my running shoes are too short, but rather my mileage is too long.

My toenails are not only often painful to look at, they can be painful to the touch. The thought of a pedicurist trimming my nails and, worse, filing them, struck me as torture — rather, toe-ture.

Ohhhh, the things we do for love.

“Ohhhh-kay,” I relented. “I’ll get my first ever — and last — pedicure, just for you. Happy birthday!”

I was not alone in feeling sympathy, compassion, and a dose pity for the pedicurist who was assigned to me. After my treatment began, MMBH texted a photo to our two adult children and my sister, too, and — Ding! Ding! Ding! — three replies quickly came back . . .

Smartypants 1: “I bet the staff were praying to do Ma’s feet instead of yours.”

Smartypants 2: “Oh, my, the poor pedicurist!”

Smartypants 3: “Who would touch your feet?! Did they draw straws to see who got the short one and was stuck with you?”

I could not disagree and actually asked the kind woman who drew the shortest straw, “Are these the worst-looking toes you’ve ever seen?”

Theresa’s awkward, elongated hesitation spoke more truthfully than did her eventual polite response.

My hurt feelings aside, the pedicure was pure pleasure. To fellow gentlemen pedicure virgins, you have no idea what you have been missing out on!

The warm foot bath, perfectly shy of hot, was relaxing; the toenail trimming was “Ouch!”-less, unlike when I clip them myself; the nail shaping and cuticle care was likewise flinch-free; exfoliating scrubs and the buffing of calluses with a pumice stone tickled for an instant, then actually felt soothingly sublime (and made the heels and balls of my feet smooth as kid leather); and the calf-and-foot massage was absolutely heavenly and my favorite part of the 45 minutes of pedi pampering.

It was actually a toe-to-trapezius experience thanks to a massage chair that kneaded all the right spots and nearly put me to sleep.

Lastly, it was time for nail polish. My Much Better Half  assumed I would sit this out, and I would have until she couched it as a dare.

I dare say, at first blush painting my toenails seemed like putting lipstick on a pig — yet my ten little piggies turned out as dazzling as Ana de Armas. Certainly, the dark plum-colored polish outshines marathon-black nails.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Two Butterflies, One Heart Aflutter

by Woody

Butterflies, butterflies, I love butterflies.

As a boy I would zigzag pell-mell though Ohio backyards and fields in their pursuit with a sheer mesh net, green in color, on the end of a wooden pole. Like a trout fisherman, I always released what I caught rather than kill, dry, and pin them spread out for display.

Monarchs were my favorite “flying flowers” but the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, large and yellow with dark stripes, and the Common Buckeye with brown wings trimmed by orange and multicolored eyespots, were also among my fluttery flighted quarry.

Sometimes our childhoods never leaves us; I still love butterflies; I titled my debut novel “The Butterfly Tree” and one of my most cherished excursions was visiting The Key West Butterfly And Nature Conservatory with upwards of 1,500 individual butterflies, representing more than 60 different varieties, flying freely inside a colossal glass-domed climate-controlled humid habitat like rainbow-colored confetti after a pro sports championship game.

My two favorite butterflies, the original and new version…

One butterfly landed, and stayed for a good while, on my shoulder; another perched in my open palm held outstretched; both instances made my heart go aflutter.

But my favorite butterfly ever, hands down, was as psychedelic as a kaleidoscope with blue and red and green and sunflower-yellow wings decorated with swirling lines and hearts and stars. Indeed, it looked like it was painted by Jackson Pollock or Picasso or maybe Van Gogh.

Instead, the wings were painted by a five-year-old girl, her tongue tip sometimes visible between her front teeth in deep concentration, while sitting beside her father at the kitchen table a few days before Halloween.

That was three decades and a little more ago, and the little girl was my daughter. She had decided she did not want to be a princess or Pink Power Ranger, costumes that would come in the years ahead, but instead wished to dress up as a butterfly.

From a moving box I cut out wings, wide wings three feet across, and fashioned a harness using shoestrings. With only small assistance, she painted the forewings and hindwings, front and back, a big project that took a few afternoons.

Together we also made antennae using two painted ping pong balls and pipe cleaners and a plastic headband; and for the rest of the costume she wore long thermal pink pajamas, sneakers, and a 100-watt smile filled with joy and pride.

On a cuteness scale of 1 to 10, she was no less than a 25!

My Little Butterfly wore many other costumes during her childhood, but when I close my eyes and think of Halloween this is the one I see. So you can understand why I have kept those magical wings all these many years.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.” Days ago, from the garage, I retrieved those cardboard butterfly wings made with a little girl’s full talent and blew the dust off their psychedelic patterns because my nearly 4-year-old granddaughter wanted to be a butterfly this year.

Auden already has her mother’s smile and demeanor, and tomorrow evening she will have her mommy’s butterfly wings while making trick-or-treating rounds. Time stutters and yesteryear is today and suddenly nostalgia has emerged after being inside a chrysalis since the early 1990s.

Seeing Auden try on her reborn costume made my heart undergo a sentimental metamorphosis: I now have a second little butterfly I love more than all others.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Another ‘Four-Dot’ Day in America

by Woody

Sadly, tragically, but no longer unbelievably, this column from my archives four years ago could – statistically – run daily in America where there have been 343 mass shootings through the first 267 days of 2026 with 323 deaths, including three children and one teacher at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon last week.

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Another school mass shooting, an all too familiar daytime nightmare in America, The Land of Milk, Honey and Guns, and my heart weeps again not only for the four victims senselessly murdered, but for all who knew them – most especially their young classmates and friends who will be haunted the rest of their lives, of this I am personally certain.

Back when tennis balls were white instead of optic yellow, instead of numerals to identify them when they strayed errantly onto an adjacent court they had one, two, three, or four blue-colored dots. Superstitiously, I always favored one-dot balls.

The summer I was 10, my superstition changed to four-dot balls – I refused to play with them. If I opened a new can that had four-dotters inside I would trade with someone, even for used balls.

You see, I had four-dot nightmares.

From childhood in The Sixties in Ohio to adulthood in Southern California in the 21st Century, these terrible dreams have followed me. A Vietnam veteran friend of mine says it is PTSD. All I know is that more than half a century later, the nightmares return from time to time, triggered by certain headlines and movie storylines.           

David was one of my childhood tennis buddies. One summer day at age 10, he was kidnapped from a public court. Days later, his lifeless body was found in a remote wooden shed and I will spare you further horrific details. It was a very, very long time before I slept peacefully through the night.

David and I were not best friends. We lived across town from each other and went to different schools. But we were the same age and we both played tennis and we took group youth clinics together.

The weekend before the atrocity, we had played each other in the first round of a big tournament. Because we were in the youngest division, we were sent to an undesirable court halfway across the Ohio State University campus a long hike from the check-in table.

One moment in the match remains clear in my mind’s eye all these years later: in the second set, after I had won the first, David broke a string. Back then youth players did not routinely have a spare racket as is commonplace today.

Two older kids, waiting on-deck at courtside to play their match after we finished ours, impatiently said David would have to default. Thanks to my two older brothers teaching me to stick up for myself, I said we were allowed time to find a racket to borrow. We eventually got one at the check-in table and raced back to the distant court and resumed play and I won.

A week later, and forever since, I wished I had lost.

If I had, maybe things would have turned out differently. David, as mentioned, was abducted from a tennis court. “Maybe,” it is easy to think, “if he had won our match he wouldn’t have been motivated to go practice his serve with a bucket of balls all alone.”

All that was found on the public court where David was last seen alive was a single tennis ball. Importantly, a tennis ball with four blue dots on it.

Important because four dots, his older sister told police when David was first reported missing, was their secret code: a four-dot ball purposely left behind meant “trouble.”

In America, every day has statistically become a four-dot nightmare with the victims numbering far beyond those who are shot.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

The Typhoid Mary of Happiness

by Woody

I passed a strange rubicon earlier this week on the 34th anniversary of my mom’s passing where I have now lived longer without her than with her.

If your own mother is still alive, I hope this excerpt from the sports column I wrote back then in The Star will inspire you to reach out to her – today – with a phone call or a visit.

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I feel like Lawrence Taylor just sacked me from the blind side. Like Mike Tyson punched me in the stomach. Like I hit he wall at Indy. Like Nolan Ryan pegged me with a fastball.

All at once.

I have the worst boo-boo in the world. And there is no one to kiss it and make it feel better.

My mom died of a heart attack the other night. Real sudden death, not a tie-breaker. God must be impatient. Must have wanted some lovely dinner company.

I don’t mean to inflict my grief on you, dear readers. Yet I must; this is one column I have to write.

I would not be a writer if it were not for my mom. My paternal grandfather was a physician, and my dad and two older brothers are as well. Doctoring is the family business, so to speak. But Mom nurtured in me the courage to take a road less traveled by, and as the poet Robert Frost said, “and that has made all the difference.”

She was my biggest reader fan, my mom was. Without question. Full stop.

Life will never be the same. I cannot believe I will never hear her honey-sweet voice on the other end of the phone line, calling just to say she liked my column that day. Even if Mom knew I would be dropping by later, she would call. She wanted to lift my spirits right now, not later.

You remember funny things at a time like this. Small things that somehow seem so very big.

For some reason, out of a million golden memories, I keep thinking about a spring day when I was in second grade. At morning recess my best friend had a new magnifying glass and we were using it to burn holes in dead leaves – it was the 1960s and kids could do that.

At lunch (we went home in those days) I was a little sad that Dan had a cool magnifying glass and I didn’t. So Mom drove me to the five-and-dime and at afternoon recess I did not have to wait my turn to burn holes in leaves.

That was my mom. She never wanted any of her loved ones to be sad, not even a tad so, not even for a moment. She wanted us to be happy, not tomorrow but today. At this recess.

Mom was the Typhoid Mary of Happiness. Blood didn’t course through her veins, champagne did. She was the pinnacle of kindness. The Golden Rule brought to life.

She died two days ago, just 60 years old. Oh, but she lived them all. Mom managed to dish out five lifetimes worth of love.

She had these big blue eyes, bluer than the ocean, movie-star blue, that were happy and joyful and warm all the time. She never went a full minute in her life without smiling.

She was the laughter and smile that lit up ever room she entered. Everyone became a nicer person when she was around. And happier. It was contagious.

No one told a story like Mom could. Her tales were almost as exaggerated as her love. “Mom never lets the truth stand in the way of a good story,” we always said.

The word “lady” was invented to describe my mom. She used her best crystal and fine china all the time. Why save it? If you broke something valuable, she would insist it was already chipped anyway.

She liked linen napkins and Wedgewood and wine and Waterford, yet also liked paper plates and beer in a bottle. She was as at ease and comfortable with everybody and, this is a rarer thing, she made everyone else feel at ease and comfortable.

When you talk about mothers, she was Hall of Fame. First ballot. Three sons and a daughter, and she gave us each the attention of an only child.

I feel lucky in my grief because there were no “I love yous” left unsaid. Actually, that is not true. There were ten million more to say.

Excuse me now. I think I’ll go buy a magnifying glass and burn holes in some dead leaves.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Part 3: Tourist Site Less Traveled To

by Woody

On a high summer’s day, I visited the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont.

This historic homestead is where Frost lived — and wrote — from 1920 to 1929. His poems penned here include “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Fire and Ice” and, in 1923, his first of four Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes, “New Hampshire.”

Serendipity smiled at me, and widely, when I mentioned to the docent, a friendly college-aged woman, that I had long ago been inspired to become a writer in no small measure by a university class focused fully on Mr. Frost. After I finished perusing the modest home-turned-museum, the docent presented me a surprise: a small treasure trove of artifacts, not kept on public display, she had retrieved from locked safekeeping.

With Robert Frost’s likeness outside his Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont.

With her blessing I had the uncommon privilege of handling, carefully and with breath-held awe, a rare volume of “The Cow’s In The Corn: A One-Act Irish Play In Rhyme.” Thin as a thick pamphlet, with pages weathered at the edges, its age-worn hardcover features a geometric print of orange, yellow, and black squares and circles, sans any printed text of title or author.

As commonly advised, do not judge a book its cover. Inside, it is hand-numbered “66” out of only “ninety-one copies” and bears the poet’s signature, crisp and legible and flowing in dark pencil that remains unfaded.

Frost possessed a typewriter, naturally, but rarely used it other than to teach his children to type. He preferred to write by hand, in pencil, and so a one-page manuscript draft at the Stone House was magical to behold — in my mind’s eye I could see him writing and revising, crossing out and inserting, thinking anew and polishing.

Enchanting as this was, equally so was simply gazing out the dining room window and imagining my poet hero composing one of his best-known works, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Surprisingly, Frost wrote this gem not on a vapor-breath snowy evening, but rather here on his dining table in the gleaming morning, chronicled as being a warm day in June 1922 — quite similar, very likely, to the sunny pre-noon hour of my wife Lisa’s and my August visit.

Something gold that will also stay in my memories happened as we were leaving. A quarter mile down the driveway, past a barn dating back to Frost’s time, near the homestead’s connection to Vermont Route 7A, a rural two-lane road, I spotted a simple black-and-white sign bolted to a weathered wooden post: Welcome To The Robert Frost Trail.

The signage was easy to miss; indeed, we had not seen it when driving in; and its location echoed Frost’s most famous poem, “A Road Not Taken.” Instead of two roads diverging, the gravel driveway and a freshly mowed trail — “Because it was grassy and wanted wear” one stanza states — parted.

Despite having gone for a long run at daybreak, I decided to give this grassy path some wear and went for a short impromptu jiggy-jog before we got back on the road driving.

The Robert Frost Trail passes through remnants of his old apple orchards and stands of red pines. As I traveled it, another line from “The Road Not Taken” resonated poignantly with me and still does today: “I doubted if I should ever come back.”

Though I doubt I will ever make it back to the Robert Frost Stone House, I remain grateful to have visited — and run where its namesake enjoyed taking long walks.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Part 2: Summer Day Filled With Frost

by Woody

My visit of Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, was followed by a roadtrip to bookend homes of poetry — the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont in late morning, and then due east 140 miles to the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire that afternoon.

I shall begin at the endpoint, at the farmhouse, where Frost lived from 1900 to 1911. The drive there from the Stone House, with My Much Better Half in the passenger seat and Google Maps in her palm offering navigation, took a full three hours — and took us through big farmlands and small towns, over skeletal steel bridges and past a wooden covered bridge, a lovely antique in the modern world and a visual time machine back to Frosts’s period.

We traveled roads less taken than highways, narrow and winding and undulating, like a gentle pastoral rollercoaster almost. It was the best kind of drive, one where we were in no rush at all, in no traffic to speak of, just a Sunday ride enjoying the bucolic scenery. We would get there when we got there.

At the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire.

And so we looked out the rental car’s windows at sizable ponds and slow streams, at farmers working their fields and children at play in schoolyards, at cows and horses and signs warning of moose crossing the road.

Eventually, we came to an old tunnel-style steel mail box, painted white and mounted atop a wooden post set in cement two paces off the side of the tree-dotted rural route. On the side of the mailbox, just above the red flag noting outgoing mail that was not raised, were black letters, all caps, with no space between the initial and the last name: R.FROST

Beneath a faded-jeans sky patched with clouds, and bright with sunshine, we had arrived at the farmhouse of a man who was greatly unsuccessful at farming but did not fail at poetry, winning four(!) Pulitzer Prizes in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943.

Interestingly, Frost’s failure to sell some farm goods in town in Derry in order to buy Christmas presents for his children in 1905 on the winter solstice — “the darkest evening of the year” he later recalled in verse — caused him to halt his horse besides the woods, weeping, and was the real-life inspiration for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Remarkably, Frost did not write this masterwork poem until nearly two decades later, in Shaftsbury.

More remarkably, he did so on a July morning, looking out his Stone House dining room window at a snowless summertime landscape.

Most remarkably, he claimed to have composed it in one sitting.

Earlier on our summer day here, in the morning, I stood beside the dining room table where he composed that iambic tetrameter magic, my imagination wandering as I gazed out the same window.

Back to our afternoon in New Hampshire. In the farmhouse gift shop, a converted old barn that still smells authentic, I bought a thick volume of Frost’s poems. It is a nice book, although certainly no match for the slim, at just 20 pages, 1936 first edition of “From Snow To Snow” I already owned. While the latter’s cloth hardcover looks like it was once left outside through a snowy winter, the pristine title page bears a pencil signature, dark and clear, albeit a little shaky, in the author’s hand.

This prized volume, however, pales to the rare book I saw — and held — earlier in the day at Robert Frost’s Stone House, which I will share here next week.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Part 1: Poetic Addition to a Collection 

by Woody

My family tree bears a Dickinson lineage, three generations before me, but tracing these roots deeper has, to my great disappointment, unearthed no direct kinship to the famous poet Emily.

No matter, it was still a thrill not long ago to visit my non-relative’s relatively regal residence in Amherst, Massachusetts.

To see where Emily Dickinson penned such celebrated poems as “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” was indeed a feather in my cap because in the fashion some people accumulate national park road trips, or collect rare comic books or vintage wines or special antiques, I collect pilgrimages to the homes of rare, vintage, special writers.

The tiny desk where big poetry magic happened.

My literary wine cellar, so to speak, includes modest to mansion quarters of: Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck (New York and California), John Muir (California and Scotland), Robert Frost (Vermont and New Hampshire), Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton W. Burgess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

My novel pursuit brought me most recently to “The Homestead” at 280 Main Street; to a three-story brick house, buttery yellow in color with forest-green shutters on every window, and there are many, with a grand porch and elegant portico at the front entrance; to where Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in the winter of 1830, where she grew up and remained and wrote most of her 1,789 lifetime poems, and where she died 140 springs ago.

The three-acre estate, once totaling 14 acres and now a recognized historical landmark, is breathtakingly bucolic. A towering white oak, planted by Emily’s grandfather and today lovely as a poem, holds sentinel near the main residence.

The postcard scene is further decorated with maples and pines, elms and chestnuts, as well as fruit trees of apple, cherry, plum, and pear. Too, importantly, there is a garden in the side yard that still grows vegetables and, pleasingly, pink roses that match the wallpaper in Emily’s bedroom.

It was in this garden that many of Dickinson’s poem sprouted as notes, initially scribbled in pencil on scraps of paper, both of which she always kept in her dress pockets so as to never be without when inspiration blossomed.

Later, in her bedroom, she would cull lines and thoughts from these jottings and compose polished poems, in ink, on legal stationery purloined from her father’s downstairs study.

This second-floor sanctuary, in the southwest corner at the back of the house, was the highlight of the tour. Specifically, just beyond the foot of the sleigh bed, to the left of a small fireplace, directly below a white-curtained window overlooking the backyard: a tiny table, only eighteen inches square, and side chair.

This is where the writing magic happened, often by candlelight or illumination from an oil lamp, long after the rest of the household was asleep.

To see Emily’s nib pen and glass inkwell resting on the cherrywood tabletop was to see, as I have, Steinbeck’s favored pencils or Hemingway’s Royal typewriter, and set my imagination flying free as if with feathered wings from her poem about Hope.

Outside on a gorgeous summer day, our guide Brenda, who had already recited a dozen Dickinson poems in full, bid me goodbye with one more: “There Is Another Sky” with 14 lines that include these two: “Here is a brighter garden, / Where not a frost has been.”

Next on my itinerary, coincidentally, was a homestead where Frost — Robert — long ago had been, and which I will share next week.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Cleaning Up Wayne’s World Daily

by Woody

In a spirited game of Monopoly or gin rummy or lawn croquet, my lifelong friend Wayne Bryan can be a playful trash talker.

He is also a serious trash walker.

That is to say, during his brisk daily morning strolls for exercise through his Camarillo neighborhood he picks up litter. He also pulls weeds and sometimes prunes bushes, and when larger items of junk and discarded furniture sadly, but routinely, materialize on his route he loads them into a truck and hauls them off to the dump on his own dime.

It is a Sisyphean task, but the end result is Wayne’s World is as pristine as Disneyland’s Main Street USA.

“I take pride in keeping a three-mile stretch clean and litter-free,” Wayne says. “I hate to see trash or graffiti or weeds or even trees that need pruning. It actually makes me jump out of bed each morning at six o’clock to get out there and make things look better.”

Armed with a “grabber” — pinchers on the end of a stick — and high-octane vigor, Wayne estimates over the past year alone he has filled more than 100 lawn-sized plastic bags with trash as well as green waste.

A week ago, he ventured beyond his usual adopted roadway and supercharged his efforts by tackling a two-mile stretch of a busy city street, including the median between lanes, that had become a blight that saddened him whenever he drove by.

Five days in a row he jumped out of bed at sunrise and spent the next three hours in a dual role of volunteer garbage collector and gardener. By week’s end 15 hours of solo labors had filled 13 large bags with trash and litter, weeds and brush — and an eyesore, thanks to Wayne’s sore back, is now a sight to make eyes happy.

Hercules cleaning the Augean stables was no more impressive, especially when you consider the Greek hero was in his twenties when he undertook his famous 12 Labors while Wayne turned 79 earlier this summer.

“Picking up orange peels,” as John Wooden referred to his similar habit of cleaning up litter on his morning walks, has long been a labor of love for Wayne. His twin sons Mike and Bob even mentioned this during their induction ceremony into the International Tennis Hall of Fame last summer, sharing with the audience: “Each day when we made that seven-minute drive to the Cabrillo Racquet Club, if our dad ever saw a piece of trash on the side of the road he’d pull the car over and we’d jump out and pick it up. He’d often say to us, ‘Always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it.’ ”

Going even further back than Mike and Bob’s childhood, I take you to my own. In the 1970s, we young tennis players enthusiastically raced around the Cabrillo Racquet Club grounds after Saturday morning clinics frantically picking up discarded paper cups, cans, and wrappers as if we were hunting Easter eggs because Coach Wayne made it a fun competition.

Wayne would like to revive that spirit today in grand fashion.

“I dream of every school class in America having an annual kids’ trash pick-up day with a three-hour effort in their community,” he says. “Pick up trash. Or pull weeds. Or plant trees. Or paint over graffiti. Or all four! Get all their parents helping, too!”

Wayne added a plea to me: “Help me get the idea out there!”

And so I shall: Local schools, are you up to the challenge?

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

On 25th Anniversary of 9/11, Some Reflecting

by Woody

In remembrance of today’s 25th anniversary of 9/11, here is my column that originally ran in 2015 following a road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard…

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The Smiling Pool from a series of children’s books by Thornton Burgess is aptly named because its curved shape, when viewed from atop an overlooking hill – as Burgess did often during his boyhood in East Sandwich, Massachusetts – resembles a smile.

Indeed, it remains a happy place to sojourn as I learned during my recent tour of his home-turned-museum.

My emotions were completely polar at the next pool of water I visited. Actually, pools plural: the twin reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The Crying Pools seems apropos.

Each reflecting pool is nearly an acre square and situated on the footprints where the Twin Towers once majestically stood. Water pours over all four edges of each pool at a rate of 3,000 gallons per minute, forming waterfall curtains, before disappearing down a small square abyss at the bottom.

The symbolism of the flow rate is heartrending because nearly 3,000 lives disappeared in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and Feb. 26, 1993. The victims’ names are inscribed on bronze panels on the parapets surrounding the pools. Visitors’ eyes, in turn, often become miniature reflecting pools overflowing with tears.

This was my first return to the site since Tuesday, June 11, 2002 (I still have my “WTC:00 Viewing Platform – 2:00-2:30 pm” ticket), nine months to the day after the World Trade Center became Ground Zero.

I remember very little from those 2002 NBA Finals I covered, other than the Los Angeles Lakers played the New Jersey Nets. But the sight of the steep-sided square hole in the ground remains unforgettable. It looked like a gargantuan grave.

Inside the completed 9/11 Memorial Museum the somberness is even more overwhelming than at the twin reflecting pools. Boxes of tissues are placed liberally throughout and empty quickly. My wife teared up within the first two minutes of entering the exhibition; I did so even sooner.

To tour the museum once is a must, I believe; I believe also I could not bear to do so again.

To describe the experience would require a dozen columns. Instead, I will share a single image that most profoundly punched me in the soul. It is the transcript of a phone call from Brian Sweeney, a 38-year-old passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 175, to his wife. Julie was not home, so he left his last words on their answering machine:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good. Go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I’ll try to call you.”

At 9:03 a.m. the plane crashed into the South Tower.

My trip of the Eastern Seaboard had earlier taken on an “author” theme with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thornton W. Burgess playing roles.

However, I believe Brian Sweeney’s words – composed with no time for writer’s block, no chance to revise and edit and polish – are as potent and poignant as any left behind by the above literary masters.

After telling my son, whom I was visiting, to “do good” and have “a good time” and that I “absolutely love” him, I hugged him goodbye while blinking repeatedly to keep my twin reflecting pools from overflowing, and boarded a jetliner so similar –and so polar – to the one Brian Sweeney took.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.