Stalled and salted

The Transport-a-Potty is temporarily blocked-up. It will be fully operational once the next idea works it's way through my system. It is currently in digestion mode. Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, here's a random observation for you:

On a day in March when the temperature doesn't get out of the teens and your walkway is thick with ice you generally need to spread around a melting or traction agent. If you choose salt and if the wind is blowing just right, you might get a tiny dusting of saltiness on your lips. Just enough so that as you finish up the task and lick your cold, dry lips, you'll get the distinct taste of spending a day beach-combing on a windswept seacoast.

With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

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With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk--thy unloos'd hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears--a lack from all
eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
greatest--no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state--something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet
never gain'st,
Surely some right withheld--some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers,
By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
And undertones of distant lion roar,
(Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear--but now, rapport for once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms,
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.