"the dearest freshness"

Life returns!
I spent this Sunday afternoon with Julia (happify design), sewing at the co-op (they've added a place to sit and snack). 

I started adding & embellishing (the orange stitches) a sunflower ruff onto the lion puppet I rescued (99¢) at the thrift store--it's ripped along some seams, but nothing that impedes its lionness:

Julia's dad, Tank, who recently celebrated his 97th birthday, kept us company. 
Tank's short-term memory is worn pretty thin, but not his long term: he recited Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

_________________

Danger Will Robinson!
I'm house sitting L&M's, while bink teaches a drawing class in Door County, and Astro is very interested in the lion.