Florida trip + gearing up for two concerts

I’m back from a 2-day trip to Florida for all things Best of Both Worlds. Sarah and I had planned to get together this week for a while, and thankfully she was home from the hospital and feeling OK enough that we could still do a modified version. Instead of going to a resort together I stayed in a hotel near her house and we recorded in her closet. I always see her closet when we are recording together virtually on Squadcast but I had not been in this space personally! So that was like a new moment in our podcasting relationship.

While I know that Philadelphia was beautiful this week too, Florida winter weather is particularly delightful. My hotel was in a fairly random office park, but I spent some time just walking around the sidewalks surrounding the office park because it was so lovely. Sarah was also able to take a short walk around the block in her neighborhood, so that was nice too.

Anyway, we got a surprising amount done, all things considered, and are feeling good about our next few months of programming. Sarah is such a trooper.

Alas, the airline schedule was not quite as resilient and there were several flight delays…but now I am home and gearing up for two concerts this weekend for my two choirs. One is performing Mexican Renaissance music, featuring Padilla’s Missa Ego flos campi, and the other is performing 20th century British music, particularly Herbert Howells’ An English Mass. It is fascinating to see how people interpret the same words (albeit in Latin for Padilla and English for Howells— minus the Kyrie in Greek for both). I am not quite as prepared as I’d like for either but I have dress rehearsals for both still so there will be some final consolidation.

In the meantime, a sonnet based on the observation at the PHS flower show two weeks ago that gardens ultimately bear the signature of time.

The Signatures

Time has its own ideas — I plant a seed,
but time will shape exactly how it grows.
A branch that I point one way feels the need
to twist another, where the sunshine shows

its face three thousand times. The days make stems
grow thick. The hellebores have filled a bed
I thought they might not reach, the vines make friends
with garden walls, the daffodils have spread

across the grass, these many springs, they move
for sure, if not as quickly as the deer.
What starts with my design will swiftly prove
to be designed by time, each rolling year

paints as it will, its signature by mine —
perhaps a bigger name along the line.