“One misty, moisty morning… “

“…When cloudy was the weather… ” etc.

Only, the “moistiness” this morning was snow flurries, tiny ice balls and black ice on the roads. Two lane, hilly, curvy country road with no shoulder (but a nice, deep bar ditch! :-)) and ice, in patches and sheets, often covered in loose snow a fraction of an inch deep: this was this a.m.’s driving, between ~6:30 and 9:00, when I was out and about.

Fun. *heh*

America’s Third World County, where very drivable roads are available in all sorts of weather… as long as one sticks to the four-lane that now cuts through the county with sneers of disdain for the little towns it swoops on by. 🙂 Actually, in this a.m.’s weather conditions, it would probably have been safer to stick to dirt and gravel back roads, although it would certainly have taken quite a while longer to get places.

Good day to have stayed in until the sun came out. If it had.

2 Replies to ““One misty, moisty morning… “”

    1. A couple of decades (and a half or so) ago, Lovely Daughter used to enjoy reciting and acting this out with me on the spur of the moment, usually on a “misty, moisty morning”:

      One misty, moisty morning when cloudy was the weather,
      There I met an old man clothed all in leather.
      He began to compliment, and I began to grin,
      “How do you do?”
      “How do you do?”
      And, “How do you do?” again.

      It’s much, much older than Steeleye Span, and I’m not sure I’ve heard their “version”. This is from an old (older than I am) edition of a Childcraft collection of poetry for children that I grew up with, inherited from family use during my preschool years. Fun. The Childcraft books and a few others were gifts to my mom when my older sister was born, from a maiden aunt who had taught school for many years.

      We still have the set, and we will probably give it to the first of our children to produce grandchildren, which is how we came to have the set we have.

      I really need to clean out my “dead tree” library sometime. Several sets of different editors’ ideas of “essential classics” reading, many duplicates of church song books (not all are hymnals, and in fact, few actually are), some ancient encyclopedias and my small collection of dictionaries: almost all of those books need new homes… somewhere. I have already given away most of my collections of poetry, as the poems I really appreciated are always with me, though sometimes I “translate” formatting a bit *cough*, and I always have to remind myself that I first memorized Stevenson’s “Evensong” inaccurately (muddled the first two lines of the second verse; how, I’m not sure, but I did–oh well), but so much remains that I really need to cull, to pass on to someone else, or even *sigh* to simply toss.

      But this little gem, this “misty-moisty” piece of doggerel, will be fun indeed to pass on to another generation. Yes, there are a few different versions, most indeed closer to the oldest English versions I’ve seen, I still prefer the early 19th century American version I learned as a child, though all the ones I’ve seen are still fun.

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