Listening Hard for Walt Whitman's Footfalls

We all, as we get older, tend to ask that cliched "where-does-the-time-go" question. I'll tell you where it goes; it goes past us while we toil over necessities and then try to fill our free time with "meaningful" activities. As I once said, paraphrasing Whitman: we fail to loaf and invite our souls.

Walt Whitman

A testament to this -- and one of whoppingly ironic proportions -- is the fact that I have lived within walking distance of Walt Whitman's summer home (the place where he reputedly wrote a good deal of Leaves of Grass) for more than a decade and have never, once, visited it. Granted, it is open by appointment, only, but -- you'd think a guy like me, who spent quite a few hours studying the man's work and who went to school in the city of Camden, New Jersey, where the poet spent a large portion of his life, would have made the effort.

Alas.

Well, today, I'm going -- not into the house, because it is Sunday, but, I will visit the outside of it and I will also venture into the nearby environs of Crystal Spring, where the poet once loafed, invited his soul and penned many of the pieces of his seminal collection of poems.

I'm off to loaf, and to invite Whitman's soul to pay me a visit. I'll be right back...with pictures.