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// April 5 [New Journal] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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 April 5

I woke up at my usual time, but Aric wasn't awake yet. He wasn't much of a morning person at all. It was a little bit annoying because I didn't want to leave him without saying goodbye, but I didn't want to wake him up, either. So I snuggled up against his side and ran my hoof over his chest.

He finally opened his eyes and looked over at me and I kissed him on the tip of his nose and then on the lips, then I set my head down on his chest and let him pet my mane for a little while, then he ran his hand down my back and across my rump and then we celebrated the new day together.

Aric helped me put on my flight vest and gave me some extra batteries he had in case my light stopped working again, and we went out on the porch together and he hugged me and waved as I took off for my morning flight.

Sometimes I wish that Kalamazoo was a smaller town. It takes a while to fly outside of the city part of it, and while it's interesting to be flying over buildings and houses, I also like flying through the countryside. Although I shouldn't complain; it doesn't take that long to get outside of the city, depending on which way I go. If I lived in Chicago, I'd be flying all day to get out in the country, unless I just went over the lake.

I went north, because that's the shortest way out of town, and I made a big sweep around, about a mile in diameter, swooping up and down to exercise and relax my wing muscles. About half the land I flew over was forested, and I thought about how pretty it would look once the trees got leaves on them. In Equestria, they would have already, but trees here were slower to react to spring, maybe because sometimes it snowed when it shouldn't have.

On my way back, I flew a little more northward and passed over a couple of big dirt places with bright yellow machines scattered around them, and trucks with open-topped trailers that I'd seen on my way out and wanted to investigate. They hadn't really stood out when they were covered with snow, but now they were big scars on the landscape. From what I could see, they were dirt mines, and I couldn't figure out how dirt would be worth mining since it was everywhere, but maybe Aquamarine would know.

When I arrived back at my dorm room, I thought it was a little too late for breakfast, so I just had a can of anchovies and sat down on my bed with a towel under my barrel and my Bible in front of me. I planned to finish Judges before I went to lunch.

It got stranger as it went on. There were talking fig trees and olive trees and a man called Abimelek who had his own servant kill him so that nobody could say a woman had done it, and there was a man named Samson who was tricked by Delilah into revealing the source of his strength but he got back at the Philistines by knocking down their temple with them in it.

And throughout all of it, the Israelites kept forgetting what God had told them, even after He had saved them, and went off to do bad things until He felt sorry for them and saved them again. You would think that they would have figured it out by now, that if they followed His rules then He would make sure that they prospered, but if they broke them, He would let them suffer for a while until they learned their lesson.

I thought that they behaved like a bunch of foals who have only just learned how to fly and think that they're a lot better at it than they really are, and they all brag among themselves about how they're going to fly over to a distant cloud even when they’ve been told they shouldn’t, and then halfway there they get tired and have to be rescued.

I didn't get all the way to the end, either. I had just gotten to Micah who came after Sampson when it was time to go to lunch, and then poetry.

Conrad sometimes liked starting the day with a bit of poetry, even as he walked through the door, and today was one of those days. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” he began, then sat down at his desk. We had to wait for a little bit until he continued, and read us the rest of the poem, which was called If, and it was by Rudyard Kipling.

He told us about Kipling's life, and he sounded like Daring Do, if Daring Do wrote poetry. He traveled all over the world and then wrote poems and stories about them, and he even won a Nobel Prize for his writing, which I think is the most important prize you can get.

His poems covered a really broad range because of his experience. We read a couple more of them in class, and I liked every one, but my favorite was The Coastwise Lights because it immediately put my mind back to home, and I could tell that Kipling knew the ocean. I thought about the small lighthouse in the village below that cast its light out into the night when maybe nopony was there to see it, and I wondered at its mindless, purposeless turning, but then a ship with tattered sails would be seen in a sweep of the light and everypony thought that maybe they had imagined it, but then the light would strike it again and it was a herring drifter, lost and trying to return home, and then everypony grabbed lanterns and dove off their clouds to escort it safely back to port, and those were the nights when you knew why the lighthouse keepers worked tirelessly to keep the flame up and the beacon turning no matter what.

And in the fog there was the mournful bellow of the horn, and it was sometimes answered back by the ringing of a ship's bell off in the distance, and then you could see it slowly emerge from the fog like a wraith. Or the stormy nights when the rain lashed against the coast despite all our efforts, turning the waves into froth and there was one stormy night when the Athelstane Dawn came in on the head of a nor'easter, running before the wind with her sails reefed but still blazing into port, her bow bursting through the crest of every wave. She began dropping sail as she rounded the point, skirting the rocks, and then they were in beam seas and the crew had to hold on for dear life as waves washed across the main deck and we thought for sure she'd capsize, but then she got in the lee of the point and straightened right back up, and she had enough way on that she coasted all the way to her pier, and would have gone beyond if the crew hadn't dragged the anchors.

We didn't have much time to celebrate, though, because it was all teams in the sky fighting the storm.





When I got my mind back to the present, I discovered that I was the only student left in class. I'd completely gotten lost in memories. I went up to Conrad to apologize, and he said that there was nothing to apologize for, because that was what a good poem ought to do. He told me that his dream in life was one day to find a poem so profound that everybody in class just sat there stunned when he was finished reading it.

Then he told me that I was lucky because in many ways Equestria was very similar to the world Kipling had known, and I probably understood poems like that better than anybody else in the class.

I said that I didn't think that was true because there were a lot of words in the poem I didn't know, words like skerry, ness, and voe, and he said that I might not know them in my head, but I knew them in my memories and that was good enough. That was more than most other students could say.

The rest of the day I had a bit of a spring in my step. After dinner, I started writing in my new journal and it was kind of sad but happy at the same time, and Peggy said that we ought to celebrate the occasion so we both sat on my bed and had a couple of beers together which was really nice. Sometimes I think I don't spend as much bonding time with Peggy as I ought to. But maybe it's better when it's in short intense bursts and unexpected.