WIZ Retro Review Giveaway Double Feature: Come Next Spring and Merrily We Live

Today is WIZ’s fifth birthday! To celebrate that and LONNOL Month, we’re giving away TWO free silver screen classics from days of yore for your viewing pleasure!

This first is a rerun from a previous WIZ Retro Review Giveaway, but it’s one of my favorite old flicks. Come Next Spring is a generous story with a quiet but strong heart.  Like many of these older films, rather than relying on in-your-face action sequences and special effects, loud soundtracks, and romantic drama that glues a box-office-compatible couple to center stage, Come Next Spring turns on resonant dialogue and actual, honest questions about family and community relations.

The story: recovering alcoholic Matt Ballot (Steve Cochran) returns to his Arkansas farm and the wife, Beth, and daughter, Annie, whom he abandoned twelve years earlier.  He’s more than a little interested to see what’s become of them since he left.  As he walks down the home stretch, he meets Annie.  Annie is a voiceless creature who keeps company with animals but runs away from her father, who doesn’t recognize her.  When Matt reaches the old homestead, he’s surprised to discover not only that his stoical and resourceful wife Bess (played beautifully by Ann Sheridan) has held everything together quite well without him but also that he has a delightful son, Abraham (Richard Eyer), born after Matt ran out on the family.

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Visitors to Canyonlands by A. J. Huffman

The rocks were caught by child’s eye,
and changed with the sunset
into horns and antennae,
goring and grinding, and going off.
Bumped into the night.

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You can find more of A. J. Huffman’s work here, here and here.

Human Nature by Merrijane Rice

In the city,
glass-skinned buildings
like bitmapped mountains
pulse with interior stars.

Streets flow with headlights
like lambent corpuscles
navigating a maze
of webbed capillaries.

My neighborhood crawls
with progeny enough
to fascinate any ant farm gazer.

My house clings to earth
like mudded swallow’s nest,
bright as bowerbird canopy
strewn with colored nothings.

My children, too,
push over the edge
like wild, young larks
falling into flight.

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Merrijane earned a B.A. in English at BYU. She then served for 18 months in the Washington, D.C. North mission at the LDS Temple Visitors’ Center. After returning, she married Jason Rice, and together they are raising a family of four boys in Kaysville. Currently, she works for Deseret Mutual in the Media Development department as a technical writer and editor. See more of her work here, and of course at WIZ.

“Birds of Tanzania” (2010) by Nevit Dilmen via Wikimedia Commons.

My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens by Theric Jepson

My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens

was accomplished with more than the usual number of boys in tow.
Four in fact. Three mine  
and a friend.

To see the metasequoia and false rocks €”and mating newts
(it’s that time of year)
spotted first and immediately by my three-year-old
who can’t see a dirty sock on the floor no matter how I point
but a perfectly still newt under a foot of pond water
is unmistakable to his bright eyes.

He’s wearing a Cars cap over his long blond hair and his
favorite part of this trip seems to be the railroad-tie stairs.

The roses in their garden are dormant in February
But somewhere in the Gardens is my love
(with three other boys)
And I am hers.

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Now that his wife has bought a membership to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, Theric Jepson should be able to visit them more often. He is the author of the novel Byuck.

Photo “Sequoia géant” courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.