The NYT has the story of an illicit party gone wrong at the Robert Frost farmhouse:
Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
…
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.
Seems a bit of a stretch, but then the whole piece has that tone. And in the end justice was served. I used to know someone who had done a stint working at one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder houses, and she swore the staff routinely found underwear and beer bottles on Monday mornings. I wonder what Robert Frost would have thought of that.
I’m always a little disturbed by the fact that people leave underwear behind. I don’t feel fully dressed if my shirt is untucked. How can you cavalierly say, “Oh well, there go the tighty-whities?”
Perhaps would-be revelers carry an extra cache of underwear just for strewing purposes?
I suppose that’s why they sell underwear in packs of 3. Fruit-of-the-Loom, you’ve impressed me yet again.