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Check out the other Friday Fill-Ins!
1. Ice cream and almonds make a quick and easy dinner (not healthy, but you didn't ask about that!)
2. Bon Appetit is the book (ok magazine) that I'm reading right now. (I'm saving the books for vacation - keep reading.)
3. July brings back memories of sitting on the hand-crank ice cream maker while bigger relatives turned it as it got stiff toward the end.
4. My inattentiveness as a sign that I'm ready for vacation this week was obvious.
5. They say if you tell your dreams you'll remember them (maybe?)
6. I try to compose difficult e-mail messages outside of my mail program, just in case, to give me time to think it over.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to having the laundry and dishes done,
tomorrow my plans include packing, packing, and a long car ride, and Sunday I want to drink chai on the screen porch of the vacation place.
In case you didn't catch on, I'll be on vacation for a couple of weeks. No internet for me until August.
Read Write Poem gave us a picture to spark our imagination this week. It reminded me of something and then I started playing around with that idea and this is what I'm still playing with. I don't think it is in its final form, but for now it amuses me and I'm happy to be playing with words that seem to be cooperating for a change!
The picture is here
Midsummer in Oz
Call me Jack Bottom,
ridgey didge grandson of my great-
grandfather, Nick.
Many times great- and so am I!
Family stories say he could do any-
thing better, weave faster,
roar louder, be more like a wall
than the wall itself.
I don't weave cloth, just
web pages full of advice for
politicians, businessmen,
footballers, and jackaroos.
They'd all do well to lis-
ten to me. Jack-of-all-trades,
that's me, though I see myself
more in a supervisory role.
Now last night I was vis-
iting out in woop woop, with the sky wide
open in all around me, and I stopped
in a pub before heading to dreamland.
Robbo, he said to call
him, and a good fellow he seemed,
listening to my suggestions
for hours on end.
I planned to sleep under
the stars and he cuffed me lightly
on the head as he left, and next thing
you know I heard people screaming.
"Bunyip!" they bellowed, and
they pointed at me and ran. I thought
I'd had too many tallies and headed
for my blankets.
I woke this morning with a hang-
over and a fuzzy head and I wonder
if those stories about Gramps
Bottom were true.
So I'll sit here a while, and spin
my next column, about the best way to keep
fleas away, and if Robbo comes by I'll see
if he will join me for a cold one at the bar.
Totally Options Prompts encouraged us to think "horoscopes" for poetry this week. I dove in and looked up my horoscope for Wednesday on nearly a dozen different websites. I didn't know what I was going to do with all of them, but I then thought about putting them in a Wordle.
So a cut-and-paste later, I had a massive Worldle that was too hard to read. So then I used one of the Wordle tools to restrict the number of words and got something that I thought might inspire me.
But now I find it too distracting all in itself. I trace words around and around. And so I decided that sharing this word-picture will be my contribution this week. Enjoy, and let me know if you find a poem in it!
(click on the image to see it bigger)
It's been gray and cloudy and rainy here for so many days on end that I feel like I'm growing mold in my mind. That influenced where I went with the abecedarian poem I wrote for Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect. With so much water in the air around me, I had to put a bit of ebb and flow into the alphabetic effect.
Still Cloudy
Charcoal clouds crowd the sky,
covering blue and carrying drizzle.
Dull days drag on,
an endless effort to endure,
each day echoing every other.
Flat light makes for faint faith
that flooding will ease and
evaporate. Encircled by erosion,
an evil essence drenches the ego,
'til duty droops in dreary drudgery.
Can't the confounding cumulonimbi
cruise away? I crave contrails
curving across clear cerulean.
Back in March I wrote about the trees in my childhood yard. I've been meaning to follow it up with a post about my Grandmother's yard. I finally wrote it!
Grandma's Yard
My grandma lived on the other side of our small town. It was just over a mile away, so we were over there at least once a week. In nice weather, we spent a lot of time in the yard. Grandma's house sat on a corner lot, and she owned the next lot too, so there was a lot of space to play.
The first trees we always saw were the two large cedar trees on the narrow side yard by the street. They kept the east side of the house shaded and kept the grass from growing. Hidden in the shade, beneath a small roof was the "side door" that opened to the landing of the basement stairs. Morning glories climbed up a trellis on each side of that door, white blooms on one side, dark blue-purple ones on the other.
Mom would drive past those trees and park in the small, blacktopped "driveway" next to the back door. That parking place had rosebushes along both sides. My favorite was a shade of pinky-orange that Grandma told me was her favorite too.
We nearly always used the back door, going through the back porch into the kitchen. The only time we used the front door was at Halloween when we pretended to be strangers and thought that we would confuse her with our masks.
A concrete walk ran across the yard from the back door to the garage. We sometimes tried to catch leaves of grass on fire, using a magnifying glass, but never had any luck. There were no trees in the yard between that walk and the street, just a pole where the clothesline hung. With no shade, the sheets and shirts and housedresses fluttered in the sunshine on washday, and dried quickly.
On the other side of the street, the closest tree was a large shade tree. I remember it as a tulip poplar, but I may have that wrong. I think there was an elm tree at one time, but like most elms, it became diseased and had to be cut down. Near the southwest corner of the house was the largest maple that I had ever seen. I loved playing with the maple wing seeds that would flutter down like helicopter rotors.
On the southeast edge of the house were some kind of evergreen bushes, trimmed to stay between the house and the walk. They sometimes had fleshy red fruits on them and since the grownups hadn't said anything about them, we dared each other to eat them, telling each other they were poisonous. They didn't taste like much, so we never ate very many and since they never made us sick they couldn't have been poisonous after all.
To the south of the maple, in a nice sunny spot was where Grandma had rhubarb planted. We were told from an early age not to eat the leaves because they were poisonous. Since all the grownups told us that, we didn't dare to try them.
At the back of the yard, on the south edge along the alley, was a pussy willow that had grown out of control. It was taller than some trees.
On the west edge of the yard, next to the neighbor's back yard, was an olive tree. I liked its soft grayish leaves, and wondered why there were never olives on it. I decided we lived too far north, where it was too cold for it.
Along the west side of Grandma's house, under the dining room windows, were spirea bushes. They bloomed their soft sprays of white just in time to use as filler in our May baskets.
Another spring flower was what Grandma called "nekkid ladies." These flowers sprouted up on fleshy-colored stems, and bloomed a soft pink. Only after that died down did the green leaves come up. We always waited until the greens died back before cleaning them up, so that the flowers would have enough energy stored to come up the next spring.
Grandma had peony bushes at either end of the row of naked ladies. I think they were white or maybe pale pink. And Grandma got help digging them up each fall. She stored them in the basement until spring.
My favorite thing growing in Grandma's yard was the redbud tree growing in the northwest corner of the yard. It was very large – big enough to climb. And Grandma did let us climb it, much to my mother's dismay (she wasn't big on tree-climbing as an activity).
But best of all in Grandma's yard was the swing. When I was little there was an old glider-style swing that had benches facing each other. Four of us could (and did) swing back and forth at the same time. It was wooden and eventually fell apart, but while it lasted it was like flying.
There were tulips and forsythia, daffodils and dandelions. We searched the clover patches for the lucky ones with 4 leaves. And on hot summer afternoons, Grandma's painted metal chairs beckoned us to sit down with a cold glass of lemonade, where we could kick off our shoes and run our toes through the soft grass in the shade.
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