Having Writ

Refuse

2011-08-19T00:41:00.002-04:00

Refuse

Meditation was a taxing chore,
so-called sage counsel for self-healing.
I never knew there were so many rocks
in my couch cushion, so many scratchy tags
in my shirts. I carried a pout on the inside
of my face
and NO in my heart.

And one day,
and one day I forgot
to pack my heavy anger,
and I floated over time,
breathed deeply and heard the sun
sing in my veins, carrying joy
to my fingertips,
and YES into my soul.

The Pose

2010-12-06T01:44:00.004-05:00

I haven't posted poetry in a long time, but this one wanted to be shared. I think I'll link to it over at Monday Poetry Train Revisited.

The Pose

The sun was nearly done with the cold sky when
I turned the corner at the graveyard and noticed
the teenager walking on the sidewalk by the road,
wandering somewhat aimlessly, gracefully.
The young man seemed to pose liquidly,
as if both hyper-aware of his body and also unfamiliar with it.
He didn't pose for me, anonymous in my Camry,
and I don't think he noticed Mr. Baseball Cap in the car ahead.
Perhaps it was in response to what he heard through the
ubiquitous white earbuds connected by a tether to his palm.
I saw the elfin curve of his body in my rear view mirror,
still at the corner, on this side of the cemetery's stone wall,
until the road's bend hid him from me.

More Summer 2010 Books

2010-09-05T11:03:00.005-04:00

One of these was buried on my bedside table and didn't make it into the last books write-up. The other two I read in the last couple of weeks.

A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg
a memoir

I stumbled across Molly Wizenburg's food blog, Orangette, years ago and was immediately hooked on her writing. It wasn't all about the food, yet the food was integral to each story. I was thrilled to hear she had been chosen to write a regular column for Bon Appetit, since I subscribe to it anyway. I was not disappointed with the columns, each ends with a recipe, but starts with a story, pretty much like her blog.

I knew (from her blog) that she'd been working on a book and finally remembered to buy it. I devoured it. The subtitle is "stories and recipes from my kitchen table" and it has the same delightful touch as the rest of her writing. She starts by introducing her family, pairing each, relatively short chapter with a food or recipe. The end of each chapter has one or more recipes, each written so clearly and with such friendliness that I have no doubt that I could make each and every one successfully.

But this isn't just about the recipes. Any reader of this memoir is granted a gentle view of her life, from childhood to present. Have I used the word "delightful" yet? I see I did, but I have no other word that so aptly describes how I find this book. It is a quick read, and one where an occasional phrase just MUST be shared with people around you. Such as this one:

"It's just that my mother and I have had decades to sync up our priorities. They are as follows: eat, walk, eat, walk, window shop, window shop, and then walk to dinner. As you might guess, we do especially well in France."

How can you NOT want to find out where the rest of that chapter leads you?

Magic Bleeds, by Ilona Andrews
A Kate Daniels Novel, fantasy

Like many series, this is probably not the book to start with, but it does have all the regular characters from previous books. Kate and other residents of Atlanta live through waves of magic that cause tech to fail, and waves of tech that cause magic to fail. They have local trouble-makers enough, but someone new is in town -- a big, bad someone bringing death and plagues.

Kate's investigation leads her to uncover more than even she bargained for. And it doesn't help that she is struggling with her personal life too.

This is a fast-moving, entry in this series and one of the better ones. Kate is sure of herself (mostly) and is surrounded by other characters equally sure of themselves. The stage is set for some fierce struggles.

The High Priest and the Idol, by Jane Fletcher
Lyremouth Chronicles: Book 4, fantasy

I ran the first three books in this series in 2009 and when I saw there was a fourth I decided, "why not?" I'm glad I did because I enjoyed this a lot more than the last one. The earlier books work to set up the relationship between the two main characters and also the response of their world to their relationship. The last book was tedious and heavy on the melancholy.

This book presents the two main characters as quite sure of themselves. It made it a pleasure to read of their adventures. The other thing I liked about this book is that the "getting from here to there" bits were omitted. If the story wasn't advanced by travails of getting from one part of the world to another, the story skips ahead to the end of the schlep. A definite improvement. There were also some nice twists to the story.

Books from Summer 2010

2010-08-20T02:11:00.006-04:00

I've been reading, mostly during vacation in late July but a bit since then. Here's the round up.

Books Read in Summer 2010 (so far)

Fire Sanctuary, by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
fantasy

Years ago I read Fires of Nuala the sequel to this book. I liked it and decided to track down the first novel which took years (partially due to my not wanting to pay $80 for a used paperback).

Now that I have read Fire Sanctuary, odds are that I will reread it. I liked the characters, some from off-world and all thrown for a loop based on the things that happen along the way. Like the other book I had to keep flipping to the beginning where the way the Nualans keep time was listed. I also kept checking out the family tree listed in the front, but be warned - it contains spoilers. I already knew some of what would happen since I had read the sequel, but I don't think it was in the author's best interest to tell all in a chart you see before the novel even starts.

Heat, by Bill Buford
non-fiction

The author was a writer and editor at The New Yorker and decided he needed to know more about cooking. He decided that the keepers of the knowledge he sought could be found in restaurants. He somehow managed to convince Mario Batali (yes, THAT Mario) to let him learn in the kitchen at Batali's restaurant, Babbo. Buford also tried to learn from some of the people (or same kinds of people) from whom Mario learned about cooking, mostly in Italy.

I enjoyed the story, but I wished it were a little more straightforward. As written, the tale wanders back and forth among Buford's experiences, the history of Batali, and of Italian cuisine, and of food itself. By the end it was a little tiring.

I learned more about Mario Batali (at least according to Buford) than I probably wanted to know. And this book reinforced my belief that restaurant cooks are kinda nuts. Overall I liked it but I'll be passing it on for someone else to read, not keeping it to reread.

Bone Crossed, by Patricia Briggs
A Mercy Thompson Novel, fantasy

This is the fourth in the series of novels about a special kind of shape shifter (Mercy is also a coyote) who has, perhaps, too many other supernatural beings for friends (and suitors). I love Mercy and the fact that she's no-nonsense and smart. She's not flawless (she's even more stubborn than I am and that's saying quite a bit) and I love that she hasn't miraculously recovered from the traumas of the last novel. The past in these books influences the future.

This was a satisfying read with appearances from a lot of key characters from Mercy's past adventures. I happily stayed up last with it one night. I'm now waiting for the next book in the series to come out in paperback.

Summer at Tiffany, by Marjorie Hart
non-fiction

This is a charming memoir set in summer 1945 when Marjorie and Marty, two young women from a college in Iowa find themselves working in New York City. It is no secret that they land jobs at Tiffany's but that is only a fraction of the story. With attention to detail, Marjorie brings to life a good feeling of what their life was like, not only that summer, but in the early war-time 1940's in general. She tells prices and explains how they scrimped to make what little they had go farther.

Between the name-dropping of famous people they glimpsed at work, Marjorie relates the gossip they followed in the magazines, and by talking to the doormen and elevator operators. She also relates end-of-war events as they played out in New York City with a particularity that make each one shine in a way the standard history book recap doesn't.

This was a quick read for me. The book's only flaw in my eyes was the extra information beyond the actual memoir. A page of notes in the beginning was followed by an official "Author's Note" and were unnecessarily repetitious. The edition I had also contained a large section at the back with a transcription of an interview with the author, along with other stories and folllow-ups that I supposed "didn't make the cut". Interesting, perhaps, but a little too much. And there were some drawings in the middle of the books (and photos and souvenirs) that were interesting but the drawings were not credited and it was only much later in the book that I decided that they must be from a booklet she describes.

Nonetheless I can think of two people who would enjoy reading this and will either pass it along or at least mention it to them soon.

Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher
Book Three of the Dresden Files, fantasy

I love the way that this series of books drops you into the middle of action and then catches you up in the next chapter. I am engaged immediately. In this story the Chicago wizard, Harry Dresden, knows he doesn't know enough and keeps making the best guesses he can. I love that I didn't figure out "who done it" before he did, even though I knew that he was wrong some of the time up until then.

I'm enjoying this series and will be reading the next one soon.

The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas, by Elizabeth Scarborough
fantasy

I've been looking for this book for years, having read and liked a number of Scarborough's books. The one called "Goldcamp Vampire" brought back a character from this book, and I was curious enough to want to read it. But it has been out of print.

This was a fun read, though some parts dragged a little bit. The story follows young writer Miss Harper as she travels away from San Francisco and the her overbearing new stepmother. She is looking for inspiration for the (lucrative) adventure novels she knows are inside her. At first she is bored silly and schemes to get out where the action is. Then she finds it, first being kidnapped, then recovered, then wondering at the possibly shady dealings of her new host and his scalp-collecting friend. And that's before the honest-to-goodness fire-breathing dragon shows up.

The Enchantment Emporium, by Tanya Huff
fantasy

Tanya Huff is evil in the most delightful way. I can't put her books down and this one was great. It kept me up way too late on way too many nights.

This story drops you in the middle of a very large, complicated family dominated by lots and lots of powerful women. One who considers herself not as powerful finds herself at loose ends when a letter comes telling her she's inherited her grandmother's store in Calgary. She goes to find out what happened to her grandmother, and uncovers more than she bargains for.

Dead and Gone, by Charlaine Harris
fantasy, a Sookie Stackhouse Novel

This is book 9 in the series and it tells a good story (but whatever you do, don't even think about starting with this novel!) The universe is too complicated.

Not to say that the little town of Bon Temps, Louisiana is complicated - it is fairly simple, as is Sookie's job as a waitress at the bar. But now that vampires have "come out of the closet" and into public view, it is now the turn of werewolves and shape-shifters, some of whom are close to Sookie. For some it goes well, but not for all.

Her boss has to go take care of some family business so Sookie ends up managing the bar just in time to discover a murder in the parking lot. And, oh yeah, there is also a powerful foe of Sookie's great-grandfather who is now trying to kill her. This makes the FBI who are in town to interview her the least of her problems.

I like the way Sookie's emotions in this one seem to run true to what I imagine the situation demands, no matter that this novel is another roller-coaster of a ride.

The Naked Viscount, by Sally MacKenzie
romance

This was a fast, sexy read, regency-style. The woman has a brain and helps piece together the mystery in spite of the man's attempts to discount her assistance. It isn't my usual style and I don't plan to read the other books in this series. But if you are looking for a smart alternative to the old Harlequin's, then go for it.

Shakespeare's Christmas, by Charlaine Harris
A Lily Bard mystery, Book 3

Lily finds herself heading back to her hometown for her sister's wedding, scheduled for Christmas Eve. She hates the idea of being back in town, when everyone knows her as the victim of a crime instead of as the woman who survived. But Lily is putting on the best face forward for her sister's sake.

To her horror, she and her nurse sister discover the town's doctor and his nurse dead, bludgeoned to death. The only bright spot is that her new-ish boyfriend surprises her by showing up in town. Of course that bright spot is dimmed somewhat when she finds out that he is also there on business, and that the groom is a suspect in an old kidnapping case. There are only days left for Lily to get to the bottom of this before the wedding.

The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years After, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
fantasy

The authors take us back to Regency England and the continuing adventures of Kate and Cecy (Cecelia) as told by their letters (and those of their husbands). This time each has settled in with their husbands and now children, but danger has not finished with them. The non-magical James is sent by the Duke of Wellington to investigate the disappearance of a powerful foreign magician who was in the country to look into something having to do with the new railroads. Cecy accompanies him, after having arranged for her cousin Kate to take care of her children.

At first I worried I would have trouble telling one voice from the other, but I soon fell into the story and didn't surface until the satisfactory end. I can't say I identify with either character, but I like reading about them nonetheless.

A Study in Rectangles

2010-06-19T17:15:00.011-04:00

Carmi at Written Inc has asked for Geometric shapes as the current Thematic Photographic challenge. Since we had part of our chimney repointed this morning, rectangles were on my mind.

First a couple of looks at the chimney "after":

Then a look at some brick on the front of a building downtown (across from the Farmer's Market):

And another with a bonus - check out the small squares (a specialized rectangle, after all) in the tile entry.

I had fun with this. Check out what other folks found with their cameras.

Echoes

2010-06-17T22:43:00.004-04:00

Photo is from AuntieP at Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntiep/, used under a Creative Commons License

Echoes

I walked to my car in the dark smelling
wet grass and corn silks and lighter fluid.
One white plastic knife on the dark path
proved it wasn't my imagination.

Friday Fill-In 177

2010-05-21T20:23:00.002-04:00

Check out the way other folks answered this week's Friday Fill-Ins.

1. Having clean sheets on the bed never fails to make me smile.
2. I'm looking forward to the arrival of some personal business cards I ordered.
3. The echos of an empty office building is what I'm listening to right now.
4. Potato salad must have something people like in it but since I don't eat it I don't know what that is!
5. A tuna salad sandwich was the best thing I ate today. (so far)
6. Today was the end of a very long work week.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to trying to recreate a dessert I remember from my childhood (without a recipe), tomorrow my plans include performing in two concerts, and Sunday, I want to R-E-L-A-X (and maybe create some clean laundry)!

Black

2010-05-20T19:57:00.004-04:00

Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect set forth a colorful challenge for this week's Monday Poetry Stretch. And while I know she had nature-inspired poems in mind, my brain took a different turn. It does that sometimes.

Dressing in Black

The long skirt is black
and the soft velvet top
and two heels that I pack
with a lint brush I drop
in the bag for the night.

I eat a light snack
then I dress for the show
checking both front and back
in a mirror just so
to ensure everything's right.

In long skirts of black
next to black suits and ties,
queued in line not a pack
we breathe deep with soft sighs
for an entrance sans fright.

With a smile and a crack
of a joke to calm doubts
I move forward, not back,
with sweet songs and grand shouts
for each listener's delight.

Oatmeal Pecan Waffles

2010-05-16T14:01:00.006-04:00

I no longer remember where I got the core of this recipe, but I have tinkered with it myself so much that it is now all mine. Not only is this perfect for this week's Sunday Scribblings prompt (recipe) but is also something I wanted to send to Molly at Orangette. And I have to say it is making me hungry just thinking about this.

Oatmeal Pecan Waffles

3/4 cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 cup pecans or walnuts
1 cup unbleached white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup non-fat plain yogurt
4 T vegetable oil
2 T honey
1 cup skim milk

1 - Chop the oats in a food processor until they are a fine powder. Put oats in a large mixing bowl.
2 - Roughly chop the nuts and add to oats.
3 - To the oat mixture add the flours, baking powder and salt and mix with a whisk to combine well.
4 - In a small bowl, lightly beat two eggs, then add yogurt, oil, honey, and milk. Mix well.
5 - Add liquid mixture to dry mixture, stirring just until combined (too much will make them tough).
6 - Cook in waffle iron, and serve with real maple syrup.

Some notes:
+ My dad taught me to measure oil first, then honey, because the honey will just slip out of a spoon (or cup) that was first coated with oil.
+ I use nonfat yogurt and skim milk because that's what I have around. If the dairy has some fat, you can reduce the oil a little.
+ I cook some of the waffles a little on the "light" side and then freeze them. Then when I want waffles, I put them directly into the toaster (or toaster oven) to thaw and crisp up without overcooking.

An Edible Memory

2010-05-13T00:55:00.006-04:00

This week's theme from Carmi at Written, Inc is "edible."

This is a homemade pizza coming out of our oven on New Year's Eve. We have homemade pizza other times of the year, but we don't have New Year's Eve without homemade pizza.

I don't remember how it started, but we've done this for many, many years now. My wife makes the dough, and one or both of us prep the toppings. She shapes the dough and puts it on the peel (previously dusted with something to keep it from sticking - usually matzo meal 'cause we always have that on hand), and she slips it onto the hot, hot, hot stone in the oven.

We like different toppings so we make one pizza each, and then we have plenty of leftovers for the next day or two. We munch pizza while watching the ball drop in Times Square on the TV.

Spring-Theme Photos

2010-05-09T15:44:00.007-04:00

Carmi at Written, Inc asked for spring-themed photos. Here are two of the things that make me think spring.

This was some time ago in the bed that is protected from the elements, in a corner between the house and porch, warmed by the morning sun when the leaves aren't yet out on the oak tree.

This says Passover to me, and that means spring. Where there is Passover, there are matzo cracker crumbs!

Taking up Space

2010-05-09T02:36:00.003-04:00

This poem is a work in progress that has been rattling around my brain for a while.

Taking up Space

I take my turn boarding the bus
and make my way to an empty spot.
I push my wide hips all the way
to the back of the seat. I sit up
like my mama taught me,
squaring my broad shoulders,
but keeping my elbows close,
so I don't poke the man next to me.

I watch the woman across from me
as she perches on half the seat,
hunching her shoulders tight,
and keeping her head down.
The man next to her spreads his knees
and his elbows swing wide as he turns
a page in his newspaper.

I take a slow breath and drop the shoulders
that had started inching toward my ears.
I wiggle my toes and reach
for my newspaper.

My Dad's Garden

2010-04-25T03:46:00.002-04:00

A chance comment in FaceBook led me to think about my dad's garden.

My dad was a doctor who, as a young man, had entertained a dream of becoming a "gentleman farmer." My mom's family had been farmers and she convinced him to start with a garden. When I was very small, there were veggies planted against the back fence in our yard. When my second cousins visited one year, we showed them how you could eat peas raw, right out of the pods. The result of that lesson was that we never did get enough peas to the house to have as a vegetable with dinner - we ate them all out in the sunshine, one pod at a time.

When I was a little older, my dad gardened on an otherwise empty lot a block down the street. It was across the street from my sister's best friend's house. Now and then, on a hot summer day, her friend's mother would bring us something cold to drink.

He didn't have that garden long, because he decided to build a new doctor's office there. The garden moved one more block over, on a lot directly across from the county hospital. Like all the town's doctors, he was always on-call for his patients. Whenever we went anywhere he left a message with the hospital's emergency room so they'd know where to find him, should the need arise. The garden was no exception. There were times when we'd see a nurse walking across the parking lot to come get him. If we didn't have our bikes, we'd walk home instead of waiting for him.

It was a sizable lot and we shared the space with another guy who lived in the neighborhood. In the spring, the other man and my dad would rototill the whole plot. After that, my dad pounded in stakes to mark the ends of rows, then he tied string to one end and then the other, so that when we helped him plant the rows would be straight.

Planting was one of the first things we helped with. Radish seeds were very forgiving, but the lettuce seeds were tiny and flew away in the lightest breeze. The corn was easy for our little hands to grip, and we planted it two or three together, about a hand-span apart. Planting corn and peas and green beans seemed like burying food, dried though it was. We planted beets and okra and kohlrabi and spinach and cabbage and zucchini and pumpkins. We planted onions and scallions. Later on, Daddy would transplant bell pepper and tomato plants.

We learned to use a rake and a hoe in that garden, mostly to cover up the seeds (but just a little!). When we started getting weeds in between the rows, we put down handfuls of straw to walk on. If it got really muddy, we put down wide boards between the rows and tried very hard not to slip off them until it dried out.

Lettuce and radishes were the first harvests. Some of the lettuce was a little small, but the rows usually needed thinning out anyway. Radishes were the first things I was allows to use a sharp knife on. I would put the red or white orbs down on a solid surface and then (while being closely supervised) I used the knife to cut off the root and the tops.

Peas also came on early, we'd pick bags or baskets full, trying to keep up with the crop, so that there would be more blossoms and more peas. Once it got too hot, the vines would dry up. We'd take the peas home and share the chore of shelling them, peas in one bowl, pods in another. We'd eat a few as we worked, but most made it to the table, or were frozen in plastic containers of water.

I remember hot, hot, humid summer days, when I'd be sent to the garden to pick green beans. And other days when I'd pedal my bike down the street to pull ripe ears of corn from the tall stalks. I'd bring home a paper bag full. Mom would put them in the pressure cooker and 15 minutes later we'd eat them.

The parts of the plants we didn't eat were left in the garden, to be turned under and feed the ground. The only exception were corn cobs. When the corn stalks came down in the fall, we'll pull off any remaining cobs and eat the handful of raw kernels from them right there in the garden.

As we worked in the garden, people would stop as they passed by. They'd ask how things were, and my dad would usually end up giving them produce. He kept extra sacks and boxes in his car.

Eventually Daddy put in red raspberry canes along one side of the garden. And some years we planted potatoes. One year he tried peanuts; another year he planted fennel for the seeds that Mom put in spaghetti sauce. Some years we'd have turnips. And he was always experimenting with squash: green zucchini, yellow summer squash, little white patty pans. He tried eggplants. I remember cucumbers.

Some experiments worked, some didn't. We learned to cook almost everything that came out of that garden. We learned about patience, and about getting your hands dirty. We learned that sometimes things ripen, and sometimes they rot. We learned about generosity.

I might have complained about working in that garden sometimes, but today I smile when I think about it.

Friday Fill-In 170

2010-04-02T16:28:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since I did one of these. Go get your own copy (and see what other folks are up to) at Friday Fill-Ins.

1. All you need is enough room to plant your feet and hang on.

2. The Cake Wrecks Blog fills me with laughter. [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com]

3. Each generation, as it grows up, has to make a decision of how to be adults.

4. People letting their dogs poop in my yard is something I have a hard time dealing with.

5. A trip to mall is what I need. [No, really! I really want to shop for clothes now that it finally feels like spring.]

6. Give smiles to other people and that's what you get back.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to being at home with my wife, tomorrow my plans include going to hear a Cheryl Wheeler concert, and Sunday, I want to take a second try at a recipe for a cake that fell the first time (I think I know what went wrong)!

Something in the Tree

2010-04-02T03:30:00.001-04:00

I posted this in response to Carmi's theme this week - its about trees. Go check out his website for more tree pics: http://writteninc.blogspot.com/

Back in January some of my family and I were walking down the main street of Hot Springs, Arkansas (why? that's a long story for another time). We were near the hot springs taps where you can fill water jugs with spring water. Since it was January it was cold, but since my family was raised further north, it didn't feel THAT cold.

I was taking pictures, trying out a my not-even-a-month-old camera, when I focused on a tree near one of the fountains. I used the camera to zoom in on it.

That green stuff was NOT tree leaves (not in January!) but I think it is mistletoe, a parasitic plant that lives on trees. Not sure how well you can see it in this view, but those berries don't belong to the tree either. I think you can click the picture to see it bigger (if I did this right).

Guess it pays to look up sometimes.

Mushroom Hunting

2010-03-13T15:51:00.003-05:00

It was an early spring day in 1967, so early in the season that the leaves were barely buds on the trees. The sun was warm but the breeze was cool. We joined another doctor's family and headed into the woods to hunt mushrooms.

With directions from a trusted friend, we hoped to find lots of morels. The locations with the biggest mushrooms would never be shared, but we might find some small-to-medium ones. And besides, it was a nice day to be outside.

My fifth birthday was not until later that year, and yet this was not my first, nor would it be my last, mushroom hunt. I enjoyed being outside, and I loved looking down at the ground as we walked along, spread out across the area, I decided that being closer to the ground was an advantage and I found a lot of them. I had learned to pick them carefully, so that they snapped close to the ground. They were then placed carefully in the brown paper bag I had with us.

The only difference between this hunt and others is the photographic evidence. (I'm the littlest one with the pale blue sweatshirt.)

Once we got them home, the morels were inspected to make sure any insects were removed, then well-rinsed, drained, then tossed gently in flour or fine cornmeal and fried in a large skillet. It had to be large because we always ate them all. I don't remember anything we had with them, though I'm sure there was other food. But when we ate morels, they are all I remember.

The areas we used to hunt mushrooms was gradually lost to us, developed for housing, or changing hands to someone we didn't know (and therefore couldn't get permission from). By the time I was in junior high school the only morels I saw were gifts to my dad from one or another of his patients.

After college I stayed in Massachusetts (where I once thought I saw a tiny morel by the back steps of a building, but only once and it was a many years ago). I never see morels in the grocery stores here, and I have given up looking for them there.

So I was surprised a few years ago to find a package of dried morels in the store. They were expensive, but I couldn't resist them. I brought them home and put them in the cabinet because I had no idea what to do with them. With their water-weight gone they were as light as air. I knew they had to be reconstituted, but was pretty sure I wouldn't want to fry them the way my mom had "back when."

Soon after I was delighted to read a post by Molly Wizenberg at her blog Orangette in which she swooned over some morels. I bravely asked for her advice in the comments and she suggested sauteing the reconstituted mushrooms with green beans or asparagus.

It took me three more years, but while my wife was out of town, I finally gave it a try. In fact, I ran two parallel food experiments. I played with some short-grained brown rice and some black wild rice, cooked together as a kind of pilaf. While that was going I turned to the morels.

I opened the package dubiously, wondering if they would just crumble to a powder. They survived OK, so I soaked half of the package in hot water while I cleaned and cut the asparagus (on sale that week). I heated up butter in a skillet and sauteed the mushrooms and asparagus. I no longer remember which went in first (I got two phone calls while I was trying to cook) but it certainly looked OK.

I plated it with the rice and remembered to take a picture before diving in.

I want to tell you that it was perfect - that the morels had the same taste I remember from childhood. Alas, I cannot. They were good, and they were entertaining, but the texture was definitely lacking, and the taste muted. I can't blame the poor mushrooms, deprived of their water so long ago that they probably barely remember themselves. But what they mostly did was spark a desire in me to track down fresh morels, somehow. I'll be on the lookout.

And on an up note, the rice was very pleasing to me and I even remember the proportions I used. We'll be having that again.

Books Read in Early 2010

2010-03-12T23:50:00.001-05:00

Although I've gotten used to typing 2010, I'm still not used to seeing it. It still looks a little fantastic (as in science fiction) to me. Nonetheless, here we are approaching the ides of March. So far I have read fantasy, non-fiction, and one mystery. And here's what I think of them.

Books Read in Early 2010

Serenity Found, edited by Jane Espenson
non-fiction essays about the Firefly universe
Back in 2007 I was delighted with Finding Serenity, a collection of essays about Joss Whedon's TV series Firefly. This is another collection of essays, some about the TV series, some about the subsequent movie. And again I was pleased with the effort. Some essays are more scholarly than others. Most contain a certain amount of humor. Some might even convince a non-fan to pick up the DVD's and try them out. [And if you liked Warehouse 13 on SciFi channel - OK SyFy - you can thank Jane, she's co-creator of the series.]

Poison Study, by Maria V. Snyder
fantasy
I have been meaning to buy this book for years now. And last summer I finally bought it, along with a giant pile of other books to take on vacation. And somehow, it didn't make it to the top of the pile on vacation. When we got home, it stayed in the vacation bag and when I needed to travel in August, it wasn't the book I picked up. I was visiting with family and my younger brother was engrossed with Poison Study - it was keeping him up even later than usual at night. I mentioned I had been meaning to read it and when he finished it before I left, he asked if I wanted it. I gladly accepted it. Then when I got home I was embarrassed to find that I now had two copies of the book.

I started reading and was not sure at first if the book was for me. The opening scene is in a dungeon and that if followed by a chance at redemption layered with deceit. Then there are secrets inside secrets, and a dance of trust with many players. I was hooked. And now I'm waiting to read the sequels (which I will endeavor to remember I have before acquiring duplicates). And don't worry, the extra will go to the public library for their next book sale.

Afterburn, by S.L. Viehl
fantasy, sequel to Bio Rescue
I've had this book for a while, started it twice, but got no further than the first few pages. I don't know why, I liked Bio Rescue well enough, a story set on a world not unlike earth, but whose primary sentient beings are water-dwellers. A world whose land masses are wanted by settlers, refugees, and by military operators for strategic purposes. I picked this up again and pushed past the first section, in which young Burn expresses his frustration, to find a complex story that was a good read. Some characters return from the first book and there are new relationships to follow, across several species. Political maneuvering underlies much of the action, some pulling strings, others trying to react in ways that aren't against their personal ethics. I'm glad I pushed though.

Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff
non-fiction
During the height of the Bernie Madoff publicity last year, a local man, a professor at Boston University, was interviewed about a book he wrote a few years ago. The book, Ponzi's Scheme, is a very readable biography of Charles Ponzi. I'm don't read many biographies, but this one reads like a story. Zuckoff is a journalism professor and he approached the story by gathering all the info he could, cross-checking the details of one account with another, and finally coming to understand Charles Ponzi. Through this telling of the events that led to one notable spring and very hot summer of 1920 I feel that I, too, have come to know Charles Ponzi and some of the things that motivated him. I can't say I'm sympathetic to him, but I understand how his self-deception and greed led him into a dead-end fiasco. I highly recommend this book.

Shakespeare's Champion by Charlaine Harris
A Lily Bard mystery, Book 2
This is the second Lily Bard mystery, set in the town of Shakespeare. It opens with murder intruding into Lily's life, in the gym where she regularly works out. I'm growing to like Lily, though her (understandable) thick shell often makes this a bit hard. And through Lily I'm getting to know the other residents of Shakespeare, with all their warts. And then there's the attractive and strangely-familiar stranger that keeps turning up...

Gale Force by Rachel Caine
Book 7 in the Weather Warden series
fantasy
This series drives me crazy. Even with the "willing suspension of disbelief" that one must bring to any speculative fiction, this one leaps from one unimaginable improbability to another. But, having said that, at least the main character knows who she is in this book (unlike one of the previous books). And the feisty characters entertain me. And I leave each book forgiving Rachel Caine for the ride she just took me on and wondering when I should start the next one. In this one the Djinn David asks Jo to marry him, and she agrees. Then all hell breaks loose, but since that is nothing new to these characters, that is just the beginning.

Fool Moon by Jim Butchers
Book 2 of the Dresden Files
Fantasy
Harry Dresden, Wizard (the only one listed in the Chicago phone book), pissed off his friend the detective in the police department at the end of Book 1. That means she hasn't been hiring him to help investigate otherwise unexplainable crimes, putting a big crimp in his wallet. Then something turns up, something that the FBI wants no on else to look at. That doesn't stop the Chicago cop or Harry. There are all kinds of predator in this book. I'll be back for Book 3.

The Rest of the 2009 Books

2010-03-09T01:20:00.001-05:00

Now that it is March of 2010, I'm finally getting around to posting about the books I finished in 2009. I last caught up on a bunch of them in August, and have been posting in the side bar the rest. So first the entire list, followed by comments on those not in the previous posting.

Books Read in 2009
• Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski
• The Postman (Il Postino) by Antonio Skármeta
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
• Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser
• The High King's Tomb by Kristen Britain
• The Exile and the Sorcerer by Jane Fletcher, Lyremouth Chronicles: Book One
• The Black Ship by Diana Pharaoh Francis
• Dervish Daughter by Sheri S. Tepper
• Fiddler's Green by Ernest Gann
• Storm Front by Jim Butcher, Book One of the Dresden Files
• Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris, the first Lily Bard Mystery
• Idaho Code by Joan Opyr
• Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
• Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
• Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews, a Kate Daniels Novel
• The Traitor and the Chalice by Jane Fletcher, Lyremouth Chronicles: Book Two
• Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs, an Alpha and Omega Novel
• The Empress and the Acolyte by Jane Fletcher, Lyremouth Chronicles: Book Three
• Excuse Me, Sir ... Your Socks Are On Fire; The Life and Times of a Wilderness Park Ranger in the Adirondack Mountains by Larry Weill
• From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris, a Sookie Stackhouse Novel
• When the King Comes Home by Caroline Stevermer
• Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs, an Alpha and Omega Novel
• Child of a Dead God by Barb & J.C. Hendee, A Novel of the Noble Dead

The Traitor and the Chalice by Jane Fletcher
Lyremouth Chronicles: Book Two
and
The Empress and the Acolyte by Jane Fletcher
Lyremouth Chronicles: Book Three
I started reading this fantasy series in the summer (see the review of the 1st one here) and decided to go ahead and read the other two. A pair of people falling in love under sudden circumstances (in book 1) are bound to have a time of adjustment. And if that weren't conflict enough, the stories that the warrior told of the missing chalice led the sorcerers to the conclusion that it was dangerous to have loose in the world. So now the promise the warrior had made to look for it for her island village (as an excuse to leave with dignity) was now a task she was forced to take on for real. Book two was a quick read. Book three ended up being a bit tedious with one of the main characters out of commission a good portion of the time, and the other being just generally in a sad, bad mood. The book included a section at the end written as a story - a fable really - passed down through the ages. As you read, you realize that the fable is a version of the novel you just read, but told through the eyes of someone not completely in the know, mixed with what must be local lore. Quite entertaining. All in all, I'm glad I read the series, but I probably won't re-read them (something I do with books I love).

Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs
an Alpha and Omega Novel
A new fantasy novel about modern werewolves, and one in particular. Alpha Wolf is a well-known concept, but this explores the Omega Wolf. Everyone (including her) thinks she is the opposite of Alpha, the most submissive of submissives. But everyone is wrong. I like her and I like this book and am looking forward to more of them.

Excuse Me, Sir ... Your Socks Are On Fire; The Life and Times of a Wilderness Park Ranger in the Adirondack Mountains by Larry Weill
True-life stories of the times the author spent walking the miles and miles and miles of trails in the Adirondack woods, as a ranger and observer of the people you find there. Contained some chuckles and some outright laughs for me. It was an impulse buy I didn't regret.

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris
a Sookie Stackhouse Novel
Book 8 in the series was one I liked (better than the last one). Sookie has had ENOUGH of being pressured/blackmailed by the vampires. But she also hasn't heard from her new boyfriend in far too long. This book doesn't go anywhere much, but does introduce a new spin on Sookie's family history.

When the King Comes Home by Caroline Stevermer
In the cities and the country, the saying was "when the King comes home..." yet there was a difference between saying it and seeing it. The King has, after all, been dead for generations. The young apprentice finds the man wandering a bit befuddled by the river and is then caught up in a political struggle, a war, and witchery. All the while, she wants to be true to her art, unless her soft heart will let her stray from that goal.

Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs
an Alpha and Omega Novel
The second book in this fantasy series was even better than the first. Now that she knows more about what she is, the Omega in the book is more fun to follow.

Child of a Dead God by Barb & J.C. Hendee
A Novel of the Noble Dead
My love/hate relationship with this series continues, as does the series. The mixed band of adventurers has new information, but still not enough. And the enemy (at least the one they know about) is still plotting and getting more unstable while he's at it. I keep wishing that there would be a bit more action - like wishing that the 2-hour tv movie was condensed to a brisker half-hour show. I like the characters (when they aren't being too self centered and/or peevish that I want to just smack them) but if the proverbial "other shoe" doesn't drop soon... Well I'll probably keep reading anyway.

I'll start catching up on the 2010 books soon.

Working on a Book Post

2010-03-06T20:39:00.002-05:00

Hello, all. In spite of what this blog looks like, I have not actually dropped off the edge of the world. I've just not been in a creative mood, and have had too many distractions.

I have, however, been reading, both blogs and books. So I'm currently working on a post to tell you about those books. Stay tuned!

Tasty Monochrome

2010-03-04T23:30:00.007-05:00

Carmi's prompt caught my attention this week. My first thought was of snow pictures, because I do like white-on-white, but the photos I have of snow were not taken by me.

I did take this picture this past December. My wife was on a cookie-baking binge. Yum. These are maple bears.

Circus Siren

2009-10-29T10:15:00.002-04:00

Read Write Poem gave us a picture (go check it out) of rides in motion at a fair or carnival or circus and this is what I came up with. See what other folks had to say.

Circus Siren

The circus came to town just once,
bringing tents and rides,
and more excitement than one
girl could contain.

We went, of course, everyone went.
The grass near the school was transformed.
I ate pink cotton candy off a paper stick and
I remember a large snake in the side show.

Half-way up the tiered seats in the tent
we watched horses, and acrobats,
and clowns and dogs, and
I ate salty peanuts from a paper bag.
The ringmaster in his colorful suit
announce more acrobats
that spun in the air and walked
impossibly thin ropes above our heads
and I couldn't hardly believe it
was finally over.

Then we headed to the rides,
large metal arms spun in all directions,
blinking their siren lights at us and
teasing us closer. I was tall enough
and boarded with so much excitement
I must have been vibrating.

The giant beast slowly woke from hibernation
and crept in a circle, then it whirled
faster and faster, until
all at once the inner section started spinning
too and my stomach spun in a different
direction and my hands desperately
gripped the bar with white knuckles
and my eyes wouldn't focus and my family
asked the attendant to stop the ride,
and he didn't and I was whirling and
green and unconnected.
And the ride finally slowed and stopped.

I tripped a bit as my feet reacquainted
themselves with an unmoving ground,
and my stomach kept spinning and I
threw up into a trash barrel.

I lost the cotton candy and my excitement,
and prayed no one I knew had noticed.
The tinny music sounded sad
and the bright lights no longer called to me.

The Bars

2009-08-26T19:28:00.006-04:00

Go see what other poets contributed to the Totally Optional Prompt: Laundry. As for me, I didn't write anything about laundry and am sharing something completely different.

The Bars

We went to the bars.
We went to the bars, but not to drink.

We went out of our way to get to the bars,
squeezing too many into a car, or hopping from bus to train to bus.
We paid the cover charge or the membership fee,
and squeezed into the dark, loud, crowded spaces.

The bars smelled like beer and clove cigarettes and patchouli.
They were always too warm, even if you found
a winter breeze from a side door, propped open a little.
There were too many bodies there, moving bodies.

We went to the bars to dance.
We went to the bars to dance with each other,
without men to hit on us.
Some woman was always trying to impress the DJs,
with a song request calculated to prove
superior knowledge of the latest releases, or
a dance move practiced to look casual-but-sexy.

We held hands at the bar,
in the open. And we danced.
We danced close to one another.
Our bodies moved in rhythm to the music and each other.
Our hands and hips talked even when it was too noisy for conversation.

We went to the bars to play pool.
There was more space to breathe by the pool tables
but you had to pay attention and move out of the way
as the players tried to out-butch each other
in their efforts to impress someone special.

We could sometimes nab a just-vacated seat near the windows,
out of the way and cozy, a good place to sit close, lean in close;
a good place to kiss and be kissed.

We went to the bars to hear live music.
We listened to singers on the tiny first-floor stage:
a woman playing an acoustic guitar with heart-on-her-sleeve political lyrics;
two women with love songs about women;
or a baby-dyke with a rock edge.
We crowded at the tiny tables and watched,
some drooling at the guitars, more at the singers.

We stood in line at the bars to get in.
We stood in line at the bars to order drinks.
We stood in line at the bars to go to pee,
a long line on the basement stairs to rooms
marked "Women" and "Men,"
not caring which was which because we used them both,
as if we owned the place.

We went to the bars because that's where the women were.
Women like us.

Not Sorry

2009-08-10T02:23:00.003-04:00

I haven't been writing any poetry I can share, so I tried a different approach. This is a work in progress, but I think I like where its going. Check out what others have to share at the Monday Poetry Train Revisited.

I'm Not Sorry

I thank the summer
for the heat that makes me sweat
and wilts the houseplants.
I perversely appreciate the high humidity
that brings mold on the wind,
into my nose,
making me sniffle and sneeze,
and my eyes water.
I bless the dry spells
that make the crispy weeds crunch
beneath my feet
and fill the air and my mouth with dust.
It is unapologetically summer
and no Back-to-School / Halloween / Christmas
sale in the stores
will convince me otherwise.
I dream of wading
barefoot along the dappled edge
of the creek,
hat off and sunburned,
and I show up late for work
with no remorse.

Friday Fill-Ins 136

2009-08-07T09:10:00.000-04:00

Don't forget to check out the Friday Fill-Ins from other folks.

1. Reading a ba-jillion books on vacation is my favorite summertime indulgence.

2. My favorite John Hughes movie is Some Kind of Wonderful.

3. Silk is something I love to touch.

4. The full moon truly seems to have brought out the crazy in people this month - especially those behind the wheel of their cars.

5. I'm late for work right now.

6. When daylight fades this time of year, the mosquitoes start looking for me -- specifically me.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to the end of my first week back at work from vacation, tomorrow my plans include helping Chelle wash her kayak and both our cars, and Sunday I want to figure out how to fill our refrigerator again!

2009 Books So Far

2009-08-04T00:45:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it is August and I haven't posted about the books I've read so far this year. Granted the year got off to a slow start, and I have been posting them in the sidebar on the right, but it is high time I filled you in.

Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski
feminist S/F and fantasy
I have really enjoyed each of the books by Slonczewski that I have read starting with A Door Into Ocean (which won a Campbell Award in 1987). But I can't leave my brain behind when I read her books, no I have to have it engaged or I'm left in the dust. Not that I mind. Brain Plague tackles the not-all-all-small question of what lives are worth saving. An artist adopts a colony of microbes that set up residence in her brain. She can communicate with them, and they with her. Each gains from the partnership. But where are the lines? What are the responsibilities, to each other, or to society? Are the microbes even safe or should they be removed as a disease-causing virus would be? You can read this one alone, but you'll know more about the background of the world if you have already read A Door Into Ocean, Daughter of Elysium, and The Children Star. But I wouldn't line them up to read all in a row. I like to let one percolate for a while before diving into the next one.

The Postman (Il Postino) by Antonio Skármeta
fiction, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
I kept hearing how wonderful this book was and I never picked it up. I finally gave in and loved it. It is the story of Mario, a young man in pre-Pinochet Chile who happens into a job as a postman with a very particular job: his job is to deliver the mail to the famous poet Pablo Neruda. He gets the job because he has a bicycle. Mario is a dreamer, a lover of movies, who thinks if he can get Neruda to autograph one of his books of poetry, then he can use it to impress the girls. And somehow we get carried away with Mario learning about metaphor and about the lovely Beatriz, and about a country's upheaval.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Book 7 in the series
Chelle and I read the whole series to each other out loud. It took us forever because we have too many other distractions. But this was a very satisfying end to the series. I am content.

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser
poetry
I know I must have heard the name Ted Kooser more than once, but it never sank in. Then I happened across him reading some of his own work on YouTube and I was hooked. I bought this book and enjoyed it immensely. I like his language and the pictures he paints. My favorite is probably "Skater", where his description turns just as the graceful skater herself. But even his titles charm me: "A Jar of Buttons", "Depression Glass", "Applesauce", and "Bank Fishing for Bluegills." Each is something I've seen or done, but Kooser looks at things a little differently and I see more by looking through his visions.

The High King's Tomb by Kristen Britain
fantasy, 3rd in the series
This book, a long one, is about sorting things out. The first two were quite chaotic in their pace, leaving broken people and a pile of messes behind. This one deals with a now-adult Karigan and her companions gathering up the pieces and laying groundwork of repairs, perhaps alliances, and hopefully a plan to protect the kingdom against a deferred threat.

The Exile and the Sorcerer by Jane Fletcher
fantasy, first of a series
This one kept popping up on the "recommended for you" list at Amazon and I finally decided to try the first one. Imagine an isolated chain of islands where young girls must drink a nasty potion when they are growing up, the result of which is that they are all super-strong. The society this makes is the flip-side of misogynistic. But the heroine doesn't fit in, fearful she'll be stoned by her family and clan if they ever find out she only has romantic feelings for women. She ends up pledging to find and retrieve a magic chalice, a task she knows she'll never complete, but which allows her to leave with her dignity, and that of her family, intact. She finds her way to the mainland where she can make a living on her strength, but has oh-so-much-more to learn. A bit of action, some romance, some mystery - I was entertained enough I bought the next two books in the series.

The Black Ship by Diana Pharaoh Francis
fantasy, a novel of Crosspointe
The first book in this series, The Cipher, gave me some fits. I wasn't sure if the fast-paced ending was worth the slog at the beginning. I decided that I'd give the sequel a try. This one starts out with another character entirely, a ship captain with attitude that only gets him in trouble. The pace on this was better, and before long, there is a swirling in of characters from the previous story, enough that I wanted to know more. I'll be back when the next one is available.

Dervish Daughter by Sheri S. Tepper
fantasy
I picked this up at a book sale at the local library and recognized it as a part of a series, one of which I'd read years ago. Unfortunately, I seem to be reading the series backwards, which means that I'm still a bit confused. I read Jinian Star-Eye which I believe is book 3. This one is book 2. That means I still need to find Jinian Footseer which I think is book 1. To complicate this even more, I believe these together may be just one of a trilogy of triologies. I may never sort the story out entirely! These are good stories, and I think the characters are alright. But these are not on the level with the newer books by Tepper (such as Grass or Shadow's End or a Plague of Angels).

Fiddler's Green by Ernest Gann
novel
This book turned up at my house when my wife mistakenly ordered it, thinking it was something else. It didn't cost much and so wasn't worth the postage to return it. I needed something to read one day and picked it up, thinking I'd be so bored after a few pages that it would go straight to the pile of books to give away. I don't read a lot of books by men, and I don't read a lot of books with so few women characters. This book was first published in the 1950's and it is set in San Francisco, along Fisherman's Wharf, and in the sea nearby. The book spells out the story from a number of viewpoints, a crook with ambitions, a detective who wants more, an immigrant fisherman who can't understand his American-born son, the son who is embarrassed by his immigrant father, the waterfront bum who can't remember beyond his last (or next) drink, and more. What I found most interesting is the inner dialog each of the male characters has. Most of the time, there is a thread of competition, of comparing oneself to the others, measuring your standing, or protecting it. I started to wonder if that is how most men do run their lives? Or was this just a theme in this book? Was it true in 1950's San Francisco? An interesting read.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher
fantasy, Book One of the Dresden Files
My older brother told me I'd like the Dresden Files TV show on the SciFi channel a while back. He had some of the episodes on DVD when we were both visiting my Mom and played a couple for me. I liked them well enough, but kept thinking I should probably just read the books. I picked up the first one and I definitely like it better than the TV series. Harry Dresden is a wizard, the only one listed in the Chicago phone book. In this first book, he has a very bad week (give or take). I'm hooked.

Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris
the first Lily Bard Mystery
I have read most of Harris' vampire series with Sookie Stackhouse, so I was wondering if I would like this series or not. Lily Bard is in hiding (from her past) and picked the town of Shakespeare because of it's name (and hers) - sort of a "why not?" kind of thing. She cleans people's houses and apartments, and does some other odd jobs for folks, so she sees and hears a lot. This book opens when she can't sleep, goes for a walk to clear her head, and finds a body dumped in her own neighborhood. She ends up trying to help solve the murder without people looking too deeply into her own past (which she wants to keep in the past). We do find out what her past was (let me warn you it is grisly and disturbing) and we see that Lily is just starting to arrive at a point where she can let people back into her life.

Idaho Code by Joan Opyr
lesbian fiction
If you are going to read this around other people, you may have to warn them ahead of time that there will be either giggles, or snorts, or other outbursts from you. Why? Let's see... the book opens with Bil, an on-the-rebound baby dyke (now living back at home with her parents to whom she has not told she is a lesbian) sitting in church next to her mother at a funeral. They are sitting directly behind the widow and daughter of the deceased when Bil's mother's cell phone rings, her mother answers it, and proceeds to carry on a short-but-loud conversation with Bil's brother, Sam, who has been arrested (again) and needs to be bailed out before his chemo session the next day. Springing Sam may not be so easy because he might have killed the funeral's honoree. Oh, yeah, and Bil has had a crush on the widow's daughter since she was in elementary school. Can't forget the old flame who arrives in town to help fight the anti-gay bill up for a state vote. Throw in Bil's best friend, a drag queen who lives at his mom's place, which happens to be a kind of lesbian-survivalist camp with guns and softball. Quite a wild ride, with lots of chuckles.

Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
fantasy or S/F
Another find from the book sale, this is an older piece by McIntyre. A good story, though the main character was a little too "oh-woe-is-me" for a while, but fortunately came up with a plan to help dig herself out of trouble. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, it has some interesting underpinnings of thought on how people might live long, long, long, long after nuclear bombs poison large swaths of the world. But the focus is not on that, but on a story of a young woman's quest and the people she encounters along the way. It leaves some questions unanswered, but many in a way that invite you to think about what might be.

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
children's fiction (junior-high age)
A story about a girl who doesn't fit in and the strengths she discovers in herself. A nice story that isn't too frilly. Set in a well-rounded environment, it all makes sense and the people are largely believable to me.

Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews
a Kate Daniels Novel
Kate Daniels is back and in deep doo-doo as usual. There are a lot of returning characters, with developing storylines. Some new foes appear, and some new facets to those friends. A lot of fighting and some sizzling verbal sparring between Kate and her would-be-suitor. Along the way, we are treated to some more of Kate's mysterious history, and why she is so driven and paranoid. I had to stay up late to finish this one.

Friday Fill-Ins 133

2009-07-18T01:15:00.003-04:00

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.

Midsummer in Oz

2009-07-02T00:09:00.008-04:00

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
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shram/ / CC BY 2.0

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.

Horoscope words words words

2009-06-25T18:05:00.007-04:00

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)

Still Cloudy

2009-06-24T05:52:00.003-04:00

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.

Grandma's Yard

2009-06-22T11:14:00.002-04:00

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.

A Late Limerick

2009-06-21T23:06:00.003-04:00

Mad Kane is once more providing inspiration for limericks. These days she is providing a first line, our job is to complete the poem.

I've been busy, but finally finished the prompt from last week (now that the next prompt is posted). Oh, well. Here it is anyway.

There once was a guy with no hair
who wandered with nary a care.
He heard no one's jeers
due to fur in his ears.
It had moved from up top to in there.

Unexpected Guest

2009-06-05T00:40:00.003-04:00

I haven't been writing, but now that my spring concerts are over, I should gain a bit of time to myself again. I also have some vacation days to sneak in before the end of the month, so here's hoping the muse will work with my limited time.

Totally Optional Prompts this week was "Unexpected Visitors" and that fit in nicely with my first foray into the world of Facebook.

Unexpected Guest

I'm sitting pretty in my p.j.'s,
comfy on my couch,
watching the world from the window
of my little laptop.

Then another singer sells me
on the plan of a page
for our chorus fans to adore us,
a focus on Facebook,
another window to the world.

So I sign up,
join forces on Facebook,
post some particulars,
sweep open the shutters,
cast open the curtains
of my world window,
and I wait.

Just two-days time
passes by and Pop!
a blast from the past casts a query,
"be my friend," she extends
a once-familiar wave wandering
toward my open window.

I cringe and cram coverlets in the way,
heaving heaps of unknowing
into the chasm of change
built in separate states,
wincing away from the wide-open window.

I click ("don't be sick!"), and
tick, tick, tick, the time
rolls back, and I'm smack
dab in the long-ago days,
with a faded photo from
there and I recognize the "then"
in us both, our backstories bridge
the welcoming at the window.

I greet my guest with a grin.

Evening Daydream

2009-05-04T22:45:00.008-04:00

Read Write Poem always finds such stimulating pictures for the Read Write Image prompts and #15 is no exception. This week Deb gave us Sunset by MorBCN, which I am showing you here according to its Creative Commons license.

It led me to this poem.

Evening Daydreaming
Flat water lay in the blue boat,
not the other way around.
The slim boat floated in the air,
pushing aside salmon clouds,
and avoiding the ripples of time
that threatened to sink dreams
back to reality.

Memory Love

2009-04-26T23:27:00.005-04:00

I've been listening to podcasts of WNYC's Radio Lab. An episode from 2007 was called "Memory and Forgetting" and the following are quotes from one person or another in that show:

"Memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another."

"Every time you remember something, you are changing the memory a little bit."

"… the more you remember something, in a sense the less accurate it becomes."

"… the safest memory, memory that's uncontaminatable, is one that exists in a patient with amnesia."

These stuck in my brain so much that I had to write about it. Even though it is nowhere near being in a final state, I decided it was OK to share at this stage.

Memory Love

Science says I build my memories out of bits and pieces,
each and every time. Memory is an act of creation.
And every time I remember something, I change it.
I can't help it. None of us can

I handle my favorite memories so much
that I've rubbed off much of the paint and
worn the corners down. No longer neat cubes,
they are set on a course to become spheres.

I pull them out to look at them lovingly and,
like delicate paintings exposed to bright light,
I wear a little of each away with my adoration.

Perhaps the love I give these memories
makes up for what I take away.

Meanwhile forgotten memories are stored
away in my mind, wrapped in protective plastic
like grandma's couch, perfectly preserved
yet unloved.

And speaking of sharing - have you been over to the Monday Poetry Train Revisited yet?

My Shoes and Me

2009-04-21T22:36:00.005-04:00

I seem to have misplaced a month. OK, not really misplaced - I watched it fly by, but I haven't posted here. I haven't written off-line either, stories or poetry. I haven't read any books either (well, I did read one-and-a-half pages the day before yesterday, but I'm going to have to re-read that part when I I next pick up the book.

What have I been up to? Well first there was some heavy-level neatening up of the house in preparation for Passover and guests. Then there was menu-planning and cooking for the same. Then as soon as that was over I (finally!) started and quickly finished our tax returns. And overlapping that my wife's niece and her mother came for a quick visit. That was followed by laundry so that my wife could head off to a conference.

I finally realized that I'd feel better if I just dove in an started writing again. So I looked up a bunch of old, old prompts and picked one from the first year of Sunday Scribblings. The prompt, "my shoes" launched this piece. Sorry it's a bit long - but then so are my feet!

When you are very small you don't know what shoes are. The adults around you may ooh-and-aah about how cute they are, but then they are likely doing the same thing over your fingers and ears. Probably the same reason that baby vegetables are popular – the whole tiny and sweet thing.

Then shoes become a struggle. You want them on when your mother wants them off, and vice versa. And for those of us who grew up before Velcro, the laces wouldn't stay tucked into those little "don't bother me" plastic, "childproof," barrels. Or the buckles on the straps were just too small to manage.

Around the time I started kindergarten I tried to learn to tie my own shoes. I wanted to very much to tie the laces, but I just couldn't get it right. We even got oddly-shaped cutouts in school, that laced up and we could practice on. (OK, I think they were supposed to look like a shoe, but the point of view was not what I saw when I looked down at my feet – it was like a snail's eye view of someone else's feet. But I digress…)

Fortunately my older brother came to my rescue. He says now that teaching me to tie my laces was self-defense; that he was tired of doing it. Whatever the reason, his lessons stuck and I moved into a phase of being at peace with my shoes.

I don't remember much about my shoes before I was nine years old. I am sure there were dressy shoes to wear when I needed something to go with a fancy, lacy dress. I'm sure there were sandals for the summer, and boots for the winter. Mostly I remember Keds. I always had white ones – or at least I did for about a day after they came out of the box. They then moved toward gray at a rapid pace that could only be slowed down by occasional trips through the washer and dryer.

Then my feet started growing. No one in my family had tiny feet (at least not after infancy). But I remember outgrowing a pair of dressy sandals I had worn only once or twice. They were simple and not too little-girly so my mom gave them to someone who could use them – my best friend's mother! I couldn't get my brain wrapped around the fact that my feet were bigger than a grown-up's.

Until that time most of my shoes came from the shoe store downtown. There was only one shoe store that was on the "bank corner" (across from the First National Bank and catty-cornered from the Farmer's and Merchant's Bank). The man who owned the store happened to be our next-door-neighbor and his son was a year younger than I was. For a small town, there was a pretty good selection and he was happy to order anything for us to try on. Trips to buy new shoes took longer and often involved that option to order something to try on when it came in a few days later. Mom grumbled about all the multivitamins she had given us when we were little. She also threatened to make us wear the shoeboxes since they were bigger, though we knew she was just teasing.

I was eleven years old when I entered sixth grade. That fall I was tickled to have a new pair of leather penny-loafers. They were pretty simple shoes, but I loved them, especially after Daddy showed me how to put a real penny into the vamp on each one. I was greatly saddened to find I had outgrown them just a month later.

The good news was that by the end of that school year it seemed my shoe size had finally stopped changing. The bad news was that I wore a US size 10, narrow.

Finding shoes in that size was hard enough. It was tougher still finding ones that didn't accentuate the length of my foot or that didn't look like it belonged on someone two or three times my age. Lace-ups were a better bet since they helped keep the shoes on my narrow foot. Straps across my foot seemed to help the illusion that I didn't have canoes on the end of my feet.

And by the time I was in high school I had entered that love/hate phase that I swing through even now. I coveted leather Frye boots like I saw in the magazines, but there was no way to fit my long foot down the shaft of a boot that didn't zip up. I needed tall black boots to wear with my flag-waving outfit for marching band. Getting those boots involved a trip to St. Louis and a huge department store.

I could no longer borrow shoes from my mom. Even the strappy black sandals that seemed a little big on her. I learned to set my expectations low when we went shoe-shopping. I went for whatever fit and had good support. And it helped if it didn't look like it belonged on a drag queen (no offense, ladies). I get away with sneakers at work a lot of the time, and I always have two or three pair of black shoes to wear with my long black choir skirt.

As an adult, I found that trips to try on shoes at warehouse-style stores needed to be a solo expedition for me. While friends could try things on in each aisle, I had to wander a lot further to see out the few pairs that were (supposedly) in my size.

It was with great delight that I discovered a shoe store for hard-to-fit sizes. It is not so easy to get to (you have to know where you are going or you'll never find it). But the man who runs it is patient and knowledgeable. He will order anything for you and sends out e-mail with a picture of each new style that comes in. My (now) size-11 average width-with-a-narrow-heel feet don't phase him and I can try on box after box of shoes in MY SIZE.

The only problem I now have is learning to balance the "it fits!" feeling in the store with a clear-eyed evaluation of how comfortable it will really be later. Does it have enough support? And occasionally I have purchased a pair of shoes that is so truly comfortable that I don't realize until a couple of weeks later how unattractive they are.

So I still hate that it takes a special trip to find shoes for me. I don't like that I have to try shoes on to know if they are really going to fit or not. But I do love the pair of grey suede flats I have (though I can't wear then for too long – not enough support). And I like the red sneakers I have nearly worn out – they are so cheerful! And I love the brown microfiber pumps I got for our wedding that I now wear with some dressier slacks at work. And I love it when I'm not the one with the hardest-to-fit-feet in the shoe store.

I Come From

2009-03-22T01:50:00.002-04:00

[Sunday Scribblings prompted us to write "I come from..." and I took them literally.]

I come from a family that valued learning and hard work. We practiced both, being told that if we didn't do enough of the former, we'd surely have plenty of the latter.

I come from the Midwest, and I like to think I absorbed a kind of practicality from there. I get my "horse sense" from my mom's side of the family.

I come from a long line of stubborn women.

I come from a long line of family comedians, where at family dinners we said, "the first liar doesn’t have a chance." One wisecrack was just an invitation for someone else to top it.

I come from savers. My parents lived through the Great Depression and a waste-not want-not sensibility was expected of us all.

Urban Perspicacity

2009-03-22T01:27:00.005-04:00

[In the current project at Cafe Writing is a prompt to consider the following quote,

Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.

then use it as inspiration to write a poem about weather meaning more. This isn't what I set out to write, but some days I don't get to choose.]

Urban Perspicacity

I live with selfish city-dwellers,
who dream a stream of endless sunny days,
each rainless golden day melting into the next.

I hear the plants whimper with thirst,
and steel myself against their desperation.

I commute to work with urbanites,
who wish away winter and the cold and snow,
and delight in January thaws.

I crave the soft, white, insulating blanket back,
to tuck in around the tender feet of my shrubs.

I work with blinkered pedestrians,
who delight in suddenly unseasonably warm days,
amidst the slow crawl from winter to spring.

I pray the tree buds stay locked tight
against the cold days still to come.

I toil in air-conditioned isolation,
with those who dread umbrellas cluttering the hall,
and wet floors and spots on the newly-washed car.

I smile at the relief of parched plants,
and my mouth waters in anticipation.

The Beginner

2009-03-14T08:13:00.002-04:00

[I was browsing my regular haunts (see the right column for my current list) and on Mad Kane's Humor Blog I found a link to info on a robot violinist. My muse was waiting at my shoulder and I thought about some beginner days of my own. I have long since given up on the instrument, but my family still remembers, I'm sure...]

The instrument took quite some wrangling.
I blew it and set nerves a-jangling.
The oboe was shrill.
My big brother stopped still,
And he asked was I playing or strangling?

Clerihew Take 2

2009-03-13T00:01:00.004-04:00

[This week Totally Optional Prompts encouraged us to rewrite. I looked for something I could stand to look at again and my heart wasn't in it.

Last spring I took a challenge to try my hand at the clerihew. I posted a couple then and decided that for my "rewrite" I would write another. It's late, but I did come up with one. I should try more of these when I'm awake.]

Jay Leno (host),
seen coast to coast,
competed with sleep and yawns (ours)
so will soon be on earlier by hours.

Three Women

2009-03-12T23:16:00.005-04:00

[This week Read Write Poem encouraged us to write about eating, cooking, dreaming about eating, and more.

keep a running list of what you eat, what you cook, what you dream about eating, what you refuse to cook, what you wish someone would cook for you. Then, come back next week and tantalize our taste buds.

This has been spinning around the back of my mind this week. If some of the references have you a bit lost, look for information on the Jewish holiday, Purim.]

Three Women

Folding circles of dough into triangular cookies
I think of Esther, Queen Esther in long-ago Persia,
and I think of Ethel, my grandmother,
whose Hebrew name was Esther. I didn't know
either woman, I just heard stories.

As I fold soft dough over apricots
or almonds I think about the apron I used
as a child, the one my dad said belonged
to my grandmother. Now it is folded
in my closet, and I think it was not much used
by her, no old stains or repairs. It must
have been one of many, or folded away
to keep it nice.

I don't have her recipe for hamantaschen,
though she must have made them. She did,
after all, run a kosher household in Crown Heights.
I gather scraps of information like scraps of
dough, hoping to press together enough pieces
to make a whole. Surely she folded
and pressed edges over prune or poppy seed filling,
and surely she thought about Queen Esther.

I doubt Queen Esther made cookies,
but doubtless she ate ones filled with
apricots or almonds, like the tender, golden
triangles I take from the cooling rack, and pack
between folded layers of wax paper.

A Taste of Grapefruit

2009-03-09T18:30:00.000-04:00

[Don't forget to go see the other folks who have posted at the Monday Poetry Train Revisited. Some cool stuff there each week.]

A Taste of Grapefruit

The sweet-tart taste of red grapefruit
can't conjure sunny southern orchards
for me.
The sticky juice on my lips
doesn't recall its warm Texas tree.

No, the soft spray as I bite
takes me to Quebec City's winter carnival
with the city socked in with a blizzard,
and my delight at finally being able
to order part of my breakfast in French.
Demi pamplemousse, s'il vous plait.

Trees

2009-03-06T23:54:00.001-05:00

We had a lot of trees in our yard when I was a girl. Daddy believed we should have a large variety so that if a disease infected one type we would still have shade. He and Mom started from scratch. The lot had been a field before they built the house, but I only know that from pictures.

I remember the locust tree out front. It had tiny little leaves grouped together in fronds. It was not a honey-locust or a black locust, but I don't know exactly what variety it was. I do remember that the cicadas liked the bark of that tree. They would anchor tight and then shed their old shells, flying away and leaving behind fragile empty cases. We would gingerly pull them off the tree and anchor the ghosts onto our sweaters. All the neighborhood boys loved it, but very few of the girls. Most shied away and some even shrieked.

Next to the locust was a clump of paper birch. The white bark was always shaggy and oh so tempting to pull. The branches hung down like a beaded curtain. My favorite memory of the birch is when a flock of goldfinches converged on the trees, feasting on the seeds and creating a flickering riot of golden yellow.

On the west side of the house were two gum trees. I didn't know if there were any other gum trees in town. I had never heard of gum trees. When I became a Girl Scout I learned the song about the Kookaburra bird from Australia, "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree..." I was delighted to discover that maybe gum trees weren't so unusual after all. They were a pretty tree, but I must say I didn't like them much. That was because of the seed balls that were prickly. Once the birds had their way, what was left was a stickery round skeleton that hurt to step on. That was only one of the reasons Mom didn't let us go barefoot in the yard.

There was a red maple on the west side of the house too. I loved the burgundy color of its leaves, standing out from all the other trees.

In one corner of the yard was a dwarf sour cherry tree. It was originally in another location but was moved when my parents added an in-ground pool. The sour cherry tree didn't seem to mind. It was quite prolific, giving us gallons and gallons of cherries, even after the birds got some. Daddy tried all kinds of things to keep the birds from eating the bulk of the crop. I think what he finally settled on most years was lengths of cheesecloth draped over large sections, and several aluminum pie pans spinning and dangling from branches to scare away the critters. Even though it was a dwarf tree, we still needed a ladder to pick most of the cherries. A fair number went directly into our mouths, but there were still plenty left to cook with, as long as we helped to pit them. Mom would give us each an old, large, worn-out shirt to wear as a smock and we would sit on the back porch with the buckets and bowls lined up on the picnic table. Mom didn't make pies, but Daddy made jam. Yum! And some would be saved for later by freezing them in square plastic boxes.

In the back of the house, next to the dog run, was a tulip poplar tree. Its leaves were such a pretty shape, but the flowers were a bit showy for me. And the bits that remained from the flowers included a kind of spiky bit that was another thing to avoid with bare feet. The shade from that tree was terrific and I know the dogs we had loved to lie in its shade when the temperature soared in the summer.

At the north-east corner of the house was a pinoak. Mom kept cutting off the lower limbs to keep the view clear. I remember how straight its trunk was.

To the east of the pool was another cherry tree, though I don't remember getting more than two or three cherries off of it. I don't know what variety of cherry it was supposed to be, but I always called it a "weeping cherry tree" because its branches drooped. It was never really happy in our yard, but my parents seemed to want to give it more time.

In the north-east corner of the yard were three pine trees. I remember when they were planted, in a triangle in the corner of the yard. They were slightly different sizes so I thought of them as papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear trees. They grew quickly. Before long, they were big enough to hide in. My brother and I took bricks left from the house remodel and used them as pavers to create a floor in the space between the trees. It was a great area, like an out-door playhouse. I can still smell the pine.

In the south-east corner of the yard was an apple tree. Daddy bought it because it was a Jonathan Apple tree, but when it finally got big enough to have fruit we discovered that it wasn't a Jonathan after all. I don't know what he decided it was. He didn't like to the spray the trees and the apples always ended up buggy. More landed on the ground to rot or go into the compost pile than made it into the kitchen.

In front of our carport and shed was a copper beech tree. Mom loved seeing the giant beech trees when we vacationed in Massachusetts and decided they should plant one. Beech trees grow so slowly that it always seemed like a small tree to me. For years it was small enough for me to put my hands around. I think that by the time I was in college it was finally big enough my hands could not span the trunk. I would like to think that beech tree will be there for decades to come, but I can only hope it is still there.

Between the shed and the house was a sycamore tree. The bark on this tree seem to flake off, but that's what it is supposed to do. The seed balls were the same size as the gum tree's balls, but the sycamore ones were not stickery and didn't hurt. I now know that sycamores like to have "damp feet" and there are some gorgeous specimens along the Charles River near Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was another tree that no one else in my hometown seemed to have. When I was little the only other place I'd heard of one was in the Presbyterian church. They taught us a song about Zaccheus sitting in a sycamore tree (the savior for to see), and something about "come down" from the tree.

There were other trees in my childhood, but these are the trees of my yard. I hope you enjoyed the tour. Maybe another day I'll tell you about the other trees, the ones in Gramma's yard, or in the park next door, or the other handful of special ones around my childhood town.

Wanted

2009-03-04T01:51:00.007-05:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect gave us the following challenge for the Monday Poetry Stretch this week:

write a personal ad about your favorite animal or historical figure

So here's what I came up with. Check out the links afterward if you can't figure it out (or if you just want to see some cool pics!]

Wanted

looking, i am,
for just the right guy,
with colors like mine,
and who really can fly.

i hang by the lake
but would move to the marsh
if the right guy would ask
and be mellow, not harsh.

i surf on the breeze
and i'll give you a clue
how to find me up there:
i'm a shocking-bright blue.

a stick for a figure,
i'm perfect, you know
but i'm missing a mate.
life is too short, you know.

so find me and show off,
i like a good dance,
you know that you're lonely
now come take a chance!

picture 1
picture 2
picture 3

Ripped

2009-03-02T03:19:00.004-05:00

[This was sparked from the Weekend Wordsmith prompt "ripped." Once I started thinking of all the ways that word might be used, I couldn't stop.]

Ripped from the Headlines

He is ripped, and goes shirtless
to show off his six-pack and
shoulders, and the powerful arms that he slowly
grew with dedication and weights.

His jeans are ripped at the knees
and stained with oil and paint,
manly stains that prove he doesn't
care about his appearance.

He grits his teeth as he rips
the adhesive bandage off his shin,
tearing out leg hairs by the roots,
and pretending the sting
in his eyes is from
grit blown in by the wind.

He tosses the bandage in the trash,
on top of the ripped shirt,
ruined beyond repair, and tainted
with the memory

when they ripped off his store
while he flexed his muscles
and stared down the barrel
of guns held by skinny-armed cowards.

For the Monday Poetry Train

2009-03-02T03:11:00.005-05:00

[If you haven't stopped by the Monday Poetry Train (Revisited) yet, please do so and check out the links to some cool work.]

The Internet Doesn't Know Everything

I googled the name
on the trophy in my closet,
presented to me at my
high school graduation
to acknowledge my achievements
in fine arts,
and in memory of
a young woman
gifted in the arts,
who died in a fire at college.

I'm sure her family remembers
and I remember
but the Internet, at least for now,
doesn't know her name.

Finger Paints

2009-02-22T20:48:00.005-05:00

[Cafe Writing this month includes a timed-writing prompt in which we are asked to consider this quote:

…should I draw you the picture of my heart it would be what I hope you would still love though it contained nothing new. The early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have obtained over it, leaves not the smallest space unoccupied..
~Abigail Adams (in a letter to John Adams)

then use 9 minutes (only!) to write about "a picture of your heart." Here's what I came up with. I tried to stay true to the 9 minutes (going over only to agonize briefly over a working title). I'm interested to see what others came up with. Nine minutes is not very long!]

Finger Paints

I need finger paints
in order to give you
a picture of my heart.

I need the bright simple colors
to stand out and show the
confetti it throws when
you make me smile.

I need to smear the color
on the slippery page
to try to convey the way it
beats faster when we kiss.

I may be complicated
but my heart is simple
enough for finger paints.
My heart loves only you.

I need finger paints
and just my own fingers,
to give you my heart,
perhaps a bit messy,
but sweet just the same.

Too Casual

2009-01-29T23:50:00.005-05:00

[I believe I'll share this with the Monday Poetry Train Revisited. You should check them out.]

Too Casual

She said we were too casual, we Americans,
nearly always in jeans and t-shirts.
Her closet was full of silky saris
and soft salwar kameez, the cotton printed
with delightful patterns.
She stood graceful and polished
against our denim.

We were freshly-minted college students, bright
and confident that only an introduction
was needed to turn a stranger into a friend.
She said we were too forward, leaping
to given-name familiarity at the first meeting,
yet she was a friend by then, herself,
or she wouldn't have told us.

I looked at us through her eyes and saw
she was right. We were casual and forward.
We were racing toward degrees or away
from our pasts, testing the outlines of adulthood
as we tried the patience of our parents.

She was right. And yet, I was delighted
to be surrounded by intelligent women,
most of whom were also too casual,
too forward, and just an introduction away
from being my friends.

Oil-and-Rock Roads

2009-01-19T07:06:00.002-05:00

[I haven't been writing for the prompts at Weekend Wordsmith for a while, but I do look at them nearly every week. This week, the prompt "road" struck a chord.]

Oil-and-Rock Roads

My bike followed the oil-and-rock roads all over town,
smelly and sticky from the new coating,
leaving black spots on the frame,
and on my white socks.

My feet walked black-top main roads,
baked hot and soft in the humid summer heat.

My mom's car thumped along the concrete
of St. Louis Avenue, cracked and patched
from the never-ending freeze/thaw/bake cycle.

My grandad's hands laid the brick underneath
Gallatin Street, hidden below asphalt, except
for an occasional worn spot where the red
peeked through from the past.

My back turned to all those roads,
I sped east to the land of granite curbstones
where no one had heard of
oil-and-rock roads.

Wanted: Contralto Solos

2009-01-18T18:12:00.002-05:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect has asked us (more than once) to write an ottava rima poem and although I am past the "deadline" for last week's Monday Poetry Stretch, I was thinking about that.

And this month's project at Cafe Writing included a prompt to think about this quote:

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs.
~William Arthur Ward

then write a poem about one of those things. Enjoy!]

Wanted: Contralto Solos

I search, and hunt, and strive to find,
achieving only grievous hitches,
the alto solos which I've pined
for – gorgeous pieces – honest riches,
yet nothing shines, I'm like as blind
and suff'ring from a jokester's switches.
I dimly peer into the murk
and seek again contralto work.

The opera brings three kinds of roles:
the first are hags that seek to irk;
and next are evil women – trolls
who seek a sheath for poisoned dirk;
and finally lads off tending foals
or scheming how their jobs to shirk.
They feature itches, molls, or ditches,
playing witches, bitches, or britches.

Perhaps I should give up this grind,
and all the heartache that it brings.
Yet on the shelf must be the kind
of piece that I so want to sing,
that binds a heart and intertwines
all noble and uplifting things.
The poignant search continues long
for blissful, joyous alto songs.

The Return

2009-01-18T11:10:00.002-05:00

[Sunday Scribblings prompts us this week with "pilgrimage." My dictionary defines the word as "a pilgrimage is a journey to a place that has religious or emotional significance."]

The Return

She hates going back there,
to the place of her birth,
but she can't help returning,
like the tongue to a sore tooth.

She packs her dwindling collection
of bright memories, then sees
them dim and tarnish with news
of each dead friend and closed store.

At the lunch with friends, hoping
to share news of children and
grandchildren and vacations,
she endures a recitation of obituaries.

She can't wait to drive away again,
vowing not to return
to the place filling up
with tombstones of her past.

The New Kitchen

2009-01-08T23:34:00.007-05:00

[For the first Monday Poetry Stretch this year, Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect set us to write about our mother's kitchen. She'll round up everyone's (check them out) but here is mine. There were some details to the challenge and the hardest was to leave myself out of the poem!]

The New Kitchen

Was it just ten years ago
that the kitchen was new?
A new marriage, new house,
and the first dinner party
when she pulled the roast from one
of the pair of new turquoise wall-ovens.

She couldn't have imagined then
that she'd want more space and
a modern harvest-gold stove instead.
The demolition starts next week
but it seems like only yesterday...

The new dining table was set
at the end of the new living room.
Betty and Jake were already
having a drink with her new husband.
The new doorbell rang and while
Charlie joined the party at the bar,
Mary Lou brought her green bean salad
into the kitchen where the new countertops
sparkled with built-in glitter.

Word Painting for Read Write Poem

2009-01-04T23:20:00.000-05:00

[This summer I had a conversation with someone about the definition of poetry. After thinking about it overnight I decided I liked the description "painting with words."

With that in mind, what follows is a word painting using the poem titles left for us in the collaborative prompt at Read Write Poem. Don't forget to see what others came up with here.

To make this, I took all the donated poetry titles, removed punctuation and fed them into a wordle. I then used the words in the wordle to inspire this word painting.]

Say This Isn't

Say this isn't this what America is:
the next sterling silver skyline,
warm splash of colours softly made;
Dorothy loving Sylvia in a poem,
and a dinosaur musical made of paper money.

Miss Ted moves against a blueberry door.
Next to the bones of a haggard afternoon,
hot and dirty in degrees at last,
she breaks the double-bass flute.

Gone are scraps meant for you in
an insoluble separation
of that marriage made of essential letters

A clay castle isn't rare.
The map meant somewhere else.
Haggard Minneapolis crows are gentle –
my biscuit minerals remain.

Shoeshine Assumptions

2009-01-04T16:14:00.005-05:00

[Read Write Poem recently had the following photo up for inspiration.]

Photo: Routine by Tres (displayed according to Creative Commons license)

Shoeshine Assumptions

I bet he's fast.
Why?
Because no one
would stay put on that bench for long.

The Sound of Sisterhood

2008-12-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

[I didn't make time to write this week, but I did pull out a piece I haven't had on the blog before. Check out what other folks contributed to this week's Monday Poetry Train Revisited.]

The Sound of Sisterhood

I didn't know what I was hearing,
at the time.

My Girl Scout leaders were
confident women teaching us to be
confident girls who would grow into
confident women ourselves.

Another confident woman interviewed me,
a conversation we both enjoyed,
then a female student led the tour
of college buildings named after women.

I arrived on campus, one of 500 women
in all shapes and sizes and colors, and my ears filled with
the alto-soprano sounds of voices in conversation.

We talked. We agreed. We argued.
We listened. We learned.
Women led. Women planned. Women failed.
Women played. Women worked.
Women wrote
and their names were everywhere.

The voices took root in me:
comforting, challenging, compelling.

I didn't know it was the sound of sisterhood until later.

Abarbanel

2008-12-24T08:30:00.004-05:00

[Read Write Poem prompted us this week to "go ancestral." Check out what fell out of people's family trees. The image of Isaac Abrabanel is in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons .]

Abarbanel

My father's father came to America as a boy,
his family fleeing pogroms in the Ukraine, sailing
west to Ellis Island where they changed his name.
We weren't Mayflower people – no D.A.R. for us.

Abarbanel

My dad said we were related to Abarbanel,
famous pawn-broker to Queen Isabella, whose jewelry
became cash to buy three ships for Columbus,
sending him sailing west across the ocean.

Today I read that Isabella didn't hock her jewels.
She filled an empty bank with the wealth of Jews expelled
by the 1492 Edict she and Ferdinand signed.
Yet Abarbanel did back Columbus and, with other
Jewish bankers, launched him west toward America
from harbors crammed with Jews fleeing for their lives.

Abarbanels and Abravanels and Barbanels
from around the world gathered in 1992,
a family reunion in Queens to honor
Don Isaac Abarbanel. One man's father was from
the Ukraine, so maybe I am related after all
to Abarbanel.

[One note - my grandfather's original last name was not Abarbanel.]

Seven Magical Things

2008-12-23T07:27:00.006-05:00

Cafe Writing's 2008 Holiday Project asked us to list seven magical things in our world. This is a list of seven from my world.

1. My music folder is open in front of me, as with each of the other singers, all eyes on the director. When her arms move, we sing with one voice, one intent. We trusted each other to start at the same time, stop at the same time, use the same words. That is magic.

2. Once upon a time my mom dressed me to go out in the snow to ski. Over underwear went thin cotton socks and cotton long-johns (tops and bottoms). On top of that went wool socks, then a cotton turtleneck. Next a wool sweater and stretch pants with stirrups under my foot and suspenders over my shoulders fought a vertical tug-of-war to keep the entire length of my legs covered. After that I was finally ready for a coat and hat, plus glove liners topped with down mittens. At the end of the day I'd be wet from the outside in and from the inside out.

Today I think the thin polypropylene and other "technical materials" that wick moisture and keep me warm are magic.

3. I watch her spoon the dry powder to into the warm water with a little honey in it and soon there are bubbles and a distinctive smell. Later she mixes in some other ingredients to form a batter that grows. Eventually a home-baked loaf of bread comes out of our oven. That is magic.

4. People from around the world have seen my stories and my poems and I have seen theirs. From shared prompts or from a serendipitous stumble along a chain of links I have connections to these people. The Internet and blogging is magic.

5. It is not just a smile. It starts with a smile, the corners of the mouth raised, but it keeps going, with dimples starting and the corners of her eyes starting to crinkle. It is tender and sweet and wicked and it feeds my heart. That is magic.

6. This weekend I helped my elderly across-the-street neighbor, and his equally elderly brother-in-law shovel the heavy snow that the plows had piled at the end of his driveway. The rest of snow was light, but the plow-built embankment was very heavy. As we worked my neighbor told me that his car had become stuck the day before, when the snow was falling quite heavily. He said a quick prayer to Saint Christopher and seemingly out of nowhere a man appeared with a shovel to help get the car moving again. I would like to think that is magic.

7.
A sight sparks a memory.
The memory carries emotion.
The emotion begets words,
words to paint with.
The words carry the picture,
the emotion, the memory.
That another sees what I do,
that is poetry,
that is magic.

Not that Cold

2008-12-22T07:45:00.004-05:00

Last week I heard about the Monday Poetry Train Revisited and since then I have been trying to think of what I wanted to post today. I finally decided that I'd share an old poem that I hope everyone has read. And if you haven't read it, I hope you will.

When I was eleven I think I had some poetry assignments in school. After that, my dad (a true Renaissance man) tried to keep me interested in poetry and made sure there were books available to me. By the time I was in high school he was sharing some of his old books: one was a worn and already-starting-to-crumble paperback called American Ballads: Naughty Ribald and Classic. In it I found a couple poems of interest including one that told a fine story.

And so I was introduced to Robert W. Service. The poem was "The Cremation of Sam McGee," originally published in 1907. It begins:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

You can find the full text here and here. And for those with access to NPR (National Public Radio) you may be able click the link near the top of this page to hear the poem read aloud.

I like the tight internal rhymes and the way they make the story pull forward. And I happen to like snow, and most times I don't mind the cold (being someone who can appreciate the cycle of seasons). But I know I've never been as cold as Sam McGee. I hope you enjoy it too.

Firsts for Totally Optionally Prompts

2008-12-19T18:24:00.004-05:00

[Totally Optional Prompts encouraged us to write about "Firsts." First anything, actually. I'm late writing one this week, but decided to do it anyway.]

The Pallbearer

I missed my grandmother's funeral when I was off at school.
I spent the day after she died with my cousin,
learning about claddagh rings and candlepin bowling in Southie.

I was a summer trip chaperone when my granddad died.
They didn't tell me until I got home from constantly watching
5 stragglers in identical blue shirts to make sure they
stayed with the group when we crossed 5th Avenue or
entered the restaurant or left the museum.

But I came home for my great aunt's funeral,
even though it was one of the coldest Januarys on record.
I had never been a pallbearer before but the
funeral director was kind and clear.

There had been more people at the visitation
during the ice storm the night before.
In the morning everything sparkled
except us, bundled in the darkest,
warmest clothes we could find.

After the second time through
"The Old Rugged Cross on the Hill"
Mom said a few words.
She was now the matriarch.

We were all big, strong people:
my sister, niece, mom, one brother and an uncle.
But lifting the coffin by my hand-hold
I was surprised at how little it weighed.
Shouldn't 90 years of life feel heavier?

They reminded us to walk slowly,
even though the trip to the hearse was a short one
and under cover so there was no ice to slip on.

I later wondered how often there were more
women than men as pallbearers.
And I wondered if it would feel less awkward
the next time I was tapped for the job.

Hunting Season

2008-12-17T07:00:00.002-05:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect set us to write a Terza Rima for this week's Monday Poetry Stretch. Check out her site at the end of the week to see what others came up with. As for me, I have never seen the following, but my Mom tells me that an Arkansas native told her about this.]

Hunting Season

The guns are all clean and alarm clocks are on,
to wake up too early and head right on out.
The long day will feel like a whole marathon.
Youngsters rise with a grumble and pout,
(the weatherman promised the day would be clear)
a quick bite and coffee and then they are out
and into the woods to go hunting for deer.
A few counties over it's turkeys they'll seek,
and many will hope that they forego the beer
as they take enough food to stay out for a week
to fend of the yawns and to keep them awake,
but contrarily too much will put them to sleep!
A few groups that gather to go out and make
a hunting trip into the woods for the day
are seeking for something else out by the lake.
They're looking for parasites locked on their prey.
Their shotguns are loaded and ready to go
after bunches of green amidst branches so gray.
They will aim at the branches and fire just so,
the dead branch will tumble and fall at their feet
so that then they can harvest the green mistletoe
and they'll package it up for a profit quite sweet.

Drenched

2008-12-16T21:44:00.004-05:00

[Read Write Poem provided Read Write Image promt #5. The image brought out this poem.]

Drenched

I pout at the gray winter rain, at the drip,
drip, drip in the living room, at the cold
wind-whipped drops flung against my west
window. I pout at the yard getting soggier
and boggier and I feel the mold
growing on my winter soul.

I demand water on my own terms! Give me
mist from a breathtaking waterfall to refresh me on a fierce
summer day. I insist on a steamy hot bath with a closed
door and a good book. I need to coast north in the warm
Gulf Stream with Caribbean fishes at my side.

Fall Books 2008

2008-12-14T18:39:00.001-05:00

Here are the books I've read this fall.

Rebel Fay by Barb & J.C. Hendee
fantasy, fifth in the Nobel Dead series
This entry continues following Leesil's history and the search for his mother. We also delve deeper into Chap and his situation. And we are kept updated on the efforts of Westiel and Chane, even though they can't enter the land where Leesil, Magiere and company are adventuring. Needless to say, this is not the place to start with this series, but I think it does well by the characters, playing true to their natures and filling in blanks in the history that we'll need later.

Thin Air by Rachel Caine
fantasy, book six in the Weather Warden series
I found this book a challenge. I was extremely irratated at the beginning because it opened with Joanne having lost her memories. She couldn't tell who meant her well and who meant her ill and even some of the former "good guys" weren't sure she was who she used to be. If that sounds confusing, I agree completely. I will say that the mysteries started to clear up and there will be more chapters in this story to come. Once again, don't start with this book in the series. Back up at least a few books before tackling this one.

The Children of the Company by Kage Baker
fantasy, 6th book (give or take) of the novels of The Company
I looked through my previous posts and can't believe I haven't written about any books by Kage Baker. I have been following Company novels for many years now, starting with The Garden of Iden. There have been many lulls, some due to when the new books were published, and some due to the fact that I preferred to wait until the paperbacks were out. The whole basis of these books is that someone figured out how to go back in time and change people into cyborgs. Not just any people - the right people had to be children with certain physical characteristics and they had to be children that would have died without the company rescuing them. That allowed them to disappear and become agents for The Company. They were sent to rescue artwork and about-to-be-extinct plants and animals and hide them away to be "miraculously" discovered generations later. These agents live forward through the ages, working for their unknown future bosses.

In The Children of the Company, Baker shows us that even amongst immortal cyborgs power can corrupt and Labienus is prime exampt of corruption. He schemes and plots and holds enough power to see those plots carried out. Much of this book is a series of stories told as a trip through his memories. Some stories were ones I had seen another side of in previous collections of short stories, but there were some additional twists exposed here. Even so, this book was a frustration in that the main thread of the whole series (the mystery of what happens in the year 2355) is not advanced. If you can't find the older books, then this might catch you up a bit, thought you night not care as much about some of the protagonists as if you started at the beginning.

The Machine's Child by Kage Baker
fantasy, continuing series of novels about The Company
In this installment, we find Mendoza reunited with Nicholas Harpole & Edward Bell-Fairfax & Alec Checkerfield, the men she fell in love with (each in turn). And they are all together in a story that requires a leap of faith to just "believe" and let the story move on. Joseph sees Checkerfield and company as enemies meaning harm to Mendoza and attempts a rescue, even as he uncovers old Budu. The thing they all have in common is the sure knowledge that the Company must be stopped, even if they have to wait until 2355 to see that it happens.

Gods and Pawns by Kage Baker
fantasy, short stories of The Company
Yes, I went on a Kage Baker spree. Unlike some of the previous short story collections of The Company, I felt these were really important. Some illuminated relationships between the cyborgs; another introduced Mr. Hearst - something that would be important later on. And they all seemed to expose more about the nature of The Company and its scheming.

The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker
fantasy, what appears to be the final Company novel
This finally wrapped things up! With jaunts back and forth across the planet and across time, we see all the players taking sides, making unexpected allies and enemies. The plots are thick and devious and as 2355 approaches, it is not a sure thing that anyone will live to tell about it! You cannot start with this novel - seriously. But if you have been following the series you will need to read it. I was not entirely pleased with how the tangle of Mendoza and her three loves works out, but then they aren't my characters, are they? I did, however, find the conclusion to the whole saga satisfactory.

Music to my Sorrow by Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill
fantasy, in the Bedlam's Bard series
Eric Banyon continues his struggle to rescue his brother Magnus. And he again finds himself pitted against plots by evil Unseleighe elves. Fortunately he has a lot of friends to help him out, even when he is too stupid to avoid the obvious. Underneath the story here is a tale of children used or abused for their talents, as well as the tale of parents who can't handle high-spirited kids. There is no solution offered for those under-tales, except maybe the caution that the "easy way out" may have unforeseen consequences.

Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews
fantasy, book 2 about Kate Daniels
Like Magic Bites this story is set in and around an alternate Atlanta where waves of magic cause technology to fail, only to be offset by waves of technology that cause magic to fail. This time we find Kate in a "flare" when magic runs rampant with little technology reprieve. Even worse, someone may be trying to waken a diety or two. And if two dieties start battling for power then Atlanta and the humans living there may pay the price. These books are good, quick reads.

Endgame
by Kristine Smith
fantasy, book 5 in the series about Captain Jani Kilian
I guess I have been deep in the series books all fall! This one is not a good place to start - too much to tell, too much to catch up with, too many politics to describe. But this is a good story. All the players are there, and the politics have caught up with every one of them. We start out in Thalassa, the community of human-idomeni hybrids, and as always, Jani keeps everyone guessing what she will do, to the frustration of those who care for her. Events cause her to return to the home of the idomeni, the place that still causes her nightmares.

His Dark Materials series:
The Golden Compass
The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass
by Philip Pullman
I admit it. I first heard about The Golden Compass when it was about to be released as a movie. And I read a little about some controversy about it - that it was anti-church. So I went to see the movie when it was released and found it enjoyable and not too objectionable. Seemed to me that the fuss was overrated. So I read the books, all three in the series.

In The Golden Compass, the book, the church is definitely more evil than in the movie. Yet the world in which this is set is not our world and therefore the church of the book is not any real church in our world. In the book Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel seem to be out for themselves, not the sympathic characters that they might have seemed at the end of the movie. The end of the first book is heartwrenching and leaves us watching Lyra walk off into another world where it touchs her own. She decides to discover the mystery of Dust for herself.

The Subtle Knife opens in our own world with young Will caring for his confused mother and fleeing men who seem to be targeting him or his long-lost father's notes. He finds a hole into another world and meets Lyra. Will becomes the bearer of the Subtle Knife that allows them to move from one world to another as she searches for Dust and he searches for his father. There are forces out to find Lyra, some to help her, some who want to use her and her talent with the Golden Compass. And on one visit to this world they stumble across Dr. Mary Malone and set her on a quest that will ultimately intersect theirs again, though the foreshadowing leaves us doubting that it will be a good thing. This book is darker than the first, but still compelling.

The Amber Spyglass continues the dark tone. There are angels (some fighting for good, some for evil). Both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are here, each scheming for their own purposes. Will searches for the kidnapped Lyra. Mary finds a world of giant trees and creatures made to live in harmony with them. The bear king Iorek Byrnison is on the move, as are the witches. The churchmen in this story are bent on a path to separate people from nature on a most elemental level. THIS book, I believe, is the reason for the protests of the movie. It is not that it is a bad book or a bad story, but it does use caricatures to shock us into thinking along new paths. I'm glad I read the series, though I think that I would not necessarily recommend it for young readers, or at least not without wanting to discuss the concepts raised.

Hope you enjoyed my list, though it looks like I need to read something besides fantasy for a while!

Miracles for Read Write Poem

2008-12-13T10:50:00.000-05:00

[Read Write Poem provided a Wordle as a prompt - a cloud of words to choose from. The words in that image sparked this poem.]

Miracles

Shadows gather then race westward,
wrapping night across the continent.
The murmur of the frozen north
is punctuated by dandelion-bright candles.
At Chanukah carnivals
Jews gather in congregations,
a religious archipelago in an ocean of gentiles.
Grandfathers wearing tallisim with an indigo thread in each corner
strain the last of the meniscus in their rusty old knees
to teach the little ones to play dreidel.
The smell of frying fills the buildings
promising sufganiyot drizzled with honey
and humble potatoes suddenly made numinous
by their bath in hot oil.

-------

for those who have other traditions, here is a small glossary:

Chanukah is also called the festival of lights, and you'll find a menorah (a 9-branched candle-holder in the window of many Jewish houses). The holiday usually falls some time in December.

tallisim is the plural of tallis, which is a kind of scarf with religious meaning, warn by more observant Jews. Each tallis has a thin white tassle at each corner. Many tallisim have one blue thread in each tassle.

meniscus is cartilage in joints like the knee.

dreidel is a 4-sided top, used in a game of chance at Chanukah, often played for pennies, nuts, or chocolates.

sufganiyot are deep-fried donuts, often filled with jelly.

oil is the basis of the Chanukah holiday because of a miracle when oil that should have lasted one night instead lasted for eight nights. Foods fried in oil are a Chanukah tradition, hence potato pancakes (latkes).

The Semi-Formal

2008-11-30T17:39:00.002-05:00

[This is more-or-less the way I remember this Winter's Tale. See others at Sunday Scribblings.]

I did not attend a lot of dances when I was a teenager. I think there was one or two a year in junior high school, one formal and usually another was a "sock-hop." In high school there were no more than two each year: homecoming in the fall for all classes and the junior-senior prom in the spring.

So I didn't have a lot of experience with dances when I got to college in New England. I went to a few parties in the fall, one on campus to celebrate the new college president, the rest were at frats in town. My dorm planned a semi-formal dance for February. While I was home for winter break, I made sure to pack a fancy dress to take back with me.

We planned food for the party, and had someone coming from Boston or Cambridge to be DJ. We had people signed up to arrange the furniture in the living room so there would be plenty of dance space. And there were dates coming (mostly from Boston and Cambridge). Not all of us had dates, but practically everyone in the dorm was going to attend anyway.

So, early in the day of the dance it started snowing – hard. In fact, it snowed so hard that we soon got a call from the D.J. telling us there was no way he could make it. But we rolled with the punches: a search of the dorm turned up some pretty decent stereo equipment and everyone chipped in records and tapes.

The food was already in the building (nothing for that was last-minute) but the roads were terrible. Soon we heard that no one was going to make it out to the suburbs that night. We were on our own.

I don't think it crossed our minds to cancel or postpone the party – there was too much going on at school to move it. So we threw a party for ourselves. We got dressed up and danced by ourselves in the living room. We had the curtains open so we could watch it continue to snow through the wall-sized windows.

A bunch of us finally couldn't stand it anymore. We went back to our rooms and traded semi-formal dresses for snow clothes. We slid down the snow from the dorm slightly uphill from ours toward the living room. We threw snowballs and chased each other and totally wore ourselves out.

When our fingers started to get numb, we went back inside and bundled into snuggly nightclothes. We took handfuls of party food up to our common room and settled in to play cards. One person taught most of the rest of us how to play Hearts. She whupped us completely, but we had a blast. We adopted the game completely and continued to play frequently all the way through college.

There were other semi-formals, at our dorm and at others. But that first was one of a kind.

Second Hand

2008-11-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

[This was written in response to a prompt on Cafe Writing's Jewels Project.]

Second Hand

She had what she needed,

a paid-for house,
a new car and a golf cart,
and enough money to last
her whole retirement.

a roof over her head,
a pickup truck in good shape,
and enough extra for
a vacation once a year.

Every week

she tried to stay
out of the way knowing
she would do it differently
if she cleaned it herself.

she pulled up in the truck
to dust and sweep
and mop and wipe as if
it were her own place.

And then

she heard her cleaning woman
had multiple sclerosis
and would have

her doctor told her
she had M.S.
and was advised

to stop working.

She gave away the
fur coat she had not worn
for years.

She tearfully said
goodbye and accepted
the generous gift.

Dental Limerick

2008-11-29T13:14:00.002-05:00

[For Mad Kane's Humor Blog and the Dental Limerick and Haiku prompt.]

She hated her teeth were not brigher
and so sought out a way to go lighter.
The hygienist did preach,
but the dentist used bleach,
and now no one has teeth that are whiter.

Dancing Through Time

2008-11-29T11:45:00.008-05:00

photo credit: Janet Spering

[This was written in response to a prompt from Cafe Writing's Jewels Project. ]

Dancing Through Time

The three sisters danced in the dappled arbor,
early summer breezes cooling them
as their twirls sent gossamer skirts whirling.
Grace was in every step as they moved
in perfect and intricate counterpoint,
sparking inspiration and joy in everyone who saw them.

They danced in paint on a canvas,
captured mid-spin by the painter
who had herself been captivated by them.

They danced into the mind of the cameo-maker,
who saw the painting and felt the breeze they stirred.
They helped tease rhythm out of stone.

They danced in a brassy ring on a grandmother's coat.

And now they dance on mine.

Pieces of the Landscape of My Youth

2008-11-29T11:38:00.002-05:00

[This was written in response to a prompt from Cafe Writing's Jewels Project. For Option 1 I used the following words: landscape, paper, museum, touch. ]

I was anxious to leave my hometown, something that might have been in my genes.

My great-grandparents left the area, taking their children west to homestead in Oklahoma. That didn't work out for them and so they came back to the area of southern Illinois that eventually gave birth to my mom.

She, in turn, wanted to leave and finally managed o do so, though not until her husband retired.

I left sooner, happy to be from there – it is a great place to be from – and happier to be living elsewhere.

But since I left small pieces of the landscape of my youth have followed me east. Some are quite concrete like my baby blanket or the folder of stories and artwork I created on lined paper in the first grade, and some other tidbits of my own creation – old in my life but new in the timeline of my family's history.

I have my mother's high school ring. She gave it to me years ago. Although I finished high school and college I never had a class ring of my own. Hers has three colors of gold and an element of age about it – it doesn't look like the most modern school rings. I wear it on my pinkie from time to time.

But the pieces that drag people and places out of the past belonged to my grandma and great-aunt. They are mostly kitchen things – hardly museum pieces.

There are some old brown crockery bowls – nothing special. I don't use them much, but I love seeing them every time I open the cabinet my measuring spoons are in.

The old, once-white, oval plates, one small and one medium, send me down memory lane when I use them. The small one is perfect as a spoon rest, though I don't remember what it was used it for before. But I can't touch the medium one without seeing it piled with chicken-fried steak, sitting on Grandma's dining room table.

Things I've Done

2008-11-28T22:13:00.005-05:00

Last seen at The Miss Rumphius Effect. She says she got it from Libby. You are welcome to play and pass it on if you like. The things I have done are in bold [with some comments.]

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower [I've only seen one shooting star!]
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain [I didn't make it all the way to the top, though]
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea [but I've had an ocean-side view of a hurricane]
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch [glass-etching]
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty [been in it, but not up it - renovations were going on when I was there]
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train [I was on an overnight boat ferry]
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort [I always got too tired before getting very far!]
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon [I ran a 1-mile fun-run when I was a teenager]
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run [a double is the best I can really hope for]
32. Been on a cruise [thanks to my parents for taking me when I was young]
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors [depends on how far back we're talking. One great-grandmother was born in a country house just a few miles south of where I grew up. But I'e never been to the "home country" of any of relatives not born in the US.]
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo's David
41. Sung karaoke [but only with the on-demand feature of my TV while folding laundry]
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight [and tripped over a baby coconut tree!]
46. Been transported in an ambulance [I guess that's how I got to the hospital when I got hurt the 1st weekend in college, but maybe it was a station wagon - hmmm.]
47. Had your portrait painted [not painted, but drawn by my sister at least twice that I know of]
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris [only part-way up]
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie [guess home-movies don't count...]
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies [more than I care to remember!]
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving [not at all interested!]
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp [I have too vivid an imagination to want to do this]
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy [my dog Waggles is in the basement now]
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar [but I was too young to remember - will have to try again]
72. Pieced a quilt [I keep wanting to do this.]
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job [does being laid-off count - job reductions due to budget cuts]
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London [I've seen the Guards, just not the changing part]
77. Broken a bone [no but a torn ligament takes longer to heal.]
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper [growing up in a small town made this easy]
85. Read the entire Bible [I think I made it all the way through the Old Testament, and I've read at least the first 6 books of the New Testament.]
86. Visited the White House [just from the street]
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating [catching fish is the closest I've come, but I wouldn't even touch them to take them off the hook.]
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life [I was a lifeguard and am thankful that yelling at people was the most I ever had to do. I did once ride in the back of a vehicle with a kid we thought might have a severe back injury - she turned out ok (whew)]
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day [or in one night!]

I think that is 42 out of 100, but I'm too tired to try and count again!

Friday Fill-Ins 99

2008-11-21T20:51:00.003-05:00

1. The last band I saw live was too long ago to remember, but the last performer I paid to hear live was Carrie Newcomer.

2. What I look forward to most on Thanksgiving is stuffing, pie, rolls, and pie.

3. My Christmas/holiday shopping is only a faint un-formed thought at this point (I'm a last-minute kind of shopper).

4. Thoughts of holiday concerts fill my head.

5. I wish I could wear pajamas and slippers to work.

6. Bagpipes are really cool and I wish I had the patience to learn to play them, but my neighbors are probably happy I don't.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to making homemade pasta noodles, tomorrow my plans include playing host to some friends for the afternoon and dinner (when we're going to eat those noodles), and Sunday, I want to relax, but I've been invited to sing at an interfaith worship service in the evening!

You can find more fill-ins here.

Old-School Activism

2008-10-31T01:22:00.000-04:00

[This week's prompt at Sunday Scribblings is "scandalous." This family story is what immediatly came to mind.]

Old-School Activism

My mom grew up in the Depression, though she reminds us that as kids they didn't know that they were poor because nearly everybody in town was in the same way. So partly because of the era and partly because there was no money, it was up to the kids to make their own fun. My mom was sandwiched between two brothers and it sounds like the kind of fun she enjoyed a lot of the time was physical. She loved to run.

I guess it was natural, given the kind of play she liked, that she took to wearing her older brother's denim jeans. He was just two years older and he didn't like it, but it didn't stop her, even though she had to roll up the bottoms and belt them really tight. At school, though, she had to wear dresses or skirts. All the girls did – it was a rule.

As I hear it, though, my mom wasn't content to let that rule stand. As I remember hearing it (and I'm sure my family will correct me if I'm wrong) my Mom was just a year or two into high school when she decided to do something about the "no pants for girls" dress code. She counted up the number of girls in her class. She figured if they ALL wore pants on the same day, there was no way for them to punish them all.

So on the appointed day, nearly all the girls showed up in slacks instead of skirts. And as Mom had figured, there were too many for them to send home to change (the usual approach). And the rule came tumbling down. I'm sure some thought that was scandalous.

Judgment of the Moon

2008-10-30T12:00:00.002-04:00

[Cafe Writing prompted me to write some fiction about a night when the moon is howling... ]

Judgment of the Moon

I was cold. Not shivery-fun cold, like when the snow crunches under your feet and you know cocoa is waiting at home. This cold was damp and ran right through me as I stood in the woods and listened.

Or tried to listen. It was hard to listen to nothing. No breeze moved one branch against another. Not a single mouse scurried. The dead, wet leaves had compressed into a spongy mat that swallowed the sound of my boots. This was a night when even the trees held their breath in fearful expectation and only the clear, empty sky rang aloud with the howl of the moon.

The giant, yellow eye unblinkingly spied me cringing in the shadows. Passion-full it searched my soul and judged me wanting. I held my breath in dread at the sentence, unable to image the payment it would demand.

Then the wind sighed and the moon shed a tear, and the howl was in my own throat and I was sentenced to live.

One Knife

2008-10-30T00:07:00.003-04:00

[It looks like 3 Word Wednesday is on a Halloween bent this week with the words corpse, damage, and knife. I couldn't resist.]

One Knife

Who knew that one knife
could do so much damage?
The crystal block of ice was now
a perfectly-rendered corpse.

Bats

2008-10-29T23:37:00.003-04:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect set a Monday Poetry Stretch to write batty poetry. As in real bats. Here's mine. Check her site at the end of the week to see what others might have come up with.]

Bats

In the darker, shallow end of the pool we
lounged in summer-heated liquid and watched
insects swarm around the lights at the deep end.

Bats darted and wheeled, flying bug zappers,
sometimes dipping low enough to sip
a chlorinated nightcap to chase their midnight snacks.

Not Jackie or Marilyn

2008-10-12T22:30:00.001-04:00

I love quizzes. Those short little things in magazines or on-line. I find them quite irresistible, although I don't pay much attention to the results. I just like taking the quiz. Maybe I just like being asked my opinion.

Today I saw that Janet at Fond of Snape took a quiz "Are you a Jackie or a Marilyn? or someone else?" She pointed me at the site and I took the test.

As it turns out, according to the quiz, I am not a Jackie or a Marilyn (which doesn't surprise me). Instead, it says I am a Grace. I would not have compared myself to Grace Kelly but there you go. Here's what they say - for what it's worth.

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz...

You Are a Grace!

You are a Grace -- "I need to understand the world.

Graces have a need for knowledge and are introverted, curious, analytical, and insightful.

How to Get Along with Me
* Be independent, not clingy
* Speak in a straightforward and brief manner
* I need time alone to process my feelings and thoughts
* Remember that If I seem aloof, distant, or arrogant, it may be that I am feeling uncomfortable
* Make me feel welcome, but not too intensely, or I might doubt your sincerity
* If I become irritated when I have to repeat things, it may be because it was such an effort to get my thoughts out in the first place
* don't come on like a bulldozer
* Help me to avoid my pet peeves: big parties, other people's loud music, overdone emotions, and intrusions on my privacy

What I Like About Being a Grace
* standing back and viewing life objectively
* coming to a thorough understanding; perceiving causes and effects
* my sense of integrity: doing what I think is right and not being influenced by social pressure
* not being caught up in material possessions and status
* being calm in a crisis

What's Hard About Being a Grace
* being slow to put my knowledge and insights out in the world
* feeling bad when I act defensive or like a know-it-all
* being pressured to be with people when I don't want to be
* watching others with better social skills, but less intelligence or technical skill, do better professionally

Graces as Children Often
* spend a lot of time alone reading, making collections, and so on
* have a few special friends rather than many
* are very bright and curious and do well in school
* have independent minds and often question their parents and teachers
* watch events from a detached point of view, gathering information
* assume a poker face in order not to look afraid
* are sensitive; avoid interpersonal conflict
* feel intruded upon and controlled and/or ignored and neglected

Graces as Parents
* are often kind, perceptive, and devoted
* are sometimes authoritarian and demanding
* may expect more intellectual achievement than is developmentally appropriate
* may be intolerant of their children expressing strong emotions

Treasure

2008-10-09T16:40:00.005-04:00

[I don't know if this is prose poetry or maybe something else, but it started out with a prompt from the Monday Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect (to use cup, gate, and sea) but it also seemed to satisfy the Totally Optionally Prompt to write about "discoveries." ]

Treasure

She found the once-white cup, chipped and dirty, dull red rust peaking through where the enamel gave way long ago. Full of dirt and dead leaves and sticks, and probably a bug or two, but its handle was still solid and it wanted to be found. From the hole at the base of the tree, she took it to the creek and washed away years of abandonment and promptly filled it with big, fat acorns that littered the path.

Her steps carried her away from the trees at a stately, measured pace. With her eyes closed she saw the aisle of the church, decorated with flowers to match those her sister had pinned in her hair. She replayed her movements, slow and careful, following the instructions to drop just one petal at a time from her basket. One by one the acorns fell, bouncing on the pavement, rolling to one side or the other, and one wobbled its way into a pothole in the street.

When her fingers brushed the bottom of the cup, she pulled out the last two acorns and rolled them around in her hand, like the silver Chinese balls that her grandmother kept in a red silk box on the shelf by her bed. They were awkward to hold and so big that she nearly dropped them.

The old wooden bridge, just wide enough for one car to cross at a time, had gaps where you could look through into the water below. She dropped one of the acorns through one of the holes and watched for the splash, but she couldn't see if it sank to the bottom or bobbled its way toward the sea.

Cup in one hand and the last acorn in the other, she skipped toward the big houses. The grand Victorians seemed palatial, but maybe not as nice as they might once have been. Like the cup, they were neglected, with weeds and bushes taking over, with paint peeling from the siding (where there was any left at all), and lopsided shutters hanging on out of habit. The wrought iron fencing was rusty and showed only a passing acquaintance with paint. The clanking rattle was tremendously satisfying as she raked the cup across the iron rails until she got to the empty space where the gate yawned permanently open, sagging deep into the soil of the yard.

She tucked the remaining acorn in her pocket and raced herself down the sidewalk to the beach where autumn's chill had finally chased away the summerfolk. The cup was perfect for digging in the dunes, and for carrying water to newly-minted moats, and moving a pile of mussel shells to the back of the castle.

Eventually she headed back home, to the secret place in her yard where she kept her treasures safe from the growups who would call them junk. She tucked the cup and acorn in next to the pieces of beach-glass and the yellow feather, beside the coin with a hole in the center and the green plastic turtle, inside the blue pottery saucer that was only chipped in one place.

Camp Iroquois

2008-10-03T01:11:00.002-04:00

[Totally Options Prompts challenged us to revisit a place, person, or idea that was once familiar and that you haven't seen in a long time. This is what came to my mind.]

Camp Iroquois

He saw it clear and sunny,
fresh as honeysuckle vines.
The fresh air of New Hampshire
lighter than a Brooklyn summer,
even with trips to Coney Island.
Color wars and war canoes,
camp crafts and camp fires,
swimming in the lake and
hiking the nearby mountains.
And, oh! those wild strawberries
and low-bush blueberries!

The summer we looked
at colleges for me we plotted
our trip to take us nearby,
thinking we'd stop by and see
the camp, ask politely at the office
to look around, for old time's sake.
We knew we were close and finally
we stopped to buy maple syrup
and ask if they knew
where Camp Iroquois was.

It was closed, they said, but
directed us there anyway, where
we parked and wandered
into the wilderness, grown up
around crumbling foundations.
I think our hearts broke
when we found the skeletons
of the mighty war canoes,
spread wide and bleached in the sun.

Crisp

2008-09-30T22:35:00.003-04:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect posed a Monday Poetry Stretch to write an acrostic poem about fall. I love the crisp air this time of year, even if I hate the falling leaves, pretty though they are.]

Chilly mornings make me
Roll over and hug the covers tight.
Icy toes hit the floor on the way to the
Shower to warm up. Nevertheless, I
Prefer this to turning on the furnace.

Wall Street Woes Limerick

2008-09-26T00:24:00.002-04:00

[Mad Kane prompts us to write a limerick and/or haiku on Wall Street Woes. I liked that turn of phrase so much, I used it.]

We put money in and it grows.
Or so we do hope and suppose.
But the mortgage disaster
makes prices fall faster
and now we all sing Wall Street woes.

Cafe Writing Seven Things

2008-09-25T23:55:00.001-04:00

[Cafe Writing is back with more prompts and one of them is to describe seven tastes or scents that define autumn to me. I warn you not to read it if you are hungry!]

1. homemade donuts
I haven't yet put the story in my blog, but when I was a kid I used to get a hankerin' for homemade donuts around about August. It was always too hot to put a pot of hot oil on the stove to deep-fry them, so Grandma and my great-aunt always made us wait until it cooled off. The first cool weekend, when we went over on a Saturday or Sunday, there would be homemade donuts rising underneath tea towels on the counter. We'd fry them up and glaze them and eat way too many. They were worth the wait.

2. a crisp apple eaten right in the orchard
I love "sweater weather." And a day when I can put on one thin extra layer, and go out into an orchard under a clear blue sky with a bag lunch and an empty container to fill with apples - (sigh) is a delight. We'd usually get one or two pecks (four pecks make a bushel) of several kinds. The orchard where we go uses no pesticides and they have several varieties with overlapping seasons. One of the first things is to pick a perfect one on the small side - maybe a Macoun, or a McIntosh, or a Cortland. Then it gets polished on my sleeve or shirt-tail. And I crunch into it and try not to be a total slob about the juice. Mmm.

3. honey
For Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, it is tradition to start with something sweet. One tradition is to dip apple slices into honey. Another is to eat honey cake. I have a ton of recipes for honey cake, and there are many different styles. And they all taste like fall to me.

4. apple cider
I have nothing against apple juice at other times of the year. But the only kind of fresh (not fermented) apple cider I can get in the grocery store these days is pasturized. I love it when I can find an orchard to sell me unpasturized apple cider. It tastes fresher. And if you leave it just a little too long, it starts fermenting, with tiny little bubbles that make it "spritzig."

5. blueberry pie
I know that blueberries are a summer fruit, not normally associated with autumn. But my dad loved blueberries. He preferred blueberry pie or cobbler to a birthday cake and his birthday was in early October. I taste his fall birthday when I have blueberry pie. Especially when it has vanilla ice cream on top.

6. candy corn
I don't love candy corn, but it is ok. I almost never buy it in the store for myself. And most times of the year, I can pass it up. But something about October makes me dip into the candy dish of artificially colored, artificial-tasting wedges of tooth-rotting sweetness. I remember eating it at my grandma's house, nibbling off the tiny white tip first, then biting off the orange middle part, leaving the stubby yellow base for last. The ones you can find now with a chocolate layer are just wrong. And I seem to remember my college roommate taking me to the candy store in her hometown, just to get fresh candy corn. I must say that the nuances were wasted on me. But then, I didn't turn it down either.

7. pumpkin pie
Just as my dad preferred pie to birthday cake, my mom's favorite birthday treat is pumpkin pie. She, too, has a fall birthday (albeit much later in the season). I like pumpkin pie enough I sometimes have a slice for breakfast. Usually eaten out of hand - no need to dirty up a fork and plate.

The only problem with this list is now I'm hungry!

9th Grade Track

2008-09-20T17:40:00.003-04:00

[I'm finally catching up with some of my favorite blogs and discovered a prompt at Mad Kane's Humor Blog to write a Limerick or Haiku on things I wasn't good at. I immediately thought back to running the 800-yard event in 9th grade. It wasn't pretty.]

In running I had but one pace -
that was slow, even when in a race.
But I did win one prize
when I once moved my thighs
to just barely come in at fifth place.

Obbligato

2008-09-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

[This weeks Totally Optional Prompt was to write a poem in blank verse, that is a poem with meter with or without rhyme. I toyed around with a the sound of triplets or a waltz. That makes it largely "dactyl" I think, though feel free to correct me. This is less of a work in progress, and more a exercise. Go check out what other folks came up with. Oh, and click here if you want a definition of obbligato.]

Obbligato

cupcakes on weeknights or choc'late chip pancakes
tending to needs of her family and friends
fridge always stocked and the always-clean linens
proof of her love and devotion to home
others came first and she always came after - yet
there she was nearby with smiles and a hug
'til
then she was gone and the melody faltered
weft-less the family fabric was frayed

Elegy

2008-09-17T23:30:00.002-04:00

[Read Write Poem challenged us to write an elegy. I had trouble with the subject until I remembered the jolt I got (many years ago now) when reading a campus newspaper.]

Unexpected Death Notice

She was so young! and I
had not known she was ill.
I cannot believe I won't bump
into her on campus, on my way
to the bank or the post office.
It makes me feel emptier,
and ashamed I didn't know.

She was the boss of my boss,
chic and savvy, with impeccable
taste and a great deal of patience
for my impetuous boss and others.
I thought she was fair, but a bit
gullible. She lost her cool
when she thought we had
pieced together the shredded
files from the bag outside her door.
But her smile was less
than chic, a little rough
around the edges and
it made me like her more.

I saw her name and picture
in the campus newspaper
and I sent a copy to my old
boss, who had moved on
years ago. He was shocked
too and we commiserated.
And days later, I still can't
believe she's dead, while
I'm still here.

Transparent

2008-09-07T23:23:00.000-04:00

[Read Write Poem challenged us to rubberneck and then write about it.]

Transparent

Teenage boys know they can
be seen: posing for the girls,
or mooning them.

But you, and that guy over there,
seem to have forgotten. You don't
remember that I can watch you
run your fingers through your hair.
I see you put on eye makeup at
40 miles an hour. I stare as you
run an electric razor over your chin.

I see you pick your nose and lean
over to pick up the CD you dropped.
I see your left hand gesturing and your
right hand holding the phone to
your head and I hope you are at least
steering with your knees.

Did you know I watched you turn
to talk to the small people strapped
into your back seat so that you missed
the light turning green?

I check out the newspaper propped
against your steering wheel. I see the
map you are struggling to fold into
a more manageable shape. I wonder
what book holds your attention while
you speed down the turnpike.

Did you know I memorized your
face when you kept straying over
the lines, jerking back into your lane
when the rumble strip jarred you awake?

I saw you changing your shirt after work.
At least you waited for a stop light
to change shoes. Did you know you
are not invisible inside your car?

The Wedding Trip

2008-08-30T19:02:00.010-04:00

[Sunday Scribblings prompts us this week with "Somewhere..." And since my mind has been on stories of my life, I thought of a time my parents took us to Massachusetts.]

Cousin Jonathan Gets Married

My cousin Jonathan was getting married. My dad had only one brother, and my uncle had three sons. The cousins were from New York, from Brooklyn, and they were significantly older than I was, closer to the ages of my older sister and brother. I know they had visited us in the Midwest, but I mostly recalled the trips from pictures, not from my own memories. And I know we had visited them in New York, but all I remember are vague memories of a hotel room and a day-trip to a distant relative's house (also in Brooklyn).

I had been to weddings before, usually pretty close to home. We'd dress up and were reminded to mind our manners. We'd go to a church and most of the time the reception was in the church fellowship hall, decorated for the occasion. Once we left the party, we'd be home in less than 10 minutes.

But I didn't remember ever having traveled to go to a wedding before. Jonathan and Jean were getting married in Massachusetts. We had been to Massachusetts before, driving two days to get to Cape Cod for vacation. But by the time of this wedding, we had stopped going there for vacation. I think I was about 9 years old.

We flew to Boston and rented a car. I remember following along on a road map as we headed west to the center of the state. I thought the arrangement of towns was funny. Northampton was north of Southampton, and Westhampton largely west of Easthampton, but Easthampton was kind of in the middle (north to south) between Northampton and Southampton. I thought if some place were going to be in the middle of all that it should be just plan "Hampton." It made me think the people who named the places weren't very original.

I don't remember which town we stayed in, but I know we spent two or three nights in a motel, along with a lot of other people with our last name. My dad was a doctor and so were several of the other guests. And some fool phoned the motel and asked to speak to Dr. Lastname and didn't even know the first name of his doctor. Since I heard about it they must have called all the rooms to try to track down someone who knew the patient!

My aunt, mother of the groom, was a bit on edge, wanting everything to be perfect and being in control of very little. I had learned a song in Girl Scouts that had words that sounded like a native-American chant, and it had hand movements that went with it. While my younger brother and I were trying to keep ourselves amused (and knowing we'd get in trouble for playing in the parking lot) we started doing this chant and hand-movement thing. When my aunt asked what we were doing, my mom teased her by saying it was a kind of rain dance. My aunt had a fit! We were banned from singing that song until after the wedding.

As for the wedding itself, I remember very little. I had never been to a wedding with that many people at it. We were quite a ways back and I really couldn't see over people's heads. I don't know what my younger brother did to entertain himself – he must have been about 7. He might have been entertained by the yarmulkes that they had given out – he got to wear one just like the grown-up men.

At the reception, I remember my cousin Michael's wife teaching us to do the Bunny Hop. I remember dancing (the box step) with my dad, and probably with some other relatives. And I remember someone asking me how old I was. When I told them 9, they told me I was 9 going on 30. I remember asking my mom what that meant, though I don't remember what she answered.

I don't remember much else about that trip.

As it turned out, that marriage didn't last. And cousin Michael's didn't either. But I still remember how to do the Bunny Hop, in case you need to invite someone to your wedding.

Feeding the Piranhas

2008-08-26T23:52:00.003-04:00

[My sister out-law inspired me to make a list of "My Life In Stories." I have a long list of titles and from time to time I write out one of the stories. This is one of them.]

Feeding the Piranhas

When I was very small, my family drove two days to get to the ocean for summer vacations. We went to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, back in the early post-Camelot days. The area around Hyannis was not yet built up and congested, but it was heading in that direction. The distance and the diminishing payoff for the long drive made my parents think about alternative ways to take vacations.

My parents had owned some property on Lake Sara, just an empty lot. Once in a while we'd drive over there and spend the day fishing and picnicking. We bought a wooden picnic table to keep there. As my parents were trying to decide what our alternative vacations might be, they turned their attention to the possibility of a vacation house.

They looked into the idea of building a house on that empty lot, but building a house was a large project and they weren't sure that was what they wanted to spend their time doing. They ended up buying a house on another part of Lake Sara. The house had been a full-time home for the previous owners, so it was fully winterized. It had yellow aluminum siding and it sat at the back-end of a cove on three lots of land. The house was on the first lot, the second lot was mostly flat and grassy, and the third lot was grass but with a few trees near the road including one large enough to have a tree swing on it.

We started going to the vacation house on lots of weekends, even before school was out for the summer. We'd pack a small bag (we kept toiletries and towels and even some clothes there, so we didn't have to bring much). We'd head east on Interstate 70 as far as Altamont. We'd exit and go north past the Stuckey's and if it was a Friday night, we might even stop there for the buffet dinner, but that was rare. Usually we tried to get an earlier start so we passed on and turned right onto old 40 toward the fairgrounds. We'd usually pass our turnoff toward the lake and drive through Funkhouser all the way into Effingham where we'd buy groceries.

Across from the grocery store was a pet store and sometimes we'd get to loiter and look in the window there. We had a dog, and Mom certainly wasn't about to let us have another pet, but that didn't stop us from looking. We usually only looked from the outside, but once in a while we got to go in to pick up dog food or something. One summer they had Piranhas in one of the fish tanks. We saw how their jaws looked funny (and strong) and from TV shows we knew they were killers. Once they fed them while we watched and they snapped up whatever it was faster than we could have imagined. The man in the store told us that's how he lost the end of one finger (we could see it was a little shorter than it should have been). He said he forgot to be careful around them. We believed him but we didn't want these dangerous fish for ourselves anyway. They were not at all cuddly, though they were fascinating.

After a quick stop for ice cream or a sandwich from Burger Chef, we'd retrace the path back to the turnoff and head to the lake house. When we got there, we'd first take the groceries in to the kitchen, then the bags to our room. At the beginning my brother and I shared a room when we were there, leaving the 3rd bedroom free for guests. If it was hot, the air conditioner got turned on, but often we were sent to open up all the windows in the place to get the air moving through.

Mom often drove us kids over as soon as she was ready on Friday, leaving Daddy to come once he was done with work. That meant we had two cars there, which was good in case the hospital called him to come fix somebody up.

Sometimes Daddy had some office hours on Saturday morning, so we'd spend some of the early part of the weekend cleaning up the lake house, dusting and sweeping inside and out. Then my brother and I (and the dog) would run in the grass and swing on the tire swing (us kids--not the dog). We'd pick up the mail at the mailbox and run down the gravel driveway to take it to Mom. At home we had a Post Office Box and so the only mailman we knew was at Grandma's house.

Like most lake houses, the living room faced the lake. What you saw from the road was mostly the attached garage (and the wall with the master bedroom and bath). And just toward the road from the garage was a rock garden with a giant boulder. Mom loves rock gardens and boulders too. That big, pale sandstone boulder would heat up in the sun and be a warm spot to sit when the weather wasn't hot yet. We'd sit there and try to catch the lizards that liked playing in the rocks. Someone told us that if the lizard lost its tail, it would grow another one. I new that starfish were supposed to do that, but I wasn't sure I believe them about the lizards.

We had to stay out of the woods because the ground underneath was covered with poison ivy plants. We knew how to identify the plants from the time we were pretty young. I'd never had a rash from them, but since I knew to stay away, we were never sure if I was allergic or not (and I wasn't looking to find out). There were also snakes in the woods but I think they didn't want to scare us by telling us then.

Eventually there would be fishing off the dock or from the rowboat, and swimming in the cove where the water was crystal clear all the way to the sandy bottom. Sometimes there would be neighbor kids (or neighbor grandkids) to play with. If the weather was bad, we would roller-skate in the big empty basement room where Daddy had strung ropes between the support poles, giving us something to hold onto since we hadn't yet learned how to balance ourselves.

And on Sunday morning, Mom always wanted a Sunday newspaper. Sometimes a neighbor would give us a powerboat ride across the lake to the marina. My parents would buy a newspaper and sometimes pick up some other groceries. My brother and I would beg them for coins to buy a slice or two of bread to feed the piranhas. The owner kept a stale loaf next to the cash register by the door. Since it was only a dime or a quarter, Mom or Daddy would let us and we'd be cautioned to be careful to stay dry. Leaving the grownups to talk, we'd scoot out the door and head over to the docks where the first slip or two usually were empty. We'd break off the smallest piece of bread, smaller than a pea, and toss it in the water.

And immediately the surface would boil with fishes competing for that bread. We'd toss the pieces close and far and marvel at the piranhas and be glad that they only lived on this side of the lake, not near our house.

Of course they were not piranhas, not in our climate. And we knew that, we really did. But it was so much more fun to pretend that they were. In truth they were the same bluegills that we caught with our bamboo fishing poles. Little sunfish that were more bone than meat. But when they charged over for those bread crumbs, you would have thought they could tear you apart.

Back on our side of the lake we'd fight over the comics section of the paper before being shooed outside to play. And far too soon we'd have to pack up the dirty laundry and close up the house to return back to our regular house again.

[I was going to put in a picture of piranhas but they are just too scary. Go over to http://images.google.com and type in "piranha" to see what I mean. Then if you need to wipe that out of your mind, you can type in "bluegill" to see some much tamer critters.]

Summer Vacation Books 2008

2008-08-21T22:30:00.001-04:00

Maria's wish is my command (well, this time). She asked to hear about the books and I was just thinking that it was time to write about the books, here goes. In no particular order, these are what I've been reading recently (and what has been occupying my time instead of writing).

The Grand Tour
by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
fantasy
Years ago I read Sorcery & Cecelia by these same two authors. The idea behind that older book was started as a game in which each author "took" a character and then wrote letters to the other character, developing the story as it went along. According to the notes, they did that and ended up with very little communication (except once to decide how long it would take to wrap up the story lines so everything came out at the same time). They liked what came of that so well it was turned into a book about two young ladies of the Regency, one just having her coming-out season in London, the other stuck in the country with one of the aunts. It had impertinence and magic and romance and danger. It was silly and they were somewhat silly, but I enjoyed it and have read it more than once. I was not sure I'd like the sequel. But this year I gave up, bought it and dove in. Once again the story was told from first one viewpoint, then the other. The book's title page lays it out like this:
The Grand Tour or the Purloined Coronation Regalia: being a revelation of matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, including extracts from the intimate diary of a Noblewoman and the sworn testimony of a Lady of Quality
This allows for alternative views, even though they are traveling together across Europe. Again it was silly and impertinent and clever and brave, and in grave danger, as is the entire world or at least all of Europe. And I enjoyed it.

Bedlam's Edge
edited by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill
fantasy short stories and one essay
Most of these stories have elves, but not in the time or places you might think. One story has a serial killer looking for teenage mall rats as victims, another is set in the civil war, another is set in modern South Africa, and another involves a search in a very dangerous modern place for the bottle of a djinn. How the long-lived elves and other magic creatures interact with people in the modern day is the general topic of a dozen or so stories. It was a quick read for me.

Steal the Dragon
by Patricia Briggs
fantasy
I have been reading a series by the author and I really liked her characters so I tried this novel set in another world. The description of the book had me a bit skeptical: the main character's tribe had been attacked by slave traders when she was a girl, but she had escaped to freedom and trained horses until the head of the spies needs someone to pretend to be a slave in the place she escaped from... It could have been dreck, but in Patricia Briggs' hands I enjoyed the story. I found the main character smart, likable, and believable. Well, as long as you buy into the magic end of things, and the chance that the enemy might be a god, and the ally might not be what he seems either. I liked it well enough I may read it again sometime.

Fantasy Gone Wrong
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koren
fantasy short stories
I really liked this collection of short stories where the expected tales take at least one turn for the unexpected. Most had a lot of humor in them. In one the characters start giving the author a lot of backtalk. In another the goblin is not at all what you think (and if only that baby goblin would go to sleep!) And Esther M. Friesner's contribution has this phrase near the beginning:

...As the boldest, bravest, and third-handsomest knight ever to couch lance in the service of his king, there could be only one thought going through his mind at such a solemn moment, namely:
"Why do I always get the squirrel-butt jobs?"

I gotta love them.

Cast in Shadow
by Michelle Sagara
fantasy
(Yea, I know, all fantasy so far. I promise I did read some other books. Just hold on a little longer.)
I have been putting off getting this book for a while. It too had a description that made me wonder if I'd like it, but I decided I could always put it down. Except that I couldn't put it down. I was dropped in the middle of a place with so many different kinds of peoples. And the protagonist (a kind of policewoman) is forced to work with a ghost (not literally) from her past, as a nightmare of a killing spree that she survived as a child is playing out again in the slums she came from. I couldn't wait to get from one chapter to the next and I was satisfied with the ending, although it is the beginning of a longer arc of a tale that I foresee will take at least a few books to get to the bottom of. Guess I'll have to watch for the sequels now.

Sleeping with the Fishes
by Mary Janice Davidson
fantasy (but quite different)
Fred is a mermaid. She has green hair (but everyone thinks it is blue). She works in Boston's New England Aquarium (trying hard not to get wet because she likes being able to leave at night instead of being kept in a tank there) but she's having trouble getting the fish to eat because they want her to play loud music when she feeds them. She hasn't had a date in just about forever and her best friend (who everyone thinks is a gay but is really straight and in love with Fred's boss) keeps telling her she needs to get laid. And all at once, she meets a very handsome man, a visiting researcher at the Aquarium who is trying to figure out where the suddenly-high toxin levels in the harbor are from. And then the mer-Prince from the Black Sea there to do the same thing (and make Fred his wife, or so he says). A rollicking romp that had me snorting (in a good way). Did I remember to tell you that Fred can't ride in a boat? She gets seasick. And she's allergic to shellfish!

All Together Dead
by Charlaine Harris
fantasy/mystery
Another Sookie Stackhouse novel in which our intrepid heroine now has a boyfriend with no (apparent) ulterior motives. He is a shape-shifter, but that's better than her erstwhile vampire lover (whom Sookie is trying to ignore). Sookie had promised to travel with the Louisiana Queen of the Vampires to the Vampire Conference in Chicago (Sookie had never been that far north) in order to mind-read the other humans who might be accompanying the other Vampire courts. If you are confused, you need to back up and read the books in order. Or else the part about where her brother wants to get married might be a bit confusing.
As for this installment, well. I like Sookie, I really do. But she just HAS to start learning to say "No." Weird things are going to find their way into her life without her having to practically go looking for them. All-in-all a good story, and I'll be back for the next installment.

A Deeper Sleep
by Dana Stabenow
mystery
I don't read many mysteries these days (though we have plenty in the house because they seem to be Chelle's favorite genre) but Kate Shugak novels are ones I try to keep up with. In this one, Kate and others know who did it. But the trick is proving it. And when he goes to trial, they can't believe that the charges didn't stick. Now how to keep him from killing again...
The crimes are horrible and are described from the viewpoint of the victims. But other things in the book are lighter. Especially the change in Kate and Jim Chopin's relationship. Cracked up up a few times! He should know better!

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth
by Chelsea Cain
Parody
I was still pretty young when I found a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene at my grandma's house. I guess it had belonged to my older sister. I read it and was hooked. I read all the other Nancy Drew books I could find in the local library, and then had them order the others from the inter-library loan. Somehow I never was drawn into any of the other teen-sleuth stories, but I knew of quite a few. I later read that Keene didn't actually write all the books, many (most?) were written by a consortium of writers. All of that, and the fact that I have a twisted sense of humor, means I was the perfect target audience for this book by Chelsea Cain. Here is a sense of what's inside from the Introduction:

...As many of you know me only as a character in a series of books written by a former friend of mine named Carolyn Keene, let me make one thing clear: Carolyn Keene used my name without my permission and made a career for herself telling stories of my adventures, many of which were fraught with error and some of which were patently false.
...I feared that if I revealed myself, details might come to light that could embarrass my husband and child.

Yet the time is now ripe for Nancy Drew to do just that. Reveal herself and the truth behind the stories in those teen-sleuth novels, and the other mysteries that she faced in her adult life too. I chuckled throughout the whole thing. If you don't know much about the teen sleuths of those old books, then much of the parody will be lost on you. But I thought it was a riot.

Between the Bridge and the River
by Craig Ferguson
novel
I love Craig Ferguson, although I hate to admit I am ever up long enough to see him on late, late night T.V. I always thought he was smart and when I heard he had written a novel, I put it on my list. Now it seemed to me that the story must have something to do with suicide (and someone jumping from a bridge) and before you get too far into this book you do encounter someone on his way to commit just such an act. But this book has so much more in it. With a large cast of characters (and I do mean characters, all writ large) on both sides of the Atlantic, the author gives even the minor walk-on parts depth and history. And linkage. A lot of interconnectedness flows through the braided stories and it should come as no surprise that one of the characters regularly talks with the dead Carl Jung. From Scottish schoolboys to American con-artists, a sad-beautiful French woman fated to love men about to die to a deadly-snake-handling reverend from Florida, this book ranges from topic to topic, but ties it all together through dreams and inspiration and shear coincidence.
It has graphic sex and violence. It has politics or the drama that stands in for politics. The characters are not afraid to state their piece whether or not it will offend someone. It has cynicism but also optimism. And I think it works beautifully.

In addition to those, Chelle and I are maybe half-way through the last Harry Potter book (don't spoil the ending, please!) and I'm half-way through yet another fantasy novel. More on them when we finish.

I'm Back

2008-08-02T21:49:00.003-04:00

Hi, all. I am back from vacation, well-rested now.

As it turns out, I didn't write anything (!) while I was on vacation. No memories, no essays, not even a single poem. But I did read a ton. I'll soon post about the books I finished.

I'll be around sometime in the next week to see what I missed. Can't wait to catch up.

Summer Books 2008

2008-07-18T06:45:00.000-04:00

In my continuing series of documenting which books I read, here is what I have read this summer (pre-vacation). It is a very short list because (a) work is keeping me quite busy and I have been too tired to pick up a book at night, and (b) I'm slowly (very slowly) working my way through two non-fiction books. About the latter, I am bound and determined to finish them. One I have been reading (on and off) for at least three years. The other I just bought and am a bit more interested in at the moment. But I can't read very much of either at a time.

But now on to the two I have finished. There will be a bunch more when I get back from vacation.

Child of a Rainless Year
by Jane Lindskold
fantasy
I wondered for a while if I would like this one, and then decided to dive in and try it. I was a bit startled that the main character was only five or six at the start of the book. But soon the descriptions of color and its power carried me along and I found that the author was just setting the stage so that we would understand the adult that would carry the bulk of the story. So by page 37 she is in her early fifties and the story really begins there. It is a bit eerie at times, and requires "willing suspension of disbelief" although the characters described definitely ring true to me. They act like real people, although ones who may be a little off-center. I liked this one, even if the very end was prosaic compared to the rest of the story.

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
by Robert Rankin
fantasy of the most impertinent variety
I actually just finished re-reading this. I saw the title years ago and put it on my wish list. I believe that one of Chelle's siblings bought it for me, agreeing that something with a title that odd must have something going for it. It is a mystery-detective story set in a toy-town filled with walking, talking toys and nursery-rhyme characters. The protagonist is, of course, named Jack, a youngster who had set out to seek his fortune in the big city. In spite of that, however, it is an adult book, with significant improper behavior. Besides, they are trying to solve a murder that turns out to be only one of a whole string of murders.

I'm Off!

2008-07-17T09:03:00.002-04:00

On Saturday morning we'll pack the car and head off for vacation - no TV, no phone, no e-mail, no Internet, not even cell-phone reception without heading down the road to find a roam signal. I'll be writing while I'm gone, but likely won't be posting until we get back. I'll miss checking on you all, but will catch up in August.

Lonely Ghazal

2008-07-17T06:30:00.001-04:00

[This week's Totally Optional Prompts was to write a ghazal. I finally gave it a try and had better luck that I had thought I would. Now I need to write an "up" one since this one is such a downer.]

Lonely Ghazal

On darkened subway platforms, right and left, the crowd was crushed.
Without you, I am all alone; without you I am crushed.

The winter winds blew through my skin, and chilled me to the bone.
I pulled tomatoes from a can; I took each one and crushed.

The sun in springtime showed its strength; the snow banks dwindled down.
The piles of white grew heavier; the grass beneath was crushed.

Hot summer air was full of tears, unshed the dampness was,
I tried to take a lonely breath; but felt my lungs were crushed.

I wandered autumn's paths alone, beheld each barren tree.
My laggard feet scuffed on the ground, and left dead leaves all crushed.

We made our plans together, once, to travel side-by-side.
Now solitary sister moves on freely -- spirit crushed.

Summer Funk

2008-07-15T23:50:00.005-04:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect presented a great Monday Poetry Stretch this week - to write using Climbing Rhyme (see her post for a description). I combined that with the Read Write Poem prompt to find something we didn't like about summer and came up with this.]

Summer Funk

Beautiful sky
I go by foot
I try to be
a healthy one
but, see! In spite
of sun bright and
day right I find
that I mind this
entwined bit of
bad smell shoved (not
beloved) – a stench!
need I mention?
Attention held
tight by spelled air
as swelled stink coils
'round and soils walk
and foils my proud
mood. The crowd veers
as loud shouts fall
and cast pall on
just all that I
see. So, sigh, first,
and cry (some), and
walk as planned, though
not grand, nor fine.

Loose Change

2008-07-11T08:05:00.004-04:00

[Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect challenged us this week to write a poem with the phrase "loose change." I had several thoughts, but this is the one that got finished first.]

Loose Change

I pluck the dark pennies
from the bright silver on the table.
I examine the artwork on each
and save the old
ones with wheat sheaves,
in black plastic film canisters
in a desk drawer,
dimly echoing Dad's pastimes
of numismatics and photography,
but his favorite coins are framed
and hang on the wall in the light.

WordPlay for Read Write Poem

2008-06-30T09:15:00.002-04:00

[Read Write Poem's prompt this week was described as "wordplay." We were encouraged to create a poem from a constrained list of words and several suggestions for obtaining those lists were given. I don't currently have any of my sets of magnetic poetry out, but I do own several sets (most a work, just one set at home). Instead of setting up my own magnetic poetry for this, I went to the magnetic poetry website and created a poem. I've also included some of my older poems created with magnetic poetry kits.]

First my new poem called Eternity through a Window, created with the Poetry Kit at Magnetic Poetry. (Click the image to see it a bit larger over at Magnetic Poetry's website, but don't forget to come back here for my other poems.)

I constructed the following back in 1999:

Near Spring

near spring
but still in the white void of winter
recall the lazy language
of sleepy summer sun
whisper the delirious petals from the garden
smell the dream of hot storms
and sing a vision of sweaty light

And also this one:

Sausage & Eggs

she frantically cooks sausage & eggs
when she aches for
the juice of sweet luscious peaches
to lick languidly from her skin
lazy in the flood of summer sun

And this one too:

Storm

lazy mist from the sky
delicate to watch
falls into a thousand frantic beats
rain sprays
flooding
please stop
a lake is not essential

Not to mention this one using words from the Genius Kit (full of big words - it even came with a glossary):

Vision

2008-06-28T02:17:00.001-04:00

[The Sunday Scribblings prompt of vision send me on a trip down memory lane:]

Vision

The summer before I entered fifth grade brought me new experiences. One of the most significant was that I took up playing the oboe. The fifth grade band comprised all the fifth graders in town who were similarly becoming acquainted with new instruments. That summer we met in small groups with one of the band directors (at that time there were two in town) and we gradually learned to play.

In fourth grade all students were exposed to some music education (see my post on the flutophone episode) so even those who couldn't read music earlier were not looking at music for the very first time. Still, some of us were not learning quickly.

There were three of us learning to play oboe. For a town the size of ours, and a band the size ours would be, this was a ridiculously large number, but that's what we had. For lessons I seem to remember we shared one music stand between the three of us. It was not easy to see the music without getting in the next person's way, or knocking her elbow. Nonetheless, I learned slowly as I squinted at the music.

That same summer I was learning to play tennis. The town's parks department offered classes at multiple levels (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and followed up weeks of lessons with some tournament play. We would be divided into teams with some at each level, then scheduled to play against other teams. But to start with, us beginners had to learn to hit the ball.

I had a terrible time trying to connect. I watched the ball; I swung the racket; I seemed to have the appropriate grip; I didn't seem to be uncoordinated. But I was nearly always just a little off – too early, too late, too close, too far away (whiff!). I was beginning to get frustrated, but was determined to get the knack.

Now when I was a kid, we had to have physical exam before entering fifth grade. My dad was my family physician so my exam was done when a quiet day rolled around mid-summer. The kids needing a physical for summer camps were done, and most of the fifth-grade (and second-grade and older school sports) exams had not yet ramped up. To my surprise, and that of my dad and my mom (the nurse), it appeared that I no longer had perfect vision. They checked it twice, then scheduled a visit to the eye doctor.

The eye doctor had an office downtown in one of the two bank buildings. The entrance was from the sidewalk on the side street, next to where the large plate-glass windows of the Tri-City Grocery store ended. We walked up one flight of stairs to a dim hallway where we turned right and walked nearly to the end (at the rear of the building) to where the office was on the right-hand side. Compared to the dim hallway, the office was quite bright and modern.

After another eye exam, this one sitting in a chair with odd things pulled down in front of my face, the doctor agreed that I needed glasses. This was not really surprising once I thought about it. Daddy wore glasses. Mom wore glasses. My older sister couldn't even find her glasses if they weren't on her head (or so we teased). My grandparents wore glasses (well, grandma didn't wear hers as much as she was supposed to).

So my next stop was all the way across the room to pick out frames. Mom nixed wire-rims as too fragile for an active girl and the doctor pulled out a lot of plastic frames. Some were placed on my face and taken away before I had a chance to look at them, but I did get quite a bit of choice in the matter. I ended up with dark-ish frames that were quite small and oval. The doctor would have the lenses made and he'd call us when we could pick up the glasses.

It must have been a couple of weeks before we got the call, and we went back to the office (through the not-quite-so-intimidating hallway). I put on the glasses and he had me hand them back to him. He bent the earpieces and gave them back. He made sure that the lenses were centered over my eyes, where they would do the most good. And I got a glasses case, which seemed a bit odd to me since I was going to have to wear the glasses all the time. I didn't know when they would be in the case.

And some amazing things happened. Well yes, there was some not-so-amazing teasing and calls of "guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses." But since I wasn't sure what a pass was I didn't worry about it. No, the amazing thing was first discovered at band practice. I could sit farther away from the music stand! And I could see the music even better than when I had sat closer.

But the more amazing thing was in tennis practice. All of a sudden I could hit the ball. Not every time, of course, I was still a beginner. But I had a fighting chance. It turns out that my left eye was significantly weaker than the right eye and it had messed up my depth perception. With the glasses, I now could figure out how fast the ball was moving. It was like magic.

I have worn lenses to correct my vision ever since. I switched to contact lenses when I was in high school and college, then back to glasses when I had to start paying for them myself. Then years later a friend encouraged me to take up downhill skiing again and once I was sure I was going to keep at it, I got contact lenses to cut down on the number of surfaces I had to clean fog off of.

My brothers, who didn't have to wear glasses when we were kids, got their turns, I think when they were in their twenties. Of course by then, my sister and I no longer wanted to tease them the way the boys had teased us. (Not much anyway!)

I have had various glasses frames over the years, though none as small as that first pair. One pair was significantly larger, but it was the 1970's. I once lost a pair – I have NO idea how I did it. It was only a year after I started wearing them. We had to order a replacement pair, and the came in just in time for me to wear them to Girl Scout summer camp. Funny thing is, on the way to camp, I put my hand in the pocket of my windbreaker and found the missing pair! Lucky thing, too! because a week later my glasses accidentally flew from my head – and were stepped on by a very large draft horse. Good thing I had a backup!

And now I find that I need to replace my glasses again. I wear contacts most of the time, but in the late evenings and at night, I wear the glasses. Unfortunately I sometimes wear the glasses to bed where I bend them slightly out of shape when I lie on my side while I read a book. These are not the bend-back kind of frames so although the prescription is fine, they are ever-so-slightly askew and don't properly correct my astigmatism anymore.

And what a miracle it seems that such small pieces of plastic can make the world come into focus!

Like Summer

2008-06-26T00:13:00.003-04:00

[Here is my quickly-written response to this week's Totally Optional Prompts encouragement to write "like summer."]

Like Summer

Since when is summer
mere welcome warmth
enjoyed briefly between
air-conditioned appointments?
the season with weed-whackers
instead of snow shovels?

Summer is that burst of
excitement finally set free from school
to spend entire days in the sun
peddling bicycles around town,
trying to avoid the stinky, sticky
new oil-and-rock roads
and the black bits that would stick
to your tires and white socks,
when refreshment was a race
to finish a grape popsicle before
it melted down your arm.

A Poem Reworked

2008-06-23T07:17:00.001-04:00

Read Write Poem is certainly stretching my poetry muscles in a good way. The prompt this week was to stop thinking about revising a poem and actually do it. OK, Juliet was much more gentle with the prompt, but this is what it meant to me. So I took a poem written in January 2008 for a Writers Island prompt and reworked it.

First the original:

Over the Horizon

The weather three states west would be ours
tomorrow, or the next day, depending on the wind.
Weather always made good time racing
across the space ironed flat by ancient glaciers.

From the back seat of the wood-paneled station wagon
the space between me and the horizon
was filled with rows of corn and soybeans
and a few trees here and there with something to prove.

The concrete interstate plowed a pale path
through green fields, due east ten miles to a gentle left-hand curve,
then straight as the crow flies to the middle of the next county,
never looking back.

Decades down the road,
I live past the curvature of the earth
from where I started.

Here's the new piece:

From Flatland

Giant steel grasshoppers sit contentedly in fields,
endlessly sipping ancient nectar from underground,
next to comforting night-lights of flaming natural gas,
unable to imagine life anywhere else.

The weather three states west will be ours
tomorrow, or the next day, depending on the wind.
It always makes good time racing
across the land ironed flat by ancient glaciers.

I lift my body's question mark
from the high school drinking fountain,
answering a different, distant call
to plow a fertile field elsewhere.

From inside the '68 Chevy station wagon my eyes
trace row after row after row of corn and soybeans,
filling the space between me and the horizon
save for the occasional tree with something to prove.

Straight as the crow flies, I follow
the pale, unbending concrete of the Interstate
past all those tidy, unchanging furrows
into the hazy, wavy shimmer ahead.

Two for Cafe Writing

2008-06-21T23:23:00.000-04:00

[I haven't been keeping up with the prompts at the monthly Cafe Writing, but fortunately Melissa gave us a bit more time with a combined May-June set of prompts. Do stop by to check out the contributions from the other talented folks over there. These two poems came from the prompt to use three of the following words: arouse, morning, nerve, women, men, beauty, admire, nowhere.]

Brava!

It's true that I've nerve to admire
the strongest of women with fire.
In spite of their flaws
they have earned my applause
and I set my goals just that much higher.

A Josh-Nosh Limerick

My dad was a man among men
who would sleep late each weekday and then
out of nowhere – no warning –
he'd arise Sunday morning,
make us breakfast and ask where we'd been.

Friday Fill-Ins 77

2008-06-20T14:04:00.005-04:00

[Check out the other Friday Fill-Ins.]

1. A smile is always appreciated by me - and usually returned.
2. I have too many stockpiled to tell you what is my favorite board or card game.
3. I would love to have more music in my life and less paper.
4. When I think of the Summer Solstice, I think of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
5. I just remembered I need to buy sneakers - I keep "just remembering" this and one of these days I'll get the new ones before the old ones fall apart.
6. One of my favorite song lyrics goes like this: I'm an expert on Shakespeare, that's a hell of a lot, but the world don't need scholars as much as I thought. It is from Jamie Cullum's Twentysomthing.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to vegging out, tomorrow my plans include personal grooming & regular household chores and Sunday, I want to bake something (but I haven't decided what)!

Guide

2008-06-15T17:31:00.003-04:00

[Sunday Scribblings prompted us with the word guide. See what other folks came up with here. For me, it brought to mind one particular person on a special trip.]

In 2004 Chelle and I went on a vacation to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Most of the trip was spent in or around the pool, or next to the beach at the all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. But there were a couple of side trips, one notably to see Chichen Itza.

Departure time was early (at least as far as vacation schedules go), and there were two buses lined up for those of us heading inland for the all-day trip. We were a long way from Chichen Itza, long enough we would be stopping for lunch on the way there. The guide on our bus was Jesus (pronounced in with a "hey" sound in front). Since he wasn't the driver, he could pay attention to us, the paying customers.

Jesus made it his business to tell us about Mexico today, passed around some old coins, talked about the current political and economic situation. He told us about the plant life we saw outside the bus as well as how he had learned about it on excursions into the jungle with a botanist friend, where he came across small groups of people who still spoke Mayan as a language. As a kind of party game he asked for our birthdays and told us what saint-names we would have likely been given had we been born in Mexico. He told us about his family and told us that he was studying German so that he would be able to lead tours for German-speaking tourists, increasing his marketability.

Our bus passed first through the downtown area of Playa del Carmen, where we saw trees being re-planted in the median strip, the former ones having been damaged in Hurricane Ivan. We saw a building going up along the road where workers were lifting concrete into place one bucket at a time; an honest-to-goodness bucket brigade getting the job done two stories above ground. And we passed startlingly-familiar shops like McDonalds and WalMart.

Our road went on highways and byways. In one town we passed through, Jesus pointed out that the church was built on the site of a native temple, and that it was, in fact, built of the very stones of the former place. The conquerors had torn down one holy building in order to put up their own.

Jesus pointed out the kinds of trees we could see over the walled yards in town. Many were faster-growing varieties that recovered quickly from the winds of the hurricane. Once we were out of the town, we passed onto smaller roads and eventually into areas where a few houses were immediately at the side of the road. A small naked toddler walked out of the front of the house to pee in the tiny front yard. Since there was no indoor plumbing, Jesus pointed out, this was probably a good place for him to do it, since it kept him away from the vegetables that were likely planted in the back.

Jesus taught us about the geology of the Yucatan Peninsula, that it was made of limestone and so porous that water doesn't stay on top. There are no above-ground rivers in the Yucatan, all are below ground. After seeing Chichen Itza, we would get to visit a cenote (pronounced say-NO-tay) which is an underground water hole.

Lunch was at a tourist-trap buffet with entertainment provided by bored dancers, but we were at least sure that it was clean. Onward we went into the jungle, the temperature and humidity rising with every mile.

When we finally arrived at the ruins of Chichen Itza, we were each handed two bottles of water and cautioned to stay hydrated since we would be sweating a lot in the heat. Jesus, himself, acted as our guide at the ruins. We saw the ancient observatory from a distance, closed to the public now since so many people had been carrying parts of it away.

We saw steps that were a funny proportion, with tall risers and short treads, tough for my size-11 feet to navigate. Round and square pillars stood upright in an area believed to have been a marketplace. Further along other pillars, all round this time, stood in a long line into the trees, the original cement still holding the stones together. We were told that local contractors all claimed to use the same centuries-old recipe in their own construction. We saw the entrance to an ancient bathhouse/sauna. Jesus pointed out the original wood at the base of a Mayan arch, made from the chicle tree. He told us contractors working on a new porch at his own house were waiting for the right time of the month to cut chicle trees for supports; that when the chicle's sap is drawn up into the tree, it helps to act as a preservative.

We saw stones laid out in an archeologist's attempt at a giant jigsaw puzzle. We passed enormous buildings that had housed warriors, some of their images carved into the rectangular pillars in the front (each image different from each other one).

Jesus told us about the number of steps on the four sides of the largest building, how with the top platform, they total 365. He told us about the magic of the equinoxes, spring and fall, when the sun is in just the right place to cause a jagged shadow to crawl down to complete a "body" for the representation of the serpent-god, Kukulkan.

He explained the ball-court game. He helped us interpret the carved images along the side of the biggest court at Chichen Itza. He pointed out the raised area at the end where royalty would have sat to watch, so as not to favor one side or the other. The top galleries, Jesus told us, would have been covered to keep the citizens cool in the heat of the sometimes days-long games.

After the tour at Chichen Itza, and somewhat revived by the air conditioning in the bus, we went to the cenote. We walked down steps carved into rock, down into the cave, where the air grew cooler as the light dimmed. Jesus pointed out the tree at the opening of the cenote, how it wasn't much to look at, but to hold our judgement. Chelle actually joined a few other folks for a swim. I decided to let her tell me how cold it was (and then decided it was going to be too cold for me). From where I stood looking around, I could see the roots of the tree Jesus pointed out. They reached down and down and down for stories, all the way down to reach the water of the cenote. The roots were pretty impressive.

As we finally headed back to the resort, with the sun going down and most of us wiped out from the heat and excitement of the day, Jesus finally stopped teaching and let us watch some movies or fall asleep.

That night we compared notes with the folks on the other bus. Our bus was full of people who ranked the day and the whole trip quite highly. The other bus was full of people who were much more indifferent. Since we went to the same places, saw the same treasures, the difference had to have been our guide. And we were quite glad we had lucked into a day with Jesus.

Last Day

2008-06-10T22:59:00.002-04:00

[Tricia at the Miss Rumphius Effect put forth this week's Monday Poetry Stretch to write about the end of school or summer vacation. This took me back.]

Last Day

There is no learning today, just lessons on
containment
as teachers try to
contain
their classes, as students try to
contain
themselves. As the whole school vibrates with
barely-contained
excitement I wonder how long the water will stay
bottled-up
inside the full-to-bursting balloons.