Category Archives: Writing

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Tuned In

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NaPoWriMo Day #3

Today’s prompt invited me to look up the #1 pop song on my birthday and write a poem inspired by that song.  I could also look up another significant date and use the song associated with that date instead.  I tried my birthday, and then the day that my husband and I always celebrated as the day of our first kiss.  I have to say that the first option won out.  Poems I have written inspired by my love for my husband will have to wait.  Especially since I am posting this in advance (courtesy the techno savvy of my friend Helen) because I am taking my kids to the Museum of Science and Industry for their birthdays today…their 23rd and 25th birthdays (kids never outgrow museums!).   I want to give my husband and the poetry he inspires a bit more time.

The number one hit song on the day that I was born was…..”The Locomotion” by Little Eva. 

I had an immediate association.  Not with the song, specifically.  With a train.  Steve has taken to describing my typical M.O. as “the freight train”.  It has to do with a very focused, linear way of acting.  I get into a task-oriented mode when I’m trying to get something accomplished.  I do not like to get side-tracked when I am operating like that.  I like to streamline and simplify and do one thing after another until the whole bloody thing is finished.  God help you if you get in my way.  That’s what cow catchers are for.  It can be an effective way of doing things.  Steve, however, likes to be “light on his feet”, like a river, like a school of fish, shaped by movement and fluidity.  There are advantages to that, too.  Anyway, it’s one of our points of reference when discussing our differences and trying to achieve compromise.

That’s the back story.  Here’s the poem:

 

Was I born to do this straight-track motion

Or was I just trained?

Was chugging along my very first notion?

Was it always ingrained?

It’s not much of a dance.

It’s not fluid with grace.

There’s not much of a chance

Of a partner to face

When we’re all in a line

Going forward full speed.

Someone’s always behind;

Someone’s always the lead.

So “ev’rybody’s doing it”,

And that may be true.

But, c’mon baby, are you sure it’s for you?

I think this is my moment to jump off the track.

And, no, I’m not asking for my money back.

Was that Scilla that just blew by?!

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Try a Triolet

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Day #2 of NaPoWriMo today!

I am learning a lot.  The prompt for today is to write a “triolet”, which is an 8 line poem where lines 1, 4 & 7 are identical and lines 2 & 8 are identical.  The rhyme scheme goes like this: ABaAabAB.  Having never studied poetry, this is all new to me and fascinating to engage.  What do you do with a structure?  Play with it for a while, then take it apart and do something else, like with toy blocks?  There’s no “right” way to play, is there?  I think not.  So I go ahead and see what happens.

I was thinking about the repetitive nature of this particular pattern, and it reminded me of a conversation I had with Steve on a recent neighborhood walk.  We were talking about getting old, how older people spend their time until they die, the change in energy and the prelude to death.  My husband was technically “working” the day before he died, although by that time, he was working from home at the dining room table, from a laptop equipped with Zoom Text that made each letter on the screen about 4 inches high.  My father, in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, didn’t move or eat or do anything on his own.  He eventually succumbed to pneumonia after he lost the ability to swallow food without aspirating it.   My grandmother died in a nursing home rather uneventfully.  She had lived with us for several years before moving into a place that could care for her more comprehensively.  She spent her days watching TV in her room and would come to the dinner table and try to make conversation, often beginning with “They say….”  My father always insisted she cite her sources.  “Who says?  Where did you hear that?”

Our concepts of dying are so complicated and irrational.  What makes “sense” economically often offends morally.  Questions, decisions, choices, preferences and emotions arise.   What do we do with them?  How do we communicate our wishes for life and death?  To whom?  I don’t have any definite answers.  I hope I get to communicate what’s important to me to someone who is listening.  I hope my views are respected.  What that might look like, I cannot tell.  Steve mentioned casually at breakfast that he’d like Schubert’s Octet played at his funeral.  I asked him who he thought might be there.  He couldn’t even say.  I guess what matters is that I heard him when he said it.

 

Triolet for My Grandmother

There was nothing good on TV that day.

She turned her face toward the wall and died.

The years had slipped by while she wasted away.

There was nothing good on TV that day.

She’d listened and heard what they had to say.

They might have been right, but often they lied.

There was nothing good on TV that day.

She turned her face toward the wall and died.

(photo credit: Josh)

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Seize The Day!

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It’s Here!

 

National Poetry Writing Month

Fun for the whole family!  My sister intends to match me, poem for poem, in the comments section of each of my posts.  Mind you, this is NOT a competition.  I have to be very clear about that and remind myself that this is about playing with words, creative collaboration, cleaning my windshield of mud and fear and stuff that gets in the way of my recognition of the wonderful ideas that I, even I, have shining on the horizon.  I remind myself of this several times a day because my older sister is brilliant and has always been better than me at everything.  Of course, that’s entirely my own hangup.  I admit it, and I’m old enough now to face it head on. Right? Right!

I am using a very inclusive definition of “poetry” here.  In other words, I’ve never been a student of poetry, I don’t know form and rules, but as a singer, I like words and rhythm.  As a visual person, I like icons and imagery.  Any formation of symbols that produce an experience can be called poetry in my definition.  Also, it’s understood that any poetry posted here is copyrighted.  If it’s not original, I will site the source. 

I am tickled that this event is starting on a Sunday.  Such creative connotations!  And on April Fool’s Day, just so that we don’t take our creativity too seriously.  I self-published a book of Poems and Parables back in 1997.   This was the first one:

God is a poem

Infinite in meaning

Economical in expression

Clothed in symbol and harmony

A breathing Word

Engaging all perception

Today’s prompt is “Carpe Diem”, with a reference to Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress.  I have to admit that my brain first translated that Latin phrase as something like “Fish Gods”.  You know, Carp Deities.  ‘Fish gods’ sounds like ‘fish guts’.  I was going down that path for a while.  But then, I remembered a conversation I had at breakfast with Steve about childhood development.  We have often referred to ourselves as 3 and 4 year olds.  He’s 3, and I’m 4.  I got a chart of early childhood characteristics at my last teacher training session, and we talked about how the descriptions fit us.  I often feel like we’re trying to get back to those authentic ideas of ourselves and that maybe, eventually, we’ll become infants again and live as though we were not separate at all from the environment.

So all that musing is background.  I began composing my first lines in the bathtub.  Here’s what I penciled in my notebook when I dried off:

My three-year-old comes out to play

With ne’er a thought about the day,

For what is ‘think’ or ‘time’ or ‘how’?

The only thing is ‘this right now’.

 

My three-year-old, with eye and ear

Stays open’d wide to what is here.

Experience is all, you see.

That three-year-old’s inside of me.

Sniffing a Ponderosa pine in New Mexico. Steve told me it smells like vanilla. I had to find out. I agreed. (photo credit: Steve)

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BOINNNNNG!!!

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As we were walking off in the rain to meet his mom for breakfast, Steve made this sound of spring….boinnng!  I thought that would make a good title for a post. I admit that I am a sound effects gal.   It comes with being an actor of sorts and a singer.  Ever notice how most guys do use sound effects at least occasionally in their conversation, but women do less often?  Maybe it’s not really ladylike, but I get more animated as I get more comfortable with the people around me.  I enjoy hamming it up.  I’ve been posting some pretty serious stuff because I have a lot of that in me, too, but lately, I’ve been itching to burst out with something creative and lively.   I am ready to engage in some collaboration, but I’ve been frustrated in my recent attempts with voice students and job interviews (still waiting to hear from Old World Wisconsin).  I’ve found something to try, though….a poetry challenge!

That’s right, folks, the NaPoWriMo challenge is about to begin on April 1!  This is the National Poetry Writing Month challenge: a poem a day for 30 days.  I once self-published a booklet of poems and sold 50 copies at my church’s gift shop, all proceeds going to charity.  One of my poems got published in The Living Church magazine, though I got no payment for it.  My religious poetry tried to be very serious.  Nowadays I write rhyming greeting card poetry for Steve’s aunt, just because she lights up so generously when I do.  I’m curious to see how I might respond to the prompts offered by the challenge organizers.  It’ll be another way to discover who I am, and possibly there will be a collaborative element as I post and receive comments.  My father used to write very amusing little rhymes in Valentines and birthday cards for me and my kids.  I loved getting those in the mail!  I miss that.  Perhaps some of that joy will spring up with this endeavor in April.  Also, it’ll be fun to try to illustrate my posts with photographs to match. 

What do you do when you hunger for creative collaboration?  (…besides what the birds & bees are doing 😉 , which is very satisfying as well!)

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Monday’s Child

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Easter Sunday in southern California was beautiful that year.  As large as I was, I wanted to be up and active, to meet people and spread the joy around.  Jim and our two young children were not feeling well, though, so I went to church by myself.  I put on my brightest maternity dress and went eagerly.   I don’t remember if I made an Easter dinner or did any special activity with the kids.  I started feeling some cramping that evening.  I took a late bath to relax, then lay down to sleep.  Suddenly, my water broke.  Jim got the kids up and took them to a friend’s house, then he came back to collect me.   When we pulled into the parking lot at the hospital,  I could barely walk.  I looked at my watch.  It was midnight.  No longer Easter.  Seventeen minutes later, before any of the staff could complete paperwork and processing, Rebecca Louise was born. 

“Monday’s child is fair of face.”  It became evident to me by the time Becca was able to crawl that she was exceptionally beautiful.  She had large blue eyes fringed with fantastically long lashes, like her father.  She had the most perfect little nose and rosebud lips.  Her face was open, balanced, symmetrical, delicate.  I became so proud of my live doll and enjoyed dressing her up and showing her off.  She, however, had no desire to sit on a shelf and be admired. She wanted to move!  She made noise!  She definitely had a mind of her own.  She challenged my idea of “perfect” and began educating me in parenting at an early age…and continued that education more vigorously in her teenaged years.  Here is a picture of her as a baby, out of focus a bit, scanned on a dusty screen.  It wasn’t until I cropped it and enlarged it that I noticed she has a cut on her lip.  Typical.  She climbed on everything.  When she was a toddler, she fell in a parking lot and shattered her front tooth.  It had to be extracted.  Until she was 6, she sported a gap-toothed smile in the middle of that perfect face.  The day it happened, I cried for hours.  I would have given anything to reverse that split-second event and restore her to completion.  Not for her sake, mind you.  She really wasn’t badly hurt.  For mine.  She was already teaching me that my attachment to perfection could create suffering.

Becca’s beauty went deeper as she grew.  She became a graceful gymnast, then a dancer.  Her remarkable intelligence was evident, but seemed to be tempered by a soft heart for people.  She became quite popular, admired by her peers for obvious reasons.  There’s nothing more daunting to a comfortably nerdy mother than having a popular, attractive daughter! Again, she challenged me and made it necessary for me to educate myself in social awareness.

High school was a minefield.  “Perfection” was blown up completely.  The bits of Becca that came floating back down became unrecognizable to me because I was still looking for an image, not for a person, a person who had a million deep feelings and only a few words safe enough to utter about them.  My best efforts at communication boiled down to the times I simply held her while she cried.  I won’t even mention my worst efforts.  

(photo credit: unknown)

Finally, she graduated and moved down state to live near her brother and study massage therapy.  That’s where she was when her father died.  She was 18.

(photo credit: unknown)

It was a new minefield, but this time, we were both better at dealing with fallout.  She moved back home, and we both worked hard at rebuilding, not “perfection”, but life.   She is a certified massage therapist now.  She creates original jewelry, grows vegetables and “mothers” a dog and cat with that same combination of beauty, grace and energy that she showed as a toddler.  Her heart is large, tender and tough all at the same time.  She is so much more than a pretty face!

(photo credit: Steve)

So, Happy 23rd Birthday, Rebecca!  I am forever proud of you and grateful for all that you’ve taught me.  Have a great night celebrating with Joe.  I’ll see you next week at the Museum of Science and Industry – can’t wait!!

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Intimacy

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How well do you know me?  How well do I know myself?  How well can any two people know each other, accept each other, celebrate each other, or be open and honest with each other?  Do you really want to be that intimate with someone?  It sounds like a lot of work.  And there are some things that might not be pleasant to know.  Even about myself.  Maybe especially about myself.  I want to present the pleasing face.  I’ve worked on being able to do that.  Is that not me?  Are you sure you prefer the genuine me over that pleasing mask?  Why?  

My partner Steve and I go around and round about this.  He maintains that he is honestly working toward a genuine intimacy that is non-judgmental and completely open.  Whether that’s attainable is another question, rather like a Zen koan.  I find that my brain is hard-wired to make a million comparisons, a million analytical assessments, a million judgments all in a short time…about everything.  I turn that brain on myself all the time, without being terribly conscious about it.   I want to practice being aware of those thoughts and communicate them honestly to Steve.  He promises to practice accepting, appreciating, and honoring them, holding a safe space open for me to continue my practice.  What might that look like?

We go on a walk together.  His long legs want to stretch; I can’t keep up.  I assess myself and feel slow and out of shape.  I begin to feel like I am a hindrance.  I blame myself.  I blame Steve.  I decide to communicate.  “I want to walk more slowly and take pictures.”  “I want to keep up a good pace and get more exercise.”   “Let’s just do what we want and meet up later.”  Sounds reasonable.

There he goes.  The Walking Man walks.  James Taylor sings in my head.  I wander toward the river, away from the parkway, the bicyclists, the dog-walkers, the joggers, the strollers and baby strollers.   On a sunny Sunday, the village moves outside.  I find a spot by the river’s edge, alone with my camera.  I watch the water glide over rocks, reflecting light.  What do I reflect?  Is that me?  Is it genuine?  Is it a costume, an act?  Maybe I am everything — change and movement.  Maybe communicating is so important because this change and movement is constant.  You will never know me if you’re thinking about what I said a minute ago.  You can never step in the same river twice.

If I take the energy I might have spent on “formatting” myself for presentation and apply it to communicating myself “as is”, will I get closer to knowing my true self?

I am still learning how to be what I am.  Just that has taken half a century almost.  This conscious brain is cumbersome, manipulated early by social constructs and patterns, weighty now with baggage.  The simple forming and blossoming of a bud reminds me that life can be much freer than I make it. 

I dreamed last night that I could fly.  It was like swimming in air, gliding where I wanted to go, my feet never touching the ground.  I have had this dream my whole life.  I’ve always known how to do that, effortlessly.  But only in my sleep.

 

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A Flower’s Name and Nature

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I learned that the blue flower growing in my garden and all over the Wehr Nature Center woods is called scilla siberica (wood squill) and is native to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey.  I am guessing that settlers brought it over here about a hundred years ago.  I’m tickled that we have parts of our name in common!  I am thinking more about the settlers and their way of life while I wait to hear about the outcome of my Old World Wisconsin interview.  What did they find different about the flora and fauna here?  What did they miss from the old country?  How does the emotional connection to land, a place, a “mother country” develop, and what did it feel like to venture out from there to an unknown place?

scilla siberica

Memories are sweet; what is here right now is also sweet. 

I find myself using more energy to be present with what is right in front of me.  When I retreat to my memories, I take that energy and shelter it deep within myself.  It feels like I’m hiding, in a way.  It’s not easy to allow anyone else to inhabit that place.  It’s slow and calm and secret.

I have a memory garden.  It blooms with the flowers of the old country: my babies, my husband, my house, my youth.  I like to visit it and inhale its familiar fragrance.  I am alone there. 

The world of the present is all around that secret garden.  It asks to be acknowledged, appreciated, and invited into my deep consciousness. 

I could call this my “settler’s mind”.   But there really is no division.  Here, there, then, now…it’s all fluid, connected, like the roots and rhizomes of wild flowers.

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day is the best day, every place you are is the best place.


 

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Honoring My Father

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George William Heigho II — born July 10, 1933, died March 19, 2010.

Today I want to honor my dad and tell you about how I eventually gave him something in return for all he’d given me.

My dad was the most influential person in my life until I was married.  He was the obvious authority in the family, very strict and powerful.  His power was sometimes expressed in angry outbursts like a deep bellow, more often in calculated punishments encased in logical rationalizations.  I knew he was to be obeyed.  I also knew he could be playful.  He loved to build with wooden blocks or sand.  Elaborate structures would spread across the living room floor or the cottage beach front, and my dad would be lying on his side adding finishing touches long after I’d lost interest.  He taught me verse after verse of silly songs with the most scholarly look on his face.  He took photographs with his Leica and set up slide shows with a projector and tripod screen after dinner when I really begged him.  He often grew frustrated with the mechanics of those contraptions, but I would wait hopefully that the show would go on forever.  It was magic to see myself and my family from my dad’s perspective.  He was such a mystery to me.  I thought he was God for a long time.  He certainly seemed smart enough to be.  He was a very devout Episcopalian, Harvard-educated, a professor and a technical writer for IBM.  He was an introvert, and loved the outdoors.  When he retired, he would go off for long hikes in the California hills by himself.  He also loved fine dining, opera, ballet, and museums.  He took us to fabulously educational places — Jamaica, Cozumel, Hawaii, and the National Parks.  He kept the dining room bookcase stacked with reference works and told us that it was unnecessary to argue in conversation over facts.

Camping in Alaska the summer after his senior year in High School: 1951.

My father was not skilled in communicating about emotions.  He was a very private person.  Raising four daughters through their teenaged years must have driven him somewhat mad.  Tears, insecurities, enthusiasms and the fodder of our adolescent dreams seemed to mystify him.  He would help me with my Trigonometry homework instead.

Playing with my dad, 1971.

I married a man of whom my father absolutely approved.  He walked me down the aisle quite proudly.  He feted my family and our guests at 4 baptisms when his grandchildren were born.  I finally felt that I had succeeded in gaining his blessing and trust.  Gradually, I began to work through the  more difficult aspects of our relationship.  He scared my young children with his style of discipline.  I asked him to refrain and allow me to do it my way.   He disowned my older sister for her choice of religion.  For 20 years, that was a subject delicately opened and re-opened during my visits.  I realized that there was still so much about this central figure in my life that I did not understand at all.

Grandpa George

In 2001, after the World Trade Center towers fell, I felt a great urgency to know my father better.  I walked into a Christian bookstore and picked up a book called Always Daddy’s Girl: Understanding Your Father’s Impact on Who You Are by H. Norman Wright.  One of the chapters contained a Father Interview that listed dozens of questions aimed at bringing out the father’s life history and the meaning he assigned to those events.  I decided to ask my father if he would answer some of these questions for me, by e-mail (since he lived more than 2,000 miles away).   Being a writer, this was not a difficult proposition for him to accept.  He decided how to break up the questions into his own groupings and sometimes re-phrase them completely to be more specific and understandable and dove in, essentially writing his own memoirs.   I was amazed, fascinated, deeply touched and profoundly grateful at the correspondence I received.  I printed each one and kept them.  So did my mother.  When I called on the telephone, each time he mentioned how grateful he was for my suggestion.  He and my mother shared many hours reminiscing and putting together the connections of events and feelings of years and years of his life.   On the phone, his repeated thanks began to be a bit eerie.  Gradually, he developed more symptoms of dementia.  His final years were spent in that wordless country we later identified as Alzheimer’s disease.

I could never have known at the time that the e-mails we exchanged would be the last record of my dad’s memory.  To have it preserved is a gift that is priceless to the entire family.  I finally learned something about the many deep wounds of his childhood, the interior life of his character development, his perception of my sister’s death at the age of 20 and his responsibility in the lives of his children.   My father is no longer “perfect”, “smart”, “strict” or any other concept or adjective that I could assign him.  He is simply the man, my father.  I accept him completely and love and respect him more holistically than I did when I knew him as a child.  That is the gift I want to give everyone.

I will close with this photo, taken in the summer of 2008 when my youngest daughter and I visited my father at the nursing home.  I had been widowed 6 months, had not yet met Steve, and was anticipating my father’s imminent passing.  My frozen smile and averted eyes are fascinating to me.  That I feel I must face a camera and record an image is somehow rational and irrational at the same time.  To honor life honestly is a difficult assignment.  I press on.

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Lamb

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In some parts of the world, it’s lambing season.  I’ve seen some beautiful photos from bloggers in rural areas, and I want to share my “Lamb” story, too.

Steve and I went on a cross-country camping trip in the summer of 2009.  One of our primary destinations was Zion National Park in Utah.  We chose to camp in nearby Dixie National Forest.  The National Forest designation allows camping free of charge anywhere within the boundaries.  The land is also used for other things, which present something of a mystery to me.  Houses are built in National Forests.  ATV roads and logging operations also exist there.  The official motto on many National Forest signs is “Land of Many Uses”.  You’re never really sure what the land is being used for until you get there, drive around, and check it out.  This was my first experience traveling like this.  I was used to researching websites and making reservations with check-in and check-out times.  Steve assured me that traveling without plans is mostly safe and more of an adventure.  “Be open to what arises” was his Zen-like mantra. This trip would definitely shape our relationship, and I was excited about the possibilities.

After bumping down a narrow ATV road in Steve’s Toyota Camry, we discovered a nice spot in an aspen grove away from the big camper-trailers that had gathered in the valley for an off-road rally event.  We parked the car and began to look for level ground to set up the tent.  In the quiet of the woods, I heard a faint sound.  A bird with an unfamiliar song…rather like the sound of a bleating…goat?  “Did you hear that?”  I asked Steve.  Odd.  I picked up a roll of toilet paper and began to look for a likely tree to designate as my powder room.  Then I saw her.  At the base of an aspen, dirty white fur blended into the leaf cover and the white bark.  She let out a mournful cry.  “Maa-aa-aa!”  Oh, my goodness!  “Steve!”  She was skin and bones.  A dry umbilical cord hung from her belly.  Her long tail was caked with mud.  She rose and began walking away from us.  She was shaky and obviously hungry.  We started throwing out questions to each other.  What do we have here?  (I guessed a goat because sheep don’t have long tails. What did I know?)  Where is her mother?  She needs help.  What should we do?  Where can we take her?  How do we catch her?  How involved do we want to get?  Where is the ranger station?  How long would it take to get there?  It’s getting dark; should we set up camp and make dinner first?

We decided to catch her and drive her toward the ranger station, even though we knew it was closed.  I put on my leather fire gloves and picked her up.  She weighed almost nothing, but I wanted to be gentle and careful of her sharp hoofs.  We set off slowly toward the populated area of the forest and came upon a big, white pickup truck we thought might belong to a ranger.  It wasn’t a ranger, but a local who was able to tell us that we had a lamb and that there were free-ranging flocks in the forest.  We drove back to camp with this information, hopeful that we’d come upon a shepherd on horseback whom we’d seen earlier.  As we set up camp, the lamb stayed close.  We tried to feed her milk from a water bottle, but she just didn’t catch on.  She was bumping and nuzzling between my legs, looking to nurse.  I felt helpless not having the equipment she was seeking.  Steve wanted to allow her to sleep in the tent with us that night to keep warm.  I feel like an ogre now for saying ‘no’, but I was more “citified” back then.  She slept on a blanket just outside the tent with her back against its slope all night.  In the morning, we made breakfast, took pictures and figured out a plan.

Looking for milk in all the wrong places

The plastic bottle fails

So skinny

What am I going to do with you, huh?

Love me!

We decided to take a hike.  Perhaps we’d find the shepherd.  Perhaps Lamb would find her mother.  We set out with Lamb following for a bit, then she turned around and sat at the base of the tent again.  We went off toward the valley overlook.  Suddenly, I heard a clanking bell sound and the bleating of…SHEEP!  The flock was in the valley!  We raced back to camp, put Lamb in the car, and drove off to the valley.  I will never forget the image of Steve crossing the road with Lamb in his outstretched hands, little legs flailing.  It wasn’t so easy as just setting her down off the side of the road, though.  Oh, no!  She kept following ME!  I’d creep as close as I dared to the flock without scaring them further away, set her down and then turn and run toward Steve.  He was laughing his head off because bounding behind me with more energy than she actually had was the little Lamb, ears flapping, leaping over the tall grass.  Obviously, we had to use more stealth, more trickery.  I crept very carefully in toward some ewes, put Lamb beside me and stayed stock still.  Finally, she recognized her own kind and started moving toward them.  As she moved in, I moved back, until finally there was enough distance between us that she couldn’t see me.  She began pursuing the ewes, bleating and trying to nurse.  My last vision of her was rather sad.  She came up behind a ewe who turned and knocked her off her feet with an angry neck butt.  I saw Lamb’s white legs upended in the grass.  She hadn’t much strength left, but I hoped her persistence would get her some milk.  Or that the shepherd would show up soon.  I turned toward the car in earnest and forbid myself to look back.

Of course I’ll never know the exact outcome of our encounter with Lamb.  I am grateful for all that she taught us about being open to what arises, talking about how we want to behave toward others, and acting with compassion in the best way we can.  That little Lamb was instrumental in our formation in many ways, and I hope that we were able to help her.

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Sunday Stroll

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My neighborhood is probably fairly typical for suburban USA, but I always find things that strike my imagination as anything but.  There’s a story wherever you look.  Here are a few I found yesterday.

The house on the hill was once owned by a retired sea captain who could be spotted occasionally behind the iron parapet with a spyglass, looking toward Lake Michigan.  Sometimes I hear him when the wind roars in the trees, shouting “Thar she blows!”

Mrs. McGillicuddy was hanging out the wash one day, when a German Shepherd came barreling around the corner of the house and ran right under her skirts.  This sock flew out of reach and remains in the maple tree on Church Street to this day.  (What happens to the story if I don’t capitalize the ‘s’?)

“Momma?  Can we make a snowman family in the front yard?  Please?”  “Nonsense, children.  That’s not necessary.  I have one I ordered from WalMart’s Home Decor department right here.  There!  Now run inside and watch the TV until dinner.”

The meteorite streamed through the dark night sky, blazing a menacing trail of fire toward the quiet, white house on the corner where Carol & Ken slept.  It whistled past the living room window, sending Fluffy on arthritic legs across the rug and under the sofa on the opposite wall.  With a steaming hiss, it plopped into the snow.  Ken snored loudly and rolled over on his left side.

Enjoy your Sunday amusements!  The sun is shining, and I think we’re off on a hike this afternoon.