Monthly Archives: December 2015

Tile House: Thursday Doors Challenge

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Entrance to the Tile House
Fraccionamiento La Floresta, Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

IMG_9164.jpgIf you think this front door is wild, you should see the rest of the house! Although I was told  it was built by John Robert Powers who founded the Powers Modeling Agency, I later received this comment from Adriana Cornejo, who seems to know much more about the house than I do.  Thanks, Adriana. One of the things I like best about blogging is how much I’ve learned from comments expanding or pointing out misinformation in my blogs. Here is what Adriana says: 

Walter Thornton the owner (not John Robert Powers, who was his competitor) spent 30 years building this house. He bought the house when it was under construction and added many rooms through the years. He traveled to Guadalajara very often to buy tile and had it delivered to the house. Then he worked on the designs, his hands where always blistering from the cement. He employed 2 to 3 people at all times, all this while raising 6 kids. He wanted to build 6 bungalows, one for each kid, but he died before this could happen. The property has 3 bungalows. You can check his bio HERE.

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Look below at barbwit’s comment if you’d like to see another fantastic tile house in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

https://miscellaneousmusingsofamiddleagedmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/thursday-doors-december-3-2015/

Dykstra-Brown, Tile House

Art Fusion: Cee’s Odd Ball Challenge, Week 49

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Art Fusion

The funky Gecko Gallery in Ajijic, Mexico, has a perfect solution to an overloaded electrical circuit and it only cost ten pesos (two five pesos coins) to solve the problem!  I hated to ask to photograph the art, but I had no compunction about photographing their fuse box! Art is everywhere.  I enjoyed my friend Mario’s two shows opening on the same night in Ajijic, and enjoyed other spontaneous photography “finds” as well.

http://ceenphotography.com/2015/12/06/cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge-2015-week-49/

Flor del Oro: Flower of the Day Challenge, Dec. 6, 2015

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Flor del Oro

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http://ceenphotography.com/2015/12/06/flower-of-the-day-december-6-2015-a-slice-of-sunshine/

Uncornered

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                                                                         Uncornered

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Corners are the great equalizer, for it is a fact that no matter how large or small the house, every corner is exactly the same size. I remember being so small that I could fit all the way into a corner, right up to where it bent. If I was facing the wall, I could hold my head straight and fit my tongue into the crack that spread out in an L to form the two sides of the corner. If I faced outwards, I felt less punished and more ready to branch out from the corner into the kitchen, perhaps, with the refrigerator to be visited and a cherry popsicle to be collected on my way out into the world of my house.

Lying on my back on the purple living room rug––a floor that, although it extended to each corner of the room, had no actual corners itself. No chance of punishment. Facing downwards on the rug was entertainment: playing jacks or putting together a picture puzzle, moving paper dolls around their world of Kleenex box furniture, pot and pan swimming pools and matchbox coffee tables. In this paper universe were treasures purloined from the jewelry boxes of our mothers. Rhinestone bracelets became flapper necklaces and ruby-colored rings bangle bracelets. A folding fan stretched from side-to-side of the corner became the dressing room where Debra Paget donned her dressing gown, slipping out of her red paper high heels.

In the corner of my sister’s closet was the little cave I’d carved out of the shoe boxes and cardboard boxes of cast-off toys. There I’d wait for her to arrive home with friends in tow, to eavesdrop on their conversations in hopes of finding out who the boy was who had called her on the phone and hung up without identifying himself when he asked if she was there and I’d said no, she was out on a date. I might discover what she was going to give me for my birthday or hear any of the interesting secrets shared by girls four years my senior. But instead, it was the corner I fell asleep in, to wake up hours later when my mother called us down to supper.

“Where’s Judy?” I heard her ask my sister from the bottom of the stairs.

“She’s not up here,” I heard my sister answer as she went hop skipping down the stairs, two at a time. Even after I heard the door close at the bottom of the stairs, I stayed quietly where I was, barely breathing.

Five minutes later, I heard my sister clomping up the stairs again—looking in every room, the bathroom, under beds, in every closet except her own—I guess because she knew I couldn’t be there since she’d been in her own room for the hour before supper. I stayed quiet, giggling inside.

After my sister went downstairs,  I sneaked quietly out into the hall and down the stairs in my stocking feet, then creaked open the door and went running around the corner into the kitchen and dinette to take my usual place at the table—on the bench against the wall.

“Where were you?” my sister asked, “You weren’t anywhere!”

“It’s a secret!” I answered, and to this day, my whereabouts that day are an unsolved family mystery.

“Where was she?” They ask each other. Then, “Where were you?” they ask me again, but try as they may, no one has ever cornered me to give an answer.

Didn’t follow the daily prompt today as I’ve written about this one a couple of times, but here it is: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/strike-a-chord/

 

What I Found When I Got Home from the Beach

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What I Found When I Got Home from the Beach!!!!

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Morrie totally destroyed Frida’s bed but left Diego’s untouched!  BAD DOG!!! Frida is sleeping in my bathroom on the cushy rug tonight.  Guess Morrie needs to be in a cage. And can’t be trusted at home alone.

 

All About Moi?

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PA260084                                                        Cover-to-cover “me?” I don’t think so!!!

                                                                            All About Moi?

The Prompt: If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover. https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/this-is-your-life/

Good writing consists as much of knowing what to leave out as in what to put in, so if the book included everthing that has and will happen to me, I think I’d have to say no thanks if offered a copy!

Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye!

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Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye!

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Eye-spy

Papyrus/Flower of the Day 12/5/15

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Papyrus

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For an incredible view of a tulip, go HERE.

The Stories Held by Things

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The Stories Held by Things

Niata and Solchi sit in the shade of a baobob,
coils of bright plastic between them,
bright green, pink, white, black, green.
Blue. Yellow.
They do not touch the yellow.
They are afraid of it, perhaps,
or dubious. Yellow is the color of the water
that carried their sister away
as she called out to them,
helpless on the bank––
the color
of the skin of their brother
who was surrendered to the water
to be carried away as well.

Yellow is not in their
creative vocabulary
as they wind, wind the plastic cord
into bracelets, forming designs
of checkerboards and crosses,
stripes like the stripes in candy canes
given in December by the missionaries.
Now a band of blue, then back to white lines
on black backgrounds.

 They fantasize about
who would wear these bracelets.
A penny each, they are given for their efforts.
Such cheap adornment—who would buy?
They weave into the bracelets stories
of the other village girls.
The one married to the tiger who carried her away.
The one with a pact made with the devil
who gave her to the handsome rich white man
who, it is said, took her to America
to sit in a chair and be waited upon,
preserving her beauty like any shiny thing
laid on a shelf.

This girl, Rishan, has entered the folklore of the town
in her lifetime. They imagine her, at nighttime by the fire,
on her throne in America. Perhaps a couch
by Ikea or Walmart or other shopping places
of the rich and famous. Like diamonds, she sparkles
in the heat of July—perhaps in a bikini her mother
would blush at, reclined by a pool of sparkling water
that she never enters, meant as she is to remain
at the edge of life. One beautiful thing
surrounded by others.

 On their tongues
are stories of Rishan and their sister
carried away, their brother lost.
They store their memories as each completed bracelet
is cast in the basket with the others;
so by night time, they cannot tell
who made which.
Their lives so cast together
that they can barely tell the difference
between them. So that when
Niata slices her finger on the knife
meant to cut the plastic strips,
Solchi cries out, thinking it was
her own hand that was cut.

 Such is the sameness of life in these places
where baubles are constructed
for American ladies to buy in a gallery
miles from town in a Wyoming outpost
of the rich and famous—a retreat
for fantasies of Westerns watched in their youth.
Dude ranches, golf courses, polo fields
and a gallery made special by the thirty miles they must drive
to comb through treasures from Mexico, India and Africa.
All the places the gallery owner goes who loves to shop––
bringing back treasures for others to buy.
This huge basket filled with bracelets
reduced from four dollars to one dollar to fifty cents.

 I line my arms with them.
They are cheap treasures—a steal at this price
and when I bring them home to Mexico,
I wear them more often than the silver bracelets
purchased over a life time—favorites all.
Perhaps contentment in life
consists of creating new favorites
and treasuring all, regardless of the price;
so that when we are asked to surrender all,
there is no accounting necessary.
All equally valuable—priceless or of so little monetary value
that they have to be valued by their beauty, like Rishan,
put on the pedestal of their memory so these girls
spread near the riverbank like colorful flowers
might imagine themselves stringing pearls
and diamonds, emeralds and beads
of bright lapis lazuli
instead of this humble beauty in the making
that I find as precious
as the stories
their makers will tell
over and over again,
winding words around
long afternoons.

 

Freudian Slip

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Freudian Slip

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Caught in the tangles of last year’s castoff wreaths in our local cemetery, I found the following words. They were scrawled in  a frenzied adult handwriting in fading purple ink on a curled yellowing slip of lined  paper with one jagged edge, as though it had been ripped from a journal:

Behind the door of my dream, I heard a knocking. I walked down a tree-lined corridor to the door at the end. As I drew nearer, the knocking grew louder and more frenzied. I struggled with the bolt, which would not open, but as I finally drew it back, there was an explosion of sound—organ music playing a dirge in such a joyful manner that it sounded like a celebration instead of the reflection of death.

As the door creaked open, I heard the crash of glass breaking and then the tinkle and scrape of this glass being ground down to shards and powder as the door opened over it. There was such a bright light shining from behind the figure standing on the other side of the door that I could make out only her silhouette—a woman with an elderly stance wearing a long skirt. She was large of bosom and had thin wisps of hair piled untidily on top of her head. In one hand, held down to her side, was a basket. In the other hand was a jar.

I drew closer to the woman, to try to get her body between my eyes and the source of the bright glare—to try to see who she was. When I was but six inches from her, I finally recognized her as my grandmother. She was wearing the same navy dress with pearl buttons and gravy stains down the front that she had been wearing the last time I remember seeing her. In the basket was a mother cat with three kittens nursing. In the jar was chokecherry jelly, if its handwritten label was to be believed.

As I drew up to hug her and kiss her cheek, she started humming a song—some church hymn, perhaps “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” It was hard to recognize because she hummed it under her breath—with little inward gasps at times that made it sound like she was eating the song and then regurgitating it.

Her eyes were vacant as she looked over my shoulder. “Grandma, it’s me!” I said, but she still didn’t look at or acknowledge me.

“Do you want to play Chinese Checkers?” I asked. It was the one activity I could remember that both my grandma and I enjoyed.

She expressed a long intake of breath, shook her head no and held out the basket to me.

“Is this a gift?” I asked.

“No, it is an obligation,” she hissed, and as the basket passed from her hand to mine, she seemed to deflate—whooshing backwards out of sight—until only the basket of cat and kittens and the jar of chokecherry jelly lying sideways on the trail she had vanished down gave testimony to her presence.

“Bye, Grandma,” I called wistfully down the trail she had vanished down. “I love you.”

But I didn’t love her. I had this memory of sleeping with her in her feather bed and almost smothering trapped between the thick feather pillow and comforter. I have an explicit memory of holding the pillow over her face and her struggling to get free. It was a joke and I hadn’t meant to smother her, really, but there was such power in the fact that she could not fight off an 8-year-old girl that it made me hold the pillow over her face for a few seconds longer than I wanted to or should have. She was all right. Just frightened as I had been frightened so often by her stories of poor little Ella and all the wrongs done to her in her lifetime. It was as though I had to choose sides—her side or the side of the people who had done mean things to her. And like the little devil she always made me out to be—I chose the other side.

 

The Prompt: Everything Changes––You encounter a folded slip of paper. You pick it up and read it and immediately, your life has changed. Describe this experience.https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/everything-changes/