I love these strange markings on this palm tree in my back yard. I believe they are caused by the tree trimmers parking their machetes in the tree while they go about their business clearing the severed off palm fronds that have fallen from above as they were up in the tree trimming it. This is not a guess. I’ve seen them take a mighty swing, chopping the blade into the tree to hang there as they go about their business.
For Sunday Trees.
And to help with the dishes.. especially those that have held ice cream
I haven’t perfected my feline vocabulary, but I think that when she took a short cut across the keys of the mac I was working on, that it was her attempt to sign her name.
(C)AT 66(6)? Is she signing herself in as devil cat with the first and last characters deleted? Rather sinister.
Acting nonchalant about the whole thing, she leaps on over to the closed lid of the Acer computer to wash up.
When Mom goes to brush her teeth, it’s a good time to go along and check out the comforts of the towel cupboard.
This video reveals the facts regarding the staggering cost of immigration detentions:
This sandwich, which I’ve had for three meals in the past two days is the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. If I get enough requests in comments, I’ll put the recipe (sort of) on my blog. Be forewarned. I just assemble ingredients without measuring, so I’ll tell you how I made it but you’ll have to figure out proportions by taste, like I do.
Since a few of you asked, HERE is the recipe for the above pictured barbecued pork sandwich.
This prompt asks questions relating to food. Below are my answers:
The QUESTIONS:
1. Do you enjoy food from countries that are not your own? Yes. Thai, Indonesian, Mexican, Italian, Ethiopian.
2. When you prepare salad for yourself, do you rip your greens (lettuce, spinach, &c…), or do you cut them? Shred, then chop into inch long pieces.
3. There’s a saying that goes: “Life is short, eat dessert first.” What do you think of that advice? Good advice as a metaphor, not literally.
4. Have you ever thrown spaghetti against the wall to test for doneness? — If it sticks, it’s done (so they say) — What other such kitchen habits might you have?Nope. Never. Stupid advice and even if it worked, I know I’d have to clean it up so I still wouldn’t.
5. How often do you eat fish? Never ever.
6. When purchasing food for yourself, do you check the nutritional label? If so, what are you checking for? Sometimes for salt and calories.
7. How often do you eat salad as a meal? As an entire meal, once or twice a year, but I eat salad with most meals.
8. Do you have any food quirks? For example: do you arrange a particular food in a certain way before eating? Or eat certain foods in a particular way every time? (i.e.: bite the heads off of gummy bears) I love blue cheese on salads but can’t stand it in any dish that is hot.
9. When boiling water for pasta or whatnot, what are your “tricks” for keeping the water from boiling over? I put a metal spoon or fork in the water.
10. Are there any recipes that have been passed down through the generations in your family? Have you passed them to anyone outside of your family? or are they a closely guarded secret? Scalloped potatoes, meatloaf, steamed steak, ice cream custard from my mother. Stroganoff shepherd’s pie from my sister.
11. In general, how do you feel about “diet” foods? Meaning: foods with artificial sweeteners or alternative fats in them. For example: Diet soda or low fat muffins. I am trying to cut back on diet sodas. I prefer them over regular ones, which I never drink. I use nonfat lactose-free milk and nonfat soy milk. Stevia or no-calories sweeteners.
12. Have you purchased food online? What do you think about that idea? No, except for packages of Schilling/McCormich powdered chili mix or spaghetti mix which is quite expensive in Mexico. When I’m going to the states, I will occasionally order it via Amazon.
13. When cooking for you and yours, what kinds of experiments have you tried? I often cook according to what is in the fridge. I rarely record amounts for recipes I think up..I just cook to taste. See testimony of this in the caption under the lonche (sandwich) above.
14. Do you now, or have you ever, grown or raised any of the food you eat? When I was a little girl, I planted a garden. I can’t remember what was in it, though.
15. Are you a vegetarian? If not, has the idea of becoming one ever crossed your mind? No. No.
16. When arranging the food on your plate, does everything have to be separated, or is it okay for your food to touch? Okay to touch.
17. When eating out, what foods on the menu might push you out of your comfort zone? (for example: pineapple on pizza makes some people twitch) I agree. No pineapple or fresh tomatoes or mushrooms on pizza. No tomatoes on salads. NO FISH or organ meats.
18. Do you have a sweet tooth? If so, what kinds of foods generally satisfy the craving? Ice cream!!!!! Chocolate.
19. What foods (if any) do you like to mix that other people might find strange? Potato chips with ketchup and cottage cheese.
20. When eating out, at what kind of restaurant do you prefer to dine? Mexican or Italian, fast food or Thai.
21. In general, how do you feel about organic food? Good idea but I don’t go out of my way to look for it.
22. What foods (if any) do you eat when you are happy or unhappy? Ice Cream. Potato Chips. Chocolate
Afternoon Off
There is more in the air than possibilities.
Smoke, fine gnats and wheat chaff.
Here then over here.
Some things get the mind off.
Others snap it back.
White side-winding middles of the smoke.
Letting the cigarettes smoke themselves.
Moons of my fingernails
pull the sea,
But for now, I don’t go near.
Wheat fields and sagebrush
or twisted dreams of seaweed?
Ocean salt. My bread.
Hussy. Hush her. Do not let the worlds touch.
Whip the tide but don’t go near the abalone.
Keep a border.
Every Sunday, sweep the sand back to the sea.
The Word of the Day Challenge is possibility.
The Place
This year,
all of the hard to reach places,
difficult situations and difficult people
are falling away,
and I’m letting them.
I need an easier place for my heart.
Some gentler place
where my heart fits.
Meanwhile…
I’ve been misplacing everything,
and now it seems
that it’s my heart that I can’t find.
Knowing myself,
I know that I will never find it by looking,
but instead, must wait until I chance upon it
in some spot where I would never think to look.
Some place where it has been placed absent-mindedly
to free my mind for other tasks,
or perhaps where a part of me kind to myself
knew it would be safe for awhile
while I was not in need of it
So I’m not looking for my heart.
Instead, I’m trying to build a new place
so that if I ever find my heart, it will have
a spot that it fits into just right.
A spot that has been prepared for it.
A warm spot and cushioned
away from elbows extended
just right for knocking hearts off ledges
The place for my heart
will not be a high place–
no careless place that earthquakes
could spill it from.
It will not be a low place–
too near toes that might stumble
over a heart brought low.
It will not be a place in direct sunlight
that might fade a heart away.
The place for my heart
will be a handy place.
A place I don’t have to think about twice.
A dependable place like the door of my refrigerator:
grocery list, dentist appointments,
art openings, family pics,
and my heart—
here in this busy place near
other necessary things.
A place like that
is where my heart will want to go
once I get it back again
from wherever it has fallen
or been kicked to
or hidden.
In a whisper,
probably at night
while I am sleeping,
it will come into my dreams
with a plan for where to put us both.
So I will dream harder,
watching for the heart I barely even recognize.
Listen for its whisper.
Listen for its shout.
Let it grab onto me and pull me after it.
Because while I’ve been building
the place for my heart to go,
it has grown so large that it no longer fits
inside of anything;
so that when I chance upon it,
my heart will just open its arms
and welcome me in.
Retablo, “Restoring the Peace” by Judy Dykstra-Brown jdb photo
For the Ragtag prompt, heart.
It is time once again for this gorgeous tree to bloom. Click on photos to enlarge.
Does 2.65 million dollars in financing for the Republican National Committtee from three private prison firms have anything to do with Trump’s executive order to abolish Obama’s policy of deprivatizing prisons and to turn them into immigration detention camps for Mexican illegal immigrants and their children? MSNBC claims private prisons have forced immigrant detainees into slavery or they face solitary confinement. Please watch this video!!!
San Miguel Nocturn.
It’s two in the morning.
Dogs call out greetings or warnings,
the near dogs hoarse in their excitement,
the far dogs mellow and rounded
in the echoing distance.
What are they saying?
Bright moon like a bowl,
new bitch in the territory,
a whole leg bone today?
All night long they bark and bay
until 4 am when the first
then the second and the third rooster crows.
Someone throws a handful of grain
and the chickens cluck like popcorn
in a finally hot pan,
waking the city which only
seemed to sleep.
The lobby steward, waiting
for the last guest to enter,
nods at his post,
t.v. static charging the air around him.
The guard by the gate waits
for the honk of a horn.
A woman crouches
over a pad of paper in the bathroom
so as not to awaken her friend.
Her pen scratches as hens scratch
in the dirt of the yard below her window.
The friend’s almost imperceptible
snores are a counterpoint to the music
of the first cars
accelerating up the cobbled hills.
New sounds build the symphony:
the slam of a car door,
footsteps on the stairs,
water in the pipes.
A city’s wide morning yawns
clash and reverberate
in the still darkness
as dogs bark like a hammer
pounding repetitiously,
building the new day.
San Miguel de Allende, 2002. Click on any of the last 5 photos to enlarge all.
This old convent, converted into a hotel, is where I have always stayed when I go to San Miguel. Bob and I stayed there just months before his death. This poem was written a few months later when I revisited our favorite places in San Miguel with a friend. That is what this poem was written. To see the poem that I wrote that night, go HERE.
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Egrets in Benito Juarez Park
By threes and fours, they soar in and alight
on sparse branches of the bent, high-spreading trees.
Below them the steady beat of dribbling basket balls
whose rhythms they punctuate with high-pitched squawks.
A hundred or more now bark like gulls,
protesting each new arrival perched too near
and settle invisible against a sky that’s glazed so pale
by torn white clouds,
that it’s barely a different color
From clouds and egrets.
A feather floats down, soars sideways
to rest under the green bench.
and I retrieve it, like a message from a saint.
More birds soar in,
their legs like two black straws held parallel and horizontal.
On limb after limb, they stand exposed, flapping wings,
with neck first fragile,
then settled into a dowager’s hump.
Once motionless, they, too, become
invisible above the shouts of children,
rebound of a ball against a backboard,
hum of generator, blast of horn, peal of church bell.
Thirty more birds attempt the impossible—
to fill gaps in a tree where no gaps exist—
like a Christmas tree with not one single limb left to ornament.
Birds lift, sift to a different tree.
Now that the stronger limbs are taken,
they perch on swinging branches,
then move to safer perches,
displacing other birds
that drift in turn until more trees fill.
Wave after wave,
on tree after tallest tree,
they settle again to silence.
This happened before we came,
will continue after I leave.
These trees alive with birds that were,
scant hours ago,
solitary waders.
Returning to the posada where I last stayed with you,
I climb staircase after staircase
past the stone room that was ours.
This is the trip I dreaded–
thought I’d never make.
I remember everything:
all the places where we’d been—
the park, the hotel and the plaza,
each favorite cafe made holy from past associations.
Yet I hold only
one feather from the egret,
see only
crenellations of the room across the courtyard where we stayed.
Hear only
the saxophonist, improved since I was here with you,
filling in the intervals between
one dog barking from a rooftop down below
and far off dogs, his accompaniment.
The saxophone spins out lines
through darkness,
the staffs of music a communication
between then and now and what remains
after the birds have flown,
after the saxophone is laid to rest
mute in its coffin, wooden tongue dried stiff.
What remains after the barking dog,
after the stairway crumbles, and the stars have cycled into another sky.
What remains as my life soars away from you,
your stillness framing my flight,
as you stretch invisible,
yet as solid around me
as clouds.
San Miguel de Allende, 2001. Click on any photo to enlarge all.
To see a companion poem and photos, go HERE.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 