FOTD
For Cee’s FOTD. (Also for “Last Photo for October,” but I can’t find the link. Help if you have it and see this!)
Update: Ah! Thanks, Bushboy!
FOTD and Last Photo for October, Nov 1, 2020, Moss Roses
2 Replies
Monthly Archives: October 2020
Light and Dark
Our Children Follow in Our Footsteps
(Click on photos to enlarge.)
Our children follow in our footsteps
Light and Dark
Darkness is a costume that light dons every night,
drawing ghoulish shadows around her blinding light.
Outlandish to surrender to midnight’s inky stain,
then return as Aurora—shedding her light again.
Why do we seek our opposites? What could the purpose be?
The mountains meet the valleys. Desert gives way to sea.
Every single element and every creature, too—
Christian and agnostic, Arab, Hindu, Jew,
lives with all these contrasts jostling within.
Goodness gives way to evil. Piety battles sin.
Frolicking or feuding, our inner natures jell—
drawing us toward Heaven and/or jerking us toward Hell.
Day by day how can we know how we’ll go down in history?
This alchemy of opposites still remains Nature’s mystery.
Word Prompts today are shadows, outlandish, ghoulish, frolic, light and costume.
Zinnias: FOTD, Oct 31, 2020
Friday Fibs: Oct 30, 2020
1. What is a poltergeist?
A perching zeitgeist.
2. What supposedly happens if you look in the mirror and say, “Bloody Mary” three times?
It turns out that whatever you are trying to blame on Mary is still your own fault!!
3. What’s so unlucky about the number 13?
In a baker’s dozen, the extra bonus muffin is always one that has fallen on the floor.
4. Why do banshees scream?
For ice cream.
5. What happens to a vampire in daylight?
They get hot-blooded.
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn’t about a monster who could kill people in their dreams. What was it about?
The night Elmer Timshot’s horse got loose.
7. Who did Norman Bates dress up as in the movie, Psycho?
It is said that each day after filming, he dressed up as Anthony Perkins and went home.
Young Frankenstein.
8. The Amityville Horror wasn’t about a haunted house. What was it about?
The horror of living among the Stepford Wives. Too much cheerfulness and perfection can be just too much.
9. What are the three witches doing at the beginning of MacBeth?
Toiling, troubling and doubling-over.
10. What classic monster lives under the Paris Opera House?
Donald Trump is going to live there after he loses the election. It is debatable whether they’ll have him as the other monsters think he gives monsters a bad name.
For Fibbing Friday
Black and White Sunday: Shapes
Click on photos to enlarge.
In case you are wondering, the second photo is of a spiny orb weaver spider. It’s only the second one I’ve seen in 19 years. They are very small–about the size of an eraser on the end of a pencil.
Florida Halloween Costume
Hilarious
I Am
I am from thick ankles and steady determination. Stubborn Dutchmen, prairie dirt, waving wheat fields, night sounds that carried me away. Inkwells and Our Miss Brooks, Christmas tree tinsel that hurt your fillings when you chewed it, chicken pox and neighbors’ dogs, tiny bunnies rescued from furrows, my sister’s old prom dresses in a trunk in the upstairs hall. I am cherry trees and cherries for pitting. Pitched tents and new friends, prayer and questions, spelling bees and math, Annie-I-Over and hollyhocks. Sunday rollerskating on the basketball court. Ten-cent movies and Bit-o-Honeys, ditch ’em and long summer nights. An attic never opened, a basement too frequently explored, dust of Sunday explorations down long dirt roads. Small prairie towns and flights of fancy. Pretending my real self, while trying to be from where I was. Caught in a net with scissors. Cutting my way out. Taking any road elsewhere. A highway, a plane, a ship, an escape, a looking for, a finding, a losing, a continual origin story of my own making. Full breaths. Sinking in. Making memories. Remembering memories made for me. I am. I am becoming. What I was I still am. Self changing self and sinking back into self.
Ode to a Spider, Best Spinner of All, and to a Mosquito, Caught in its Thrall
To the Spider
Insatiable monster, you spin your fine strands,
creating your trap with abdominal glands.
You then cast your nets out into the breeze
that carries them off to the bushes and trees.
With anticipation, you wait in the center
for mosquitos or flies—whatever may enter
your gossamer trap. Then, their prospects are dire,
for one tremor of contact is all you require
to be off in a flash to put them to bed
with a cocoon of silk wrapped from bottom to head.
To the Mosquito
“I am” says the spider, as she sips out your sap,
“going to have a light lunch, and then take a nap!”
The spider pulls the silk created from liquid in its body through its spinnnerets – silk-secreting organs on its abdomen. Once the thread is started, the spider lifts its spinnerets into the breeze. It’s the breeze that is the secret to the spider’s ability to spin a web from one tree to another.
Prompt words today are anticipation, insatiable, monster, require, I am and spider.
Indecision: Cee’s FOTD, Oct 30, 2020
Click on photos to enlarge
I rescued this hibiscus from a pile Pasiano had clipped from the bush next to the ramp leading down to my studio. I couldn’t decide which photo to use, so created a cluster.
For Cee’s FOTD
All in Everything
Click on photos to enlarge.
All in Everything
My heart as empty as a room the party’s left behind,
I tell myself I am at peace and that I do not mind;
but it may be pertinent, if I am being truthful,
to admit as I say these words, that I am feeling ruthful.
Day-by-day, I improvise, insisting I am free.
‘I” can pursue anything not limited by “we.”
Driving past the railroad tracks, an engine rushing by
reminds me of those trips when I was young and wild and high.
Cheyenne out to Oregon, Sydney to Melbourne town.
Always a new place and new adventure going down.
That local train in Java, stopping a thousand times
at every local village–the hawkers and the mimes
flooding all the aisles and all the window frames
insistently proficient in their selling games.
All the places where I went teeming with new faces,
constantly observing as life put me through its paces.
Before old age annexed me, I had a brilliant life
as student and explorer, as writer, artist, wife.
Those inevitable things, grave and prompting sorrow
were always covered over by the prospect of tomorrow.
But now that tomorrow is not such a certain thing,
I simply fall in line with whatever life may bring.
Knowing that I can’t flee fate, still I have seized my power
by finding a whole universe in bee and bird and flower.
j
Prompt words today are empty room, pertinent, improvising, annex, railroad tracks and grave.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 