Can you guess what this is? No work has been done on the photo, other than to reduce its size. (Yes, it’s in full color.) Once I see 10 guesses here, I’ll tell you what it is. Xill, no fair guessing!!!
We finally spotted a flock of these toucans we’d been looking for for three weeks at the Chacchoben Mayan ruins last week. We fly home today!!!!
For Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #105”. Today’s number is 227 . To play along, go to your photos file folder and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title. This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. Here are my contributions to the album.
**Click on Photos to Enlarge and View as Gallery.**
I’m still in Buenavista, where I’ve been for the past month. Tomorrow we go to spend the night nearer to the airport as we fly back to Guadalajara on the 29th. I went alone to swim today because Xill was feeling ill. While there, I met one of the daughters of this lively family and before I knew it I was caught up in their activities. I sent them these photos on Whatsapp. Hope they received them.
It’s Boxing Day, and the questions this week are a mixed bag of whimsy and anything else!
1. Why is there a fairy on top of the Christmas Tree? Angels are on strike.
2. Why is the 26th December known as Boxing Day in some countries? Disappointment over gifts leads to aggression.
3. What would be the gifts from the Three Wise Men today? Tesla stock, a gold cellphone and tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
4. What is Hogmanay? It is one pig farmer. Yes.
5. How much is a monkey? It is just one.
6. Do crows crow? Yes. and cows caw.
7. Why do milking stools have three legs? The cowherd broke off the third to use in herding the cows in.
8. What is meant by perfect pitch? Three strikes.
9. Where will you find a palm tree? In your hand.
10. What is rolling stock? Cattle in a cattle car on a train or a stash of marijuana.
Creche by Judy Dykstra-Brown
If He
had married the girl and had children
and been less overt with his teachings
of peace and love too radical
for a world immersed in their opposite,
he would then not have changed the world, perhaps,
but only lived in contrast
to that power popular among those who needed it
and effective in keeping those adverse to it quiet.
If he had married the girl, the world would probably have ended up
pretty much how it has anyway, but he might have had a different ending––
grown old, had his cronies over to talk about the good old days,
converted water into wine and served them loaves and fishes.
Mary Magdalene would have danced for them like in the good old days,
and all of his children would have listened in awe to hear the tales
of how he walked on the water,
bade Lazarus to rise from the grave.
He would shush his cronies as they started in
with tales of how he smashed the souvenir stands
and threw the moneychangers out of the temple––
not stories for young ears not quite yet ready to learn revolution.
And all of the ill done in his name might have happened anyway,
but at least he would have had a good life. Would have suffered less.
And some other savior might have found a way to save the world
that would have worked.
For dVerse Poets Open Link Night 398
See other poems HERE.
Photos by Xill Fessenden.
Jungle Bells
A loud peal of thunder awakened me at precisely 5 A.M. this morning of Christmas Eve, 2025. I have been in this little house formed entirely of concrete for the past three weeks. I am 78 years old and this is the third time in my life that I’ve celebrated Christmas without a tree, decorations or presents. I am in the small jungle town of Buenavista, Quintana Roo. Streets are dirt roads carved through the jungle by the tires of the vehicles that use them––bicycles, motorcycles, three-wheeled bicycles and a very occasional car or truck. Deep potholes fill with water during the periodical heavy jungle rains. Dogs serve as topes, slowing down all traffic by lying in the exact center of the dirt pathways..moving only by shifting their head back to hover over their back haunches so that you can avoid them, barely, by moving one wheel out over the edge of the dirt track onto the vegetation that hugs the road closely. After three weeks here, we still get lost, even maneuvering to places we’ve been to dozens of times. With no street markers, directions are limited to distinctive houses, stores..or more often, recognized dogs in the center of the road.
I am traveling with my friend Xill, and today we woke up late and assembled a large shopping bag full of presents for the family whose life we have witnessed by ear from the other side of the wall that separates their dirt-floored home from our concrete one. The baby and dogs have shared their voices the most often, and the dogs have met us each time we open our gates to leave or to return. They are Bambi and Rocky–friendly and accustomed to a treat each time they see us. For them we have brought a bag of dogfood embellished with tinsel. Each of the three daughters will receive a bracelet of semiprecious local stone. The two-year-old a huge transport vehicle filled with various cars and trucks, the two-month old a snuggly soft blanket with matching stuffed hippo, the Mom and Dad two houseplants and a big Christmas box of Ferro-Rocher chocolates. In addition, a spinning top and Christmas stocking full of small toys and candy. I think that is it. Later we will take them tamales made by the mother of our favorite small grocery-store owner.
I think they don’t quite know how to respond to us. Early in our visit, when musicians and men settling off fireworks in celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe came by their house to share music and beer, when I stuck my nose in to see what the hoopla was, they invited me in to see a small boy dancing with one of the men to the music. They offered us beers, which I took even though I don’t drink beer, and we offered them 200 pesos to contribute to their costs. And so, although our intercourse has been limited, I feel tied to this little family that I have heard nightly over the wall that separates us. The baby’s cries, as noted before, and sounds of merriment from the girls long after I would think they would have gone to bed.
I miss the kids I usually give a pinata party for on Xmas, an Easter Egg hunt for Easter. These children are my substitutes, letting me feel some vestige of Christmas spirit even though we have celebrated it so oddly. Everything is everywhere, I have often said, and so it is with Christmas, even when we substitute tamales for turkey, fireworks for Christmas music, a dip in a cold lake for snowball fights. I look back to a Christmas in India, another in Africa, another in Australia. In each, different traditions, new people, even changes in the date when Christmas was celebrated, and the one thing they all had in common was how they prompted memories––the same memories mentioned by my sister in her response to my photos of how I’d spent the day. Family Christmases with a mother who had taught us all to appreciate the traditions of tree, decorations, family, presents and memory–of all of the special happenings that can be shared and remembered for however long nature chooses to give us to remember them.
Image by Surabhi Sapra on Unsplash.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2318366148607327
“You’ll only be able to see and hear this if you subscribe to Facebook, but if you do, click on link! Be sure to turn on sound….Merry Xmas… xoxoox
This is the night sky from Lake Bacalar in Buenavista, Quintana Roo, on Dec. 22, 2025. We got up at 5 to drive through the jungle to the lake to try to view the Ursid Meteor Shower which was supposed to be most active in the hours before dawn. Home at 6:45, chilly and damp from lying out on the wet wooden deck over the water to get free of the surrounding jungle. I saw 6 or 7 meteors in the more than an hour we were there. Xill thinks she saw 13. Most of the action was supposed to take place around the Little Dipper which was not viewable. This is the Big Dipper, which was still in the very dark part of the sky. The lower part of the sky was lightened…probably by the lights of Tulum 2 hours away.
Our viewing spot, in daylight.
For Cellpic Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #104”. Today’s number is 226 (posted by Forgottenman for Judy). To play along, go to your photos file folder and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title. This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. Here are my contributions to the album.
**Click on Photos to Enlarge and View as Gallery.**
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 