Author Archives: lifelessons

Unknown's avatar

About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

The Numbers Game #94. Please Play Along! Oct 13, 2025

32 Replies

Welcome to “The Numbers Game #94”. Today’s number is 216. 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.***

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The cowgirls are sister Patti and friend Karen. I’m the “Sunbeam Bread” girl..mystery personality.
For those of you who don’t know who the Sunbeam bread girl was, here’s a photo of the one I was imitating in the previous photo.
Chopping the spines off the agave.
This little girl may be one of the friendliest in camp, at least when it comes to the counselors. She has a hug and a kiss for me every morning and when she leaves in the afternoon.

Oct 12, 2025, San Juan Cosala Malecon

2 Replies

The water in the lake is up at its highest level again and I went down to check it out. Obvioously, the kids were taking full advantage of the water level!!!

Click on photos to enlarge.

Restaurant Rooster, for Cellpic Sunday

7 Replies

Luckily, I hadn’t ordered the chicken the day this fellow decided to cruise through the restaurant.

For Cellpic Sunday

Dream Diary for The Sunday Whirl

6 Replies

 

Dream Diary

Tattered strips of memory are so easily forgotten,
be they draped in velvet or wound in filmy cotton.
Yet moments revealed in our dreams may spin us back in time
to an earlier period when we were in our prime.
The sound track of our dreaming, be it jazz or rock or rap
be it lullaby or roar, may serve us as a map
putting us in touch with times we’ve chosen to forget—
showing just the tip of an iceberg we’d regret
to see the submerged truth of, preferring to recall
just what we have chosen, not remembering it all.

 

 

Words for the Sunday Whirl are: draped moment velvet reveal tips jazz touch back roar filmy strips forgotten

“Dreamy” for Lens Artists Challenge

5 Replies

Click on Photos to Enlarge.

\
And so to bed, to dream of the next day’s adventures

The Lens Artists Challenge  prompt for this week is “Dreamy” (The illustrations are from my  book Sunup Sundown Song.)

A&Wesome Burgers for the Ragtag Daily Prompt “Sandwich” Prompt

15 Replies

Okay, when I saw the Ragtag prompt was “sandwich,” I decided I simply must rerun this post from 2016:

img_5457-1
Today dawned rainy and foggy with a prediction it would last all day, so instead of spending five hours on the Cabot Trail before heading southwards for another three hour journey to get my car returned to Hertz by 9 p.m., I decided to head immediately for the airport and my overnight stay at the very classy Alt hotel which is located right at the Halifax airport.  Very handy.  Enroute, I noticed an A&W Drive-in and had to stop. I thought they’d gone out of business years ago but here is proof that they are still alive and thriving in Nova Scotia. Thanks, WordPress, for the very timely prompt.  I didn’t even know what it was until I got to the wifi of my hotel in Halifax. Nice coincidence that I was already supplied with an illustration for today’s prompt of “Sandwich!”

Version 3

A&Wsome Burgers

The first drive-in I went to when I was just a kid
(before there was McDonalds or wax cups with a lid)
was an A&W sixty miles from home
with root beer served in frosty mugs and sporting heads of foam.
I haven’t seen another for years, so I believed
there weren’t any anymore—a fact that I have grieved.
So while driving into Halifax, imagine my elation
when I saw an A&W next to a filling station!

I had meant to fill my rental car before I turned it in,
‘cause the prices when Hertz fills them up are really quite a sin,
but all thoughts of filling up the car vanished in a blink
with thoughts of luscious burgers and foamy things to drink.
There’s mama burger, papa burger and even a teen,
but still no baby burgers, or anything between.
They have onion rings and French fries and something called poutine?
An addition to the menu? I found it most obscene.

Now it has been a long time since I have had the fun
of consuming family members stuffed into a bun,
but I am really very sure that poutine is a new one.
In all my life I’ve never before had the chance to chew one!
I asked the friendly sales girl for a bit of erudition
that could clue me in to this Canadian addition
to what I thought was sacrosanct—an act of pure sedition.
Just what has the world come to when franchises have permission

to add things to the menu? It simply is not right
that they can think up something new for us to bite!!!
She filled me in on what it was and said it was delicious.
French fries, cheese curd, gravy??? A mixture most pernicious.
What good are French fries served with cheese that’s certain to taste boggy,
topped off with gravy that no doubt would make the whole mess soggy?
I bought a teen burger and naked French fries at their best—
then left to eat them in my car—a sure sign of protest.

But in the end my protest was paid most dearly for.
For when I took my food to go, slamming shut the door
and roaring off to eat my food in another place,
I ended up with poutine all over my face.
For I forgot to buy my gas which would have cost a third
of what I had to pay to Hertz—a total most absurd.
Yet even though my protest in my budget put a crimp,
at least I did not stoop to eating French fries that were limp!!!

The prompt for RDP is “Sandwich.”

“Open Invitation” For Reena’s Exploration Challenge #402

9 Replies

Doorways, Passageways, Transitions

IMG_2015

IMG_2015 (1)

This statement by okcForgottenMan written as a comment to these photographs is so true and so related to these photos of Daniel’s house and place of business that was next to the house I rented in La Manzanilla for a few months each year that I must reproduce it here:

“I marvel at how Mexican businesses (and some homeowners) build doorways so differently from what I know in the U.S., where our doors are rigidly defined, narrow, and usually closed (even if they automatically open). There in Mexico, the doorways to the shops are usually wide enough to drive a car through, and they stay open, inviting, during business hours. They blur the distinction between being in the shop and being just outside. Viva Mexico!”

For Reena’s Exploration Challenge #402 the prompt is: Passages, Doorways, Thresholds, Transitions

An Autumn Garden

6 Replies

Click on photos to enlarge.

For the Cosmic Photo Challenge we are to post photos of our autumn garden

The Beginning for SOCS

14 Replies

The Beginning

You are in a hotel room.  The drapes are drawn. No one else knows you are here.  There is a white covering on the bed—something light that flutters with the fan blades as they go around and around, just like your thoughts.  He has gone.  You don’t know whether to be glad about this or sorry, for with him have vanished all of the terrible things in your life along with all of the best ones.  Mainly, you will now need to decide for yourself what to do next.  What will you have for dinner now that his needs do not need to be taken into account?  When will you go to bed and what side of the bed will you sleep on?  It is like beginning a new life with all of the “musts” and “shoulds” erased.  You can do anything in the world that you want to do.

You take off your dress and then your underwear.  You can have another piece of pie without wondering what he will think the next time he looks at you naked. No one to calculate what went where and when.  Is the roll over your waistline evidence of that triple chocolate ice cream cone?  That extra inch on your thigh the milk you have in your coffee each morning? 

You step to the mirror and look closely, not overlooking for once.  Are your curves artistic or simple obesity? Do you yourself care so long as no one else is looking?  Is his leaving a blessing or a curse?

You move out to the terrace.  It is dark and no one is looking.  The night air has a slight movement that you would not be noticing if you were clothed.  It is almost sensuous, this movement of air like light caressing fingers—the way he could never quite make his fingers  behave enough to be.  Nature has become your lover and perhaps this will be enough. Always before, you have replaced each one who left, but maybe this time you will not bother.  You and the natural world will conspire to meet your needs and you will be shameless in your environment, carefree in your living.  You will pass before mirrors without looking away, even when you stand as you are standing now.  Without cover.  Without any flattering draping or cloaking color.  You.  No longer us.

 

The SOCS prompt is “In The Beginning” (Image generated making use of AI)

Daffynitions For Fibbing Friday

15 Replies

Words to define for Fibbing Friday are:

1. Baloney: a batter’s first missed pitch
2. Hogwash: A facility used to clean Harley Davidsons.
3. Codswallop: A mercy blow to a caught fish’s head after they are removed from the fish hook.
4. Bunkum: What counselors do to campers at bedtime.
5. Claptrap: Another word for mittens
6. Fly tipping: The act of giving gratuities to flight attendants.
7. Tripe:  One’s third bathroom visit of the night
8. Balderdash: A marathon race for male senior citizens
9. Trash: A choir director’s command to silence the first syllable of “Tra la la.”
10.Scrap: A rude statement made about something of low quality.