Author Archives: lifelessons

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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.

Somehow, Things Just Seem to Work Out

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Somehow, Things Just Seem to Work Out

Sometimes the world’s a slippery slope as though it seeks to best us—
its calumnies and trials just meant to try to test us.
But I have found the hard knocks that seem about to break us
are really just the tempering by means of which life makes us.

Life at its extremities of temperature and weather
tests our very limits and makes us stronger whether
the regions where we find ourselves be boiling hot or frigid ones,
cooling off our hot spots and warming up our rigid ones.

When we are exhausted, life has a way of slowing,
as though it has known all along the direction we’ve been going.
Although we meet with floods and gales, there is a sort of knowing
that’s somehow able to predict the way our winds are blowing.

 

Prompt words today are calumny, slope, exhausted, extremity and region.

Ashton Wildwood Park

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This is the entrance to the  Ashton Wildwood Park that has now been dedicated to  my former brother-in-law Denis Wilcox who passed away a few months ago. We had the dedication for it on  Friday. The dedication arch has not yet been completed, but here is the stone marking the area that he maintained for so many years. He was also on the conservation board for the park.


Above is a photo of some of his kids and grandkids at the dedication

And a photo of the whole crew: kids, their spouses, grandkids and former sis-in-law. 

For Tree Square

Model A Still Going Strong in the 1950’s

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These are photos of my sister Betty and her future husband Denis at her spring formal at Cornell College, Iowa in the mid-1950’s. This car was his pride and joy and I remember going on weekend rides in it when I visited them.

For RDP’s Yesterday’s Cars

Yesterday’s Cars

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Yesterday’s Cars

Yesterday’s cars slanted down where they should
have had fins at the tail, and were square at the hood.
Some required a stepstool to enter the door,
then had a big bump centered there in the floor

The grandfathers of cars weren’t for the faint-hearted.
They required you crank them before they got  started,
and inevitably, when the tires went flat,
a service station wasn’t where you were at.

With no Triple A, the onus was on you
to figure out what you had to do.
The jacks were all manual. Tubes needed air,
so many the driver gave up in despair.

With Mom in the front seat and kids in the rumble,
dad  would pump and unscrew and blather and bumble,
then put out his thumb to beg for a ride
in a car that was passing that had room inside.

He was not feinting his look of distress,
and neither was mom, although I confess
it was an adventure for sister and me
who watched the procedure giggling with glee

as inevitably, he would hoof it to town
and we’d open the car doors, jump happily down
and cavort in a field, searching out hidden treasure
and picking up cockleburs in equal measure.

Then when dad caught a ride back with a fixed wheel,
we’d drive on to a diner for a well-deserved meal,
then be on our way, trouble-free and much faster
for the rest of our trip that was free from disaster.

 

And HERE are another two special photos of Model A’s you won’t want to miss.

Prompt words today are yesterday’s cars, slope, require, feint and inevitable. Image by Philip Schroeder on Unsplash. 

I must admit that this particular situation is fiction, although the predicament certainly must have been reenacted many times in an era earlier than mine.

Ollie Finds a Distraction

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Oops..I can see this video here but not when I try to view it on Notifications or the Reader. Please let me know if it works for you. It should last about 15 seconds, but it  looks like this video doesn’t work except on Facebook. I’ll see if she can send it in another format. Sorry.

I received this message from my friend Kristina who is housesitting for me on my birthday. Hope you can see this video of Ollie and another who remained his playmate and not his prey, but I fear the worst.

Bingo!!!

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Today on July 10th. 2021, I woke up thinking I had to record a very very strange dream and instead saw a message from Forgottenman that I had received my millionth view on my blog as I slept, so now at 8:55 AM, checking my stats, I see that I’ve had l,000,052 views. I guess I’ll never know who was the millionth. When I get home, I’m going to celebrate by actually starting the ball rolling on formatting my two completed books for publication. Please let me be as dedicated to that goal as I’ve been to the blog. My alarm just went off. Must be a signal that I ‘m on the right track??? I can see a bit of sun through a slight opening in the blackout curtain of the motel where I am staying. We’ll head back to St. Paul in a few hours. Then in a few hours more I’ll head to Wyoming. Life goes on….

Hail, Hail.

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Today was the second day of our family reunion and we were sitting outside in my nephew’s backyard in Des Moines, minding our own business and talking one over the other when suddenly we were outshouted by a tremendous hailstorm with huge stones. Here are my nephews presenting some of the golfball-sized hail. Yes, I did get pelted with a few before running into the house and then grabbing a wash pan to put over my head and  go back out to try to find my computer. No it wasn’t outside but safely inside in its case.

One Million Coming Up!!!

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One Millionth View Coming Up!!!!

I started this blog in March of 2013 and started posting a poem a day for NaPoWriMo for the month of April. Then in 2014 after I had posted a poem a day for NaPoWriMo, I continued to write a poem a day to prompts, a practice I’ve continued every day since and today, on July 10, 2021, I will hit my millionth view. Chances are when this happens, I will be riding back to St. Paul from Des Moines, where I came for a memorial and family reunion, so I likely won’t even realize when it happens and will never know who my millionth viewer is, but since my views now stand at 999,982, it is bound to happen.

At any rate, I want to thank all of you who have both viewed my blog and furnished me with the entertainment of viewing yours all these years. There are a few of you who have viewed me and been viewed by me from the very first and I want to thank you, especially, for being part of the reason why I kept going.

In that time, I have posted 8,365 blogs. Over 2,657 of them have been poems and another 996 have been daily posts of photos of flowers for Cee’s Flower of the Day blog which as far as I can tell, I have posted every day since October 18, 2018. The rest of the posts are additional stories, poems, essays and my own photography posted for various prompts and I thank those who faithfully publish these prompts every day or every week.

I had declared earlier that when I hit my millionth view, I would stop blogging, but recently I’ve established another blog in addition to my WordPress blog, so looks like retirement is not in my near future. I will, of course, continue with the WordPress blog as well.

Happy blogging. For now, I’ll continue to see you here as always. oxooxox Judy

Posies for Patti

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Happy Birthday to my sister Patti: July 9, 2021.

Roses are red, violets are blue.
These are the flowers we picked for you!

We miss you here at the family gathering–
xoxoxoxo Judy & the Gang

 

For Cee’s FOTDForCe

For

Withholding with One Hand and Giving with Another

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Withholding with One Hand and Giving with Another

She feared that too much dieting would make her moribund,
and so she kept on dining until she was rotund.
She viewed dieting with horror yet felt terror when she viewed
her own form in the mirror, be it fully–clothed or nude.
Of all those excess curves and rolls, she wanted to be free.
Her rosy cheeks were garish, and she willed them not to be.
Yet her psychology of wishing misplaced not a single ounce.
She shed no flesh or inches, lost not one single bounce.

Until she fell in love one day and grew over-excited
when her amorous feelings led to passions unrequited.
And so she lost her taste for food and other worldly pleasures,
this lovelorn depression supplanting former measures
of trying to lose inches around her thighs and trunk,
and so her mass diminished as she slowly shrunk
from size eighteen to fifteen and eventually ten
and that girl in the mirror turned willowly and thin.

Men started to walk by her house and one man chose to linger,
and within the year there was a gold band on her finger.
Thus did she learn the lesson that our wishes might be met
by simply being deprived of what we want to get.
Sometimes deprivation triggers something we need more,
for we do not always know what life may have in store
when it withholds its blessings. It may be that when we wait,
exactly what we’ve wanted is dished out to us by fate!

 

Prompt words today are free, garish, terror, horror, rotund and psychology.