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.

Travel Challenge, Day 8

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I’m going to break the rules to explain this travel photo, which was my favorite taken during a long-ago trip with my mother, driving the backroads of England, Scotland and Wales. Since my mother had always been interested in the paranormal, I made sure to include two overnight stays in haunted hotels. This one was in the Cotswolds, and although we noted no paranormal activity, I did love the fact that this hot water bottle was hanging on the back of the bathroom door–not your usual amenity. 

The rules are to post one travel photo each day for ten days with no comment, and to nominate one other person for the challenge each day to do the same. Rules were made to be broken, so for the last two days, I’m going to decree that you can say whatever you wish to about your travel photo. For my eighth day, I nominate Sam at Los Perdidos.

Go HERE if even after viewing this photo, you still want to see my day 9 photo.

Sun Rose and Bee: FOTD Dec 17, 2020

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For Cee’s FOTD

Berry, Berry Christmas: FOTD Dec 16, 2020

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I “Cee” your berries and raise you one, Cee! Great minds think alike.

For Cee’s FOTD

Festive Is

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Festive Is

. . . ribbons and candles and holly.
Christmas trees, parties both raucous and jolly.
Confetti in hair and the nerve to kiss boys
beneath the mistletoe, and other joys.

Presents and eggnog and wedding cake, too.
Fireworks. Flags waving red, white and blue.
Easter egg optimism in the hunting,
papel picado and streamers and bunting.

Festive is hearts charged up with the living.
Anticipation and loving and giving.
Remembrance of exploits and births and unitings,
Easter ham slicings and turkey leg bitings.

May baskets on doorsteps. Socks hung in a row.
Eggnog and streamers wherever you go.
Who knows where festivity had its first starts—
Easter egg rolling or Valentine hearts?

Square dances, cloggings and Virginia reelings
end up on the feet but start with warm feelings
that set toes to tapping and make folks so restive
that they have no choice but to end up as festive!

Before presents and food and new decorations
increase credit card debt to new elevations,
perhaps we’ll remember to go back to the start
and return the horse to in front of the cart.

Our kids need to learn that joy can’t be bought,
and it’s up to us that the lesson be taught.
Before it’s too late, we must somehow impart
that there’s no charge for love and no price tag on heart.

Word prompts today are festive, nerve, optimism and charge.

Incredible Art by Jon Foreman

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https://www.treehugger.com/land-art-by-jon-foreman-5091704

 

Christmas Candy: Tourmaline’s 2020 Countdown to Christmas Challenge, Dec. 15

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Christmas Candy

Candy canes hung from the tree—though they were never tasted,
were packed away to use next year, so they were never wasted.
Sugar ribbons, butterbrickle, candies tinged with clove—
In between the thrust-out arms of other kids we wove
to get our bag from Santa, driven down the streets,
in the back of a convertible, dispensing bags of sweets.

More candy gone uneaten, yet pretty in a dish
set out for guests, who always said they didn’t wish
to ruin their appetite for turkey, but if the truth were told,
they, too, knew that the candy was unsavory and old.
Thank Santa, then, for stockings with chocolates in the toe
to sink our teeth into to change the candy status-quo. 

For Tourmaline’s Daily Countdown to Christmas Challenge

Nightly Visit

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Nightly Visit

Like those of a recluse aunt, both cloistered and suspicious,
her midnight visits to our house have hardly been auspicious.
Under the mask of darkness, she ends her nightly wait.
Inching along the garden wall to circumvent the gate,
far above the threat of jaws and the dog’s wild bark,
she comes for nightly dining in the protective dark.

The cats’ leftover kibble is her nightly fare.
She comes in brief installments, until the bowl is bare.
I hear her loud enjoyment, the bowl’s scrape and the crunching,
intent on my midnight screen, I can’t resist her munching.
I steal across the tile floor, shoeless in my glide.
How can she know I’m coming, sealed as I am, inside?

Furtive, I reach the door and hear her final mastication.
But all I capture when I look is her evacuation.
She cannot hear or see me, a glass door in between,
the whole room dark behind me, yet she remains unseen.
Just one time in the dozens I think that I may
have born witness to her shadow before she slipped away.

In the lamplight’s subtle glow, I thought I saw a tail
and a mounded body obscured my nighttime’s veil.
I snapped an unlit photo and it is it alone
that bears witness to the possum outlined against the stone.
She glides so silently away to some handy location,
waiting for my departure to resume her mastication.

I know that she’s no midnight dream, no figment of delusion.
She’s that shy part of our family who prefers her seclusion.
Within my nightly flood of words she’s a welcome diversion.
I welcome that slight mystery brought on by her incursion.
I don’t hold it against her, this  hide-and-seek revival,
as I pour a bit more kibble out to insure her survival.

Is it only my imagination, or can you, too, make out the mound of her body and a long, slender curled tail in the shadows of this photo—just behind the dish?

dPrompt words today are mask, auspicious, laud and family.

Reuniting with an Old Friend at the School Reunion

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Reuniting with an Old Friend at the School Reunion

You astound me with your gibberish. Where did you learn this stuff?
After just a minute or two, I feel I’ve had enough.

I pride myself on faithfulness, but nonetheless I fear
somehow over all the years you’ve turned a little queer.

I never pegged you for a fool way back in our youth,
yet I think you got shorter on wits as you got long of tooth.

Though friends of long duration are my favorite kind,
somehow I feel that you’re one friend I need to leave behind.

Word prompts today are peg, gibberish, astound and faithful. Image by Janko Ferlic on Unsplash.

 

Marigolds: Flower of the Day, Dec 14, 2020

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The 12 day festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe is finally over. There were LOUD fireworks every day and night, but on the last two nights they went off constantly all night long. Yesterday, only the floral tributes remained. In Mexico, that usually calls for marigolds, and in the churches, roses, as they play a vital role in the story of the appearance of the Virgin.

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Geminid Meteor Shower, Dec 14, 2020

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Is anyone else watching the Geminid Meteor shower tonight? I went out for an hour and twenty minutes and saw 13 meteors. The sky was always clear in patches, although most of it was cloud-covered. I could always see from four to a dozen clear stars and the meteors, which were supposed to all be emanating from the proximity of Gemini, instead all had completely different trajectories. Some were horizontal, some diagonal and some completely vertical in their paths and they seemed to come from different parts of the sky. It is a somewhat chilly night and I was sitting in my short nightgown with a warm top pulled over it, so now that I am in bed, it feels good to have the duvet over my frigid knees and toes. The boy cat is kneading the duvet cover by my shins. If it were the girl cat, she would be lying on my legs or on the space between them, warming me up a bit, but the boy cat lies by my side, extending his claws to pull at the duvet cover. If there were bare flesh exposed, he would not discriminate between the two.

I don’t know how the twenty minutes since I came in passed so quickly, but it is now 2 A.M. and the shower is supposedly at its height now so I suppose I’ll go out again, lean back in the padded metal chair, and get dizzy from bending my neck back to peer up at the sky. Earlier, Forgottenman kept me company via phone, but he has perhaps gone back to his program or to bed. Here I go lonely into the night to see what performance the universe has prepared for me. The count i presently at 13. I’ll give it one more go, but this time I’ll take a blanket along.

Back inside again at 2:40. In 20 minutes, I saw seven definite comets and possibly three others that were so faint that I questioned whether I really saw them or it was my imagination. So in the first hour and twenty minutes, I saw 13 and in the 20 minutes after 2 AM I saw 7. So much for scientific notation. I need to turn on the heated mattress pad to try to get my feet and legs warm. I still have on my warm top over my nightgown. Plans are to sleep in it. Kitty is curled up by my side. I’ve let Forgottenman off companion duty. All’s right with the world.