I think I’ve had this succulent plant for at least 15 years, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it bloom. The bloom is small, enlarged here. Click on photos to enlarge. Click on photos to enlarge:
For Cee’s FOTD
I saw this beautiful fellow taking a bath a my friend Sharon’s house. If you’d like to know more about the occasion, go HERE.
Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion
“Pack up all your suitcases, we’re going on vacation.
Don’t forget your sleeping bags and some alimentation.
We’re heading out in two hours for the challenge of your lives,
so load up all your kids and hurry up your wives.
I’m making a pronouncement that perhaps you won’t agree with,
but since you are the folks that I most enjoy to be with,
I spent all of your legacies on this giant bus
that it is my fondest wish to fill with only us
and set out for the summer having various adventures.
Most likely we’ll get lost and perhaps Gram will lose her dentures,
but all-in-all we’ll have great times that no one will forget.
You’re going to spend this summer with the finer set.
I’ve cleared it with your bosses. I’ve contacted your friends.
No need to call anyone. No need to make amends.
You’ll live without your boyfriends for a month or two.
Just tell them that your family needs some time with you.
Go and find your places–kids all in the back.
I have some games to play with you while your mothers pack.
No phones, laptops or notebooks are allowed aboard the bus.
I want communication to be narrowed down to us.
I’ll teach you snakes and ladders, Monopoly and Chess.
You can beat your Uncle Tom and your Auntie Bess,
your grandma and your sisters, your cousins and your brother.
Why bother to beat someone else when you can beat each other?”
The ending you might well project. The mom’s find fault. The kids object.
But once he’d packed us all inside and started out on our grand ride,
we settled down and all joined in to get to know their closest kin
and all in all, that summer trip, each tent-pitching, each skinny dip
turned into one fine memory, just as Gramp knew it would be!
(Click on photos to enlarge and view as slide show.)
Prompt words today are pronounced, legacy, challenge, alimentation and suitcase. Sadly, this is fiction and the photos a compilation of various friends and family. I wish this had happened, but alas, it didn’t. The fourth photo is a picture of part of my actual family.
The dVerse Poets prompt was to write a poem inspired by one of these vegetable names. I’m going to try to use them all: Black Beauty, Trail of Tears, Lazy housewife, princess, purple queen, Jacob’s cattle, The Czar, Wizard, golden acre, dazzling blue, purple sword, Jack ice, Reine de Glaces, blue fire, aurora, tender and true.
Cold Jack Ice
As accomplished in his love-making as at a game of dice,
his name was John Dukakis, but they called him Cool Jack Ice
because his smile could warm or freeze, depending on the way
his luck played out or didn’t, as it changed from day to day.
When he purchased Jacob’s cattle and his Golden Acre Farm,
He thought that he would use them to impress the new school marm.
He’d be a wizard as a cowboy, a czar of cultivation.
He’d win her as his bride before the coming school vacation.
He’d heard she was an ice queen a real “Reine de Glacé.
And since he was the King of Ice, he knew the game to play.
He donned his purple sword and a coat of dazzling blue.
If he was to be her Lochinvar, he knew just what to do.
He swooped down on his Ellen at the school fete,
saved her from the stag line and took her on a date.
The aurora borealis shone down from far above
As, feigning true and tender, he declared undying love.
He called her his sweet princess for those months he sought to woo her.
It was only after they were wed that he began to rue her.
She was a lazy housewife, he said, and counted coup,
taunting her as his black beauty as he beat her black and blue.
She fled into the freezing cold, a trail of tears behind her,
taking refuge in a secret place where he would never find her.
And as her bruises turned her into a purple queen,
she plotted out her vengeance, silent and unseen.
They say it was blue fire that streaked across that night
that both Jack Frost and Black Jack Ice took their final bite.
What footsteps there were left were so filled up with snow
that not a single tracker could tell where they might go.
Severed from its body, Jack’s face had ceased to smile
as the one who wiped it off his face sped onward, mile by mile.
on Jack’s steed, and since that day, no one has defamed her,
for to put it bluntly, not one who knew him blamed her!
And, in case you didn’t read it before, here’s another poem I wrote about an heirloom tomato: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/02/12/aunt-lous-underground-railroad-tomato-for-black-history-month/
FordVerse Poets prompt.
The Supervisor
He’s enamored of particulars, pedantic to the end.
Impressed by rank and privilege and rules ones can’t bend.
Though not swimming in his compliments, He’s lavish in critique—
always another detail he can find for you to tweak.
If you’re in constant contact, you have my sympathy
as well as sincere thankfulness that it’s not empathy!!!
Prompt words today are pedantic, rank, contact, lavish and swimming.
This beauty just burst out yesterday. Third time it has bloomed but the second time it disappeared before I could get a photo. Either there is a flower thief in the yard or I was hallucinating. I saw it on my way to the hammock to have a nap. After my nap, 2 hours later, went up to the house to get my camera and as I passed its location, it had vanished. Not fallen. No petals below. Just gone. Has Diego developed a taste for hibiscus? A really hungry snail? Some bird? I’ll never know..
Photo by Alessandro Bellone on Unsplash, used with permission
Old Friends
We are grappling with our friendship over difference of opinions.
My beliefs are liberal. He’s one of Donald’s minions.
He won’t put up with teasing. I can’t bear his iron will.
Of faux patriotic slogans, I fear I’ve had my fill.
How can it be that all those years I thought that he had heart,
he was harboring this meanness? When did it get its start?
This virus in our populace that masks as patriotism
spreads misinformation, creating such a schism
that no bridge can be long enough to bring us all together.
The strength of our convictions seems to hold us at short tether.
When will come the end of it, and if that end should come,
what will end this great discordance and restore the hum
of democratic harmony? Are voices so distorted
that we cannot reclaim the friends with whom we once consorted?
When I walk the streets where we once walked, my former friend and I,
he crosses to the other side if he sees me walk by.
When change comes, certain evils must come to an end,
but I don’t think it will mend the hearts of me and my old friend.
Word prompts for today are tease, iron, opinion, grapple and friendship.
To read the life story of this giant banana blossom, click on each photo. The photos will enlarge and the story is told in the captions.
Visitations
He hovers in the corner less frequently now. His face is rarely seen in clouds. He leaves no further messages as the cats walk over my computer keys. It is true that sometimes I catch the scent of him, but it’s not often and not for long. Who knows how long a spirit is tied to earth? The cats sense him sometimes, as do the dogs. The candelabra with its arms arched upwards and the carved wooden Virgin of Guadalupe statue rising up like a head in front of it, in a dark room backlit by kitchen lights, has given me a start now and then; but I soon realize it is not him. None of these places are where I keep him now. It is only long after midnight, when, exhausted, I fall to dreams, that his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream.
For the dVerse Poets Pub prompt, we are to write a 144 word prose piece that contains the quote “his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” from Maya Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird.” Read other responses to the prompt HERE.
