(Click on photos to enlarge)
Isidro Xilonsochitl led this project to encourage students to decorate the telephone poles in San Juan Cosala. I took a little drive today to try to find some to share with you. Incidently, he is also a wonderful artist, the illustrator for my books and the painter of murals and eleven other works of art in my house. I’m a fan!
Photos will enlarge if you click on them.
Wooden Heart
We often wash our minds clean here on memory lane,
so what was a dark portrait is illumined once again.
Daily random memories wash up on the shore
while sadder associations stand waiting by the door.
I do not choose remembering the dark spots in our past.
It is the brighter moments that I prefer to last.
The heart I formed from copper, the heart you carved of wood.
All the broken contracts healed by all the good.
Love stories come in fits and starts and so it was with ours—
we must choose our final endings by our selective powers
to decide what we will sift from memory’s fine sand,
and though the bitter moments haven’t been fully banned,
I daily choose the moments that I will remember—
that March day when our love was young, not your final September.
When I met Bob, he was teaching art in Canyon Country, California. One day he brought me this pouch necklace he had made of leather in class. Inside was a wooden heart with his initial on one side and my initial on the other. Yes. I had to marry the man. Later, with his encouragement, I became a metalsmith and formed this heart out of copper for him. The pouch now also contains a lock of his hair, a lock of mine, a miniature bar of chocolate–his favorite food on earth–and a tiny dinosaur carved by one of his small sons in the studio where he worked with his dad. When I admired it, he gave it to me, just as Bob gave to me the family he brought with him when we married.
Prompts today are memory lane, daily, dark, portrait and wash.
This beauty was one of dozens flanking the effigy of the Virgin Mary near the plaza in San Juan Cosala. The church is filled with hundreds.
“When you wore a tulip, a rosy red tulip–and I wore a big yellow rose.” (We just got the colors mixed up a bit.) For Cee’s Flower of the day. See her contribution HERE to complete the ditty.
Sometimes there is just as much beauty in imperfection.
The old making space for the new.
Second Thoughts
We’ve brought your breakfast tray for we know that you’ve been restive,
but now we’d like to urge you to try to feel more festive.
Will you remain forever, questioning and forlorn
because you could not go downstairs on your wedding morn?
You cannot stay much longer in this sealed-off room.
The wedding guests are gathering. It’s time to jump the broom.
Jumping the broom is a time-honored wedding tradition in which the bride and groom jump over a broom during the ceremony. The act symbolizes a new beginning and a sweeping away of the past, and can also signify the joining of two families or offer a respectful nod to family ancestors.
Think of all the things you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t have knees!
(Click on photos to enlarge.)
even Polar bears have kneezes.
but still they know what they are for.
to ask girls, “Will you marry me?”
And aren’t we glad that knees are bendable?
Matin for Patella
please thank the Lord for making knees!
When I moved here eighteen years ago, my first visitor was my friend Linda from Oaxaca. Since Christmas was nearing, she brought me a beautiful poinsettia plant which I planted in the lower garden after the holidays. Over the next few years, it grew and grew, but when I had my studio built, it covered it up and I eventually forgot it was there. This year, my only poinsettia blooming was the peach–colored one I showed in a FOTD post a few days ago. But, surprise, surprise. As I exited my studio the other day, I noticed a flash of red behind the dense cover between the sidewalk and the wall and there, peeking out from around the corner of the studio, was this beautiful red poinsettia. Things like to grow in Mexico, neglected or not! So here, at last, is a shot from me of a red poinsettia. Here they are called “La Flor de la Nochebuena” (Flower of the Holy Night, or Christmas Eve). Merry Xmas, everyone!!!
For Cee’s FOTD
Overdressed
“So, I reckon you’re naked under all them clothes?”
It was either the dumbest or cleverest pick-up line she had ever heard. Everyone else seemed in a state of shock over what she was wearing, and already one person had tried to oust her, but she could see no signs that actually said “Nude Beach,” so she was sticking her ground.
No one on this earth was going to tell her what she should (or in this case, shouldn’t) be wearing. Next week she intended on entering everyone’s favorite coffee shop with no shoes, no shirt. That should balance things out a bit.
Prompts for today are reckoning, either, naked, oust and state.
Venus in the Year 2020
She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.
She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.
From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.
She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.
She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.
Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.
With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.
She
stands.
