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.

Fallen Memories

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The monsoon rains come like a blessing, relieving the hot humidity, building the lushness of the rice terraces. Green everywhere. Energetic monkeys in the sacred monkey forest grab my postcards from my hands, leave teethmarks that will delight your children more than anything  I might say in the postcards I send as recompense for the father I have taken off with me to another part of the world.

We grow into these long hot humid afternoons that are washed away for a mere hour or so by the seasonal rains. Shedding clothes like years, we live naked underneath sarongs wrapped tightly for security. You sit on the porch, your soon-to-be-old man’s furry pot belly proudly obscuring the tightly wound tuck of your sarong. Over twenty years later, it is that sarong made into a jalaba that I now wear almost daily,  hiding my soon-to-be-old lady’s pot as well. 

How I cope with growing old without you is to sift through these memories like playing cards or photos fallen from old albums that have lost their ability to secure. As gullible as upon our first meeting, I wipe away your inadequacies as I’m sure you would have forgotten mine if you had been the one left sorting the fallen memories in the bottom of the album box.

Monsoons, I have been told, blow both moist and dry, as we did over those fifteen years. But we endured and built each other, coping as all of those in marriages judged successful by their lasting power do. Today you are the photo fallen from the album to the floor.  Quickly, as you fell from my life, I tuck you back securely into your correct place, placing on top new albums with new memories built on the foundation of you and all those memories a life, in the end, is made of.  You slip into that middle place old loved ones eventually  are relegated to. Our way to cope. Our way to live life instead of merely remembering it. Because that is what life is. We keep trying. We keep on.

 

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The grab bag of prompts today were cope, monsoon, gullible and energetic. Here are the links in case you’d like to play along:

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/welcome-to-daily-addictions/ (Cope)

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/rdp-62-monsoon/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/01/fowc-with-fandango-gullible/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/energetic/

Thunbergia Triplets: Flower of the day, Aug 1, 2018

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For Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt

Maternal Support

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Because I finally found this photo of my mother that I’ve been looking for for years, I had to put it on my blog.  I just love how young she looks, wonder what prompted her lifting up my stroller, love the depiction of the new neighborhood we’d just moved into that lacked even graveled streets, let alone paved ones.  I’m wondering if she lifted me up to show off her spectator pumps?  Pretty fancy for a mother in a housedress holding her chunky baby aloft complete with heavy metal stroller. This is my all-time favorite photo of my mother and me so I just had to share it. That’s the Masonic Temple in the background, by the way. My mother was 37 years old. I must have been between 10 months and a year old.

In case you are curious, here are a number of poems, essays and stories I’ve written about my mother over the years. Bet you can’t read the whole bunch!! But if you want to read just one, let it be the first one, which gives the most complete view of her.

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/04/25/napowrimo-day-25-she/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2017/04/12/family-secrets/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2017/03/19/the-emperor-of-chocola/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2017/03/02/i-imagine-dverse-poets-prose-poetry/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/12/22/believe/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/09/20/generational-drift/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/01/30/china-bulldog/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/10/17/mommy-talk/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2018/04/24/elegy-for-eunice/

 

Not Share Your World

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Cee Neuner, from Cee’s Photography, and host of her widely popular Share Your World weekly prompt, is on vacation for a few weeks. So Melanie, from Sparks From a Combustible Mind, decided that she would step up to the plate and post an “unofficial” Share Your World prompt this week.

Have you ever been in a food fight?

Yes.  My friend Rita and I once spent hours making and decorating a birthday cake.  We even bought sugar roses from Mrs. Swanson, who really was a cake decorator. After we finished it, we tasted it and it was terrible.  If I can find the photos, I’ll show you the result.  Food fight!!!! (Unfortunately, although I found this photo of the cake we made, I couldn’t find the one of Rita’s face after the food fight!

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How do you deliver bad news?

Usually by phone as I’m usually living far from most loved ones.

What (if anything) do you think is beyond the stars?

A huge kid staring into a globe in which he has created the universe as a science experiment.

What unsophisticated activity do you like to do?

Fly kites, although I haven’t done so in years, Watch teenage movies. (Don’t tell.)

Is there a scary scene from a movie (or book) you viewed as a child that still haunts you?

When I watched the exorcist, I had to call my sister on the phone and keep her on the phone as we both watched from our own houses.  Later, I put the receiver on the pillow beside me and we stayed connected until I fell asleep.  I was in college!!!

Seal’s ‘Kiss From A Rose’ was the theme from which film? 

Never saw the film, never heard the song.

I’m not sure where to post this.  Hope this works:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/31/not-cees-share-your-world/

https://sparksfromacombustiblemind.com/2018/07/30/unofficial-syw-7-30-18/

Bougainvillea: Flower of the Day, Jul 31, 2018 B and W and Color

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Click to enlarge photos.

Poetry Press

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The quadrille form has only one rule: that a poem be exactly 44 words long.  The other prompts for this poem are the words pulse, deadline, succinct and access.  Think I can do it in 44 words? Can you?

Poetry Press.

I fear this poetry deadline will make my pulse rate rise.
No time to access dictionaries or to dot my i’s.
And to top it off, I have to be succinct? Absurd!
For quadrilles say that I must stop here at my forty-fourth word.

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/rdp-61-pulse/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/31/fowc-with-fandango-deadline/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/succinct/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/ access

https://dversepoets.com/ quadrille (44 word poem)

Hand-Me-Down Advice

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Hand-Me-Down Advice

May I speak with candor? It may be that those pants
looked fine on your mother, your grandma or your aunts;
but drawstrings are for knapsacks and snaps are to call waiters.
And it’s been 50 years or more since fashion sanctioned gaiters.
I know that they are comfortable but another thing
is that they’re lacking in panache. They haven’t any zing.
And just to finally seal the deal, dear, men just don’t make passes
at girls in baggy bloomers that exaggerate their asses.

 

The prompt words were comfortable and candor.

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/30/fowc-with-fandango-comfortable/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/07/30/candor/

Venery (for #RDP)

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Venery

Ivory bangles.
Her wrist rubbed vulnerable
against his horsehair sofa.
She is waiting
opposite
the moose head
on the wall,
the gyre-horned kudu,
altered eyes
implying gentle death.

Her snakeskin heel
stilettos wool carpet
woven roughly foreign
as she fingers
leather covered volumes
on the shelf
wherein he wrote
their sporting deaths.

She needs air.
She retrieves
her mink coat
careless flung
over the elephant leg
tobacco stand.
In the hall,
the bull’s ear
pinned to the bullring poster.

Minutes later,
He descends
to find her gone.
Near the bookcase,
her musk signs the air.
On her scent,
he chevies to the hall.
Fresh quarry.
He has flushed the British bird.

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/30/rdp-60-quarry/

Clerihew, Two-on-Two

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It may be I will live to rue
the day I wrote each clerihew.
They may invite derisive snorts,
yet here they are with all their warts!

Below is a reblog from three years ago. The Daily Addictions prompt word today was “rue.”

lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Clerihew  Two-on-Two

The word is out that Geoffrey Chaucer
never bothered with a saucer,
for though he raised many a couplet,
he always held them fully uplet!

Some have charged Truman Capote
with writing that is too emotey.
but though he was no macho stud,
I know that he wrote in cold blood.

The prompt today was to write a clerihew. A clerihew has the following properties:

  • It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it mostly pokes fun at famous people
  • It has four lines of irregular length and metre (for comic effect)
  • The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English languages[2]
  • The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject’s name. According to a letter…

View original post 101 more words

Persistent Sprout: Sunday Trees, July 29, 2018

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When I had the tree-trimmers trim back my hugely overgrown pistachio tree, they cut off a huge branch and tarred it over completely to inhibit further growth.  This little sprout stubbornly flouted convention and somehow managed to push through the tar.  I have to applaud its persistence and determination!

For Becca’s Sunday Trees