Category Archives: memories

“Prairie Grass” for Word of the Day

6 Replies

                                                            Prairie Grass

IMG_0108Prairie grass waves over the spot where my parents’ house used to be. Its roof was blown away in a tornado years ago and the house leveled, the basement filled in. What physical remnants of my past remain beneath this dirt I’ll never know as members of the family were all far-distant when the tornado hit and no one ever went to clear out items stored in the basement. I’m told townspeople came in and scavenged in the basement before it was filled in.  A friend took my childhood books for her children.  I have no idea where other letters, books, trophies and assorted treasures from my past ended up. Perhaps they are buried there.

IMG_0105
Across the dirt road is the cemetery where we all will lie beneath prairie grass one day. Yes, I was moved to tears both by the beauty and the inevitability that all our fuss and bother will result in this simplicity. We rise from the earth, feed on it and in return are fed upon. No person is so special as to survive the inevitable leveling force of nature.

IMG_0117

 

 

The Word of the Day prompt is “Grass.”

First Love and the School Reunion, For SOCS, Aug 31, 2024

16 Replies

 

First Love and the School Reunion

Click on Photos to Enlarge.

img_1035
img_1667

Then and Now

First Love

Zing! went our heartstrings. Zang! went our souls.
Eyes filled with wonder, hearts cupped like bowls
ready to fill  with passion and love.
Putting each other on like a glove.

First kisses miracles we’d never known.
No longer single all on our own.
Someone to cuddle, someone to spoon.
Hand holds and lip locks over too soon.

Misunderstandings, squabbles and fights.
Heartbreak and lonely Saturday nights.
Then a new glance from cars “U”ing  main.
Flirting and wooing all over again.

More hugs and kisses parked on a hill.
How to forget them? We never will.
At school reunions, we relive those lives,
husbands beside us, or boyfriends or wives.

Talking of other things: study halls, games,
but always remembering carving those names
in desktops and memory—first loves forever—
tendrils that bind us that we cannot sever.

We’ll soar ahead to the rest of our lives,
collecting new memories—bees in our hives.
But no honey finer than that we made first.
No sweeter lips and no stronger thirst.

Stored in our hearts, remembered but hidden,
hoarded like treasures sealed in a midden,
our lives are made richer by both now and then.
Past memories opening over again

spill out old secrets, then seal them away
to be unwrapped on some future day
when old schoolmates meet for two days’ reminiscing
of school pranks and ballgames and homework. And kissing.

img_5741

The SOCS prompt for Aug 31, 2024 is “School.” This is a reblog of a poem written in 2016.

Leftovers: Assorted Facts from Memory

16 Replies

 

Assorted Facts of Memory

My childhood phone number was Mohawk 9-2206.
Objects once considered worthless have acquired value through time.
Romance adds flavor to any adventure.
Kinship is the glue of life.
My first freedom was a tan Hiawatha bike with maroon racing stripes.

 

Prompt words today are: mohawk, worthless, romance, kinship, bike.

The Old Homestead: For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 590

14 Replies

 

Dad’s family at homestead. My sister Betty in front.

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

The first photo is of my grandparents and two aunts and their families. The third photo is my dad and his cousins, my grandmother Jane and her sister Susie and my oldest sister Betty Jo as a child.

The Old Homestead

Its barn is thick with echoed thrust
of wings long faded into dust.
The barn owl hunts no rodent ghosts,
no drumming wings the still air boasts.

Those boards you walked now topped with blooms
of mildew, mold and wild mushrooms
that cling and spread and flood the room
with peaceful quiet and sombre gloom.

What footfalls that you might have made
are soon absorbed and so they fade.
Your presence, vital long ago
barely interrupts the flow

of time that passes here so slow.
No lowing cattle, no rooster’s crow.
No bleat of lamb, no donkey’s bray.
All that once was has passed away.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 590 the prompt words are: barns thick clung topped blooms walked spread drumming faded hunt peace floods

Act Three

22 Replies

Act Three

The echo of your footsteps as you trod across my mind
creates anticipation of a nostalgic kind.

You elevate my consciousness as you were wont to do
and so in time I manifest the whole grand rest of you.

You’ve been a silent tenant for so many years
that this surprise appearance prompts again those  tears

I thought had been dried up in me when you had to go
to that place where you were drawn by the undertow.

For only a brief moment, we are as we have been, 
’til with a click of memory, I banish you again.

You slip back into shadow in the attic of my mind,
where both of us lie tangled, hopelessly entwined.

I come back to the present while you’re banished to the past,
once again resuming the roles in which we’re cast.

You imprisoned in act two, caught eternally
while I assume a solo role, living out act three.

Prompt words today are elevate, echo, click, tenant and cross.

Wooden Heart

11 Replies

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.

 

IMG_4662

Prompts today are memory lane, daily, dark, portrait and wash.

Explorers

15 Replies

Click to enlarge photos.

Patti, Me, Patty Peck
Patti and I under the rose trellis.
Patti, her friend and I on the schoolground slides across the street from our house.
With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
First day of school. I think I was in the 2nd grade

Explorers

Sitting up past midnight, we search our mind for facts,
parting long grasses of the past for long-forgotten pacts
of secrets kept from parents and long-forgotten games:
“New Orleans” and “Send ‘Em” *. We comb our minds for names.

Of talents left to childhood, like flips off monkey bars.
Adventures dreamed on rooftops and the back seats of cars.
Favorite childhood dresses and jokes pulled on our folks.
Afternoons in Mack’s Cafe, sipping on our Cokes.

Hot beef sandwiches at Fern’s and running up the stairs
to avoid Mom’s fly swatter aimed at our derrieres.
Childhood dramas staged in trees or in our backyard lawn.
Teenage slumber parties that stretched out into dawn.

We journey through old albums, searching photos for
any tiny detail that will open up a door.
Each time I come to visit, we remember a bit more
on these safaris of the mind that we both adore.

*These are the names of childhood games. Did anyone else play them?

For the Word of the Day challenge: Exploring

Reviving Barbie’s Predecessors

19 Replies

I was reading my friend Mary McNinch’s charming blog about her play date with her granddaughter and my comment got so long I decided to turn it into a post.  Here it is: 

My housekeeper and friend Yolanda’s seven-year-old daughter Yoli was here one day and I dragged out all my old 9 inch dolls—precursors to Barbie.   Jan, Jeff and Cissette. (Although I couldn’t find Jeff.  Evidently they had a separation.) Yoli proceeded to dress them all wrong, putting Jan’s dress on Cissette (without belt and backwards at that) and dressed Jan in such a dowdy dress that it amazed me I’d ever chosen it in the first place. After she left, they stayed in place, waiting for her return, but school started and she hasn’t been back since. 

That is how, past midnight a few nights later, I found myself seated in front of my sewing table in my guest room, where I’d set Yoli up with the dolls and my Jill and Jan closet and the basket of clothes she’d neglected to put away.  After choosing the “right” clothes for each and dressing her, I replaced the detached doors of the closet, hung all the other clothes neatly in the closet, and posed the girls for best effect.  By then it was about 1:30 a.m. and I closed down the play date with myself and went to bed.  The next day, they had chosen to assume the same position I left them in. They’ve been there for a few weeks, but I have a party tomorrow night and decided it was time for them to go back into seclusion in my art studio.  Makes me kind of sad, though. Luckily, I had a photo shoot before assigning the gals back to the past. I neglected to do a photo shoot of Yoli’s choices of costume, but just as well, I don’t think her heart was really into “retro.”

Here is the whole group, posed for their photo shoot.
These little dolls sold for $2 each at the Super Value Grocery in the town I grew up in. They were displayed on the shelf over the vegetables. I think these were original outfits.
JAN DOLL(IN RED)
Jan’s eyes seem to have lost their pupils and irises over the years so she needs to wear glasses.
Yoli thought Brian was top dog, from the first.
This is Cissette in my favorite outfit, a bit child-worn from being played with by my stepdaughter and her friends. They cut up Jan’s leotard to make a sleeveless t-shirt! Grief. It was so cute. Before.

Click on first photo to see larger views of photos and to see captions.

Sweet Clover

5 Replies

Getting ready to leave for Minnesota in an hour, so I’ll rely on a poem written two years ago that meets the demands of the prompt word today, which was “honk.”

IMG_0102

Sweet Clover

Before our dad told us its real name,
we used to call it wild mustard.
What did we know about sweet clover except for its color
and that summer smell, cloying in its sugared perfume.
It filled the air and smothered the plains—
bright yellow and green where before
brown stubble had peeked through blown snow.

On these dry lands, what flowers there were
tended to be cash crops or cattle feed.
Sweet clover or alfalfa.
The twitching noses of baby rabbits brought home by my dad
as we proffered it to them by the handful.
Fragile chains we draped around our necks and wrists.
Bouquets for our mom
that wilted as fast as we could pick them.

Summers were sweet clover and sweet corn
and first sweethearts parked on country roads,
windows rolled down to the night air,
then quickly closed to the miller moths.
Heady kisses,
whispered confessions, declarations,
unkept promises.
What we found most in these first selfish loves
was ourselves.

The relief of being chosen
and assurance that all our parts worked.
Our lips accepting those pressures unacceptable
just the year before.
Regions we’d never had much congress with before
calling out for company.
That hard flutter
like a large moth determined to get out.
Finding to our surprise,
like the lyrics of a sixties song,
that our hearts could break, too.

Hot summer nights,
“U”ing Main,
cars full of boys honking
at cars full of girls.
Cokes at Mack’s cafe.
And over the whole town
that heavy ache of sweet clover.
Half promise, half memory.
A giant invisible hand
that covered summer.

IMG_1056

The prompt word today was honk.

Cacophony

Leave a reply

Over the years, I’ve written many pieces that make use of the word cacophony. This is one I’d forgotten, but having reread it, it is my favorite. Written more than three years ago, I’d like to share it with you again. Go HERE to see it.

 

The word today cacophony.