My disgruntled spouse surveyed the plum, then squeezed its flesh beneath his thumb, saw that there were plenty more in the tree that grew next door, and though the crop was most abundant, he merely saw it as redundant.
There were no grapes for him to filch. Bananas? It had proffered zilch. No oranges or apples to seed and peel and slice and chew. No limes or lemons to produce a glass of fresh-squeezed zesty juice.
It made him sad and rather glum to see plum after purple plum hung on the tree. Could I dispute his claim that we’d have to commute to steal instead various fruit? I felt his argument was moot.
One must make do with what might come. The progeny of plum was plum. If he required figs or berries, peaches, kiwi fruit or cherries, he’d have to head out to the store or plant a a dozen trees or more.
He’d have to mulch and trim and spray, water every other day, and wait for years for fruit to grow, but he was hungry now and so he went outside and picked him some plum after plum and plum and plum.
Prompt words today are glum, commute, zilch and abundant. Images thanks to Marius Karotkis and Kelly Neil on Unsplash. Used with permission.
“That” picture in the wheelbarrow. I look shocked at being so posed.
Patti and I under the rose trellis.
One of the first photos of me that I have, ten months old
My sister Patti’s horse, passed down to me.
My fifth birthday party.
When I was little, life seemed like one long summer day,
With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
Arty shot.
Patti’s birthday. Probably her seventh.
First day of school.
Fishing with dad and my sisters.
Patti’s first formal occasion
Patti and Karen, always the clowns.
Patti’s twelfth (?) costume birthday party. I was Alice in Wonderland.
Photo shoot. Two years old? Again, most likely posed by Betty.
Age one plus. Caught unaware.
Merry-go-Round
Patti, her friend and I on the schoolground slides across the street from our house.
The smell of grass. Sister outfits.
Learning to ride a tricycle.
Ten months old, in front of our “new” house.
Patti, Me, Patty Peck
Me with “my” dog. It really belonged to our neighbors.
Neighborhood play
Floating around in innertubes?.
1949
Fooling around in costume
Family Christmas–Grandma, Dad and me.
My favorite shot of my mom and me
Click on the photos to enlarge and read captions.
Although the subject of these photos seems to be mainly me, the actual subject is the photographer. I was just her compliant model..These are all photos taken by my sister Betty Jo, who was eleven years older than me. Her other frequent subject was my sister Patti, four years older than me. Since the photos seem to start when I was about ten or eleven months old, I think perhaps Betty Jo must have received a camera for her birthday the year she turned eleven. It was another time when cellphones had not been invented and even cameras were rare. I remember a black box camera and wonder if that was hers or if by then there was a newer model. Whatever the camera, she was a natural in choosing and composing shots. Betty passed away yesterday, Nov. 5, 2021, and these pictures and the following poem are my tribute to her.
My Sister’s Camera
Videos and photos are doorways to the past. Without these visual triggers, how long would memory last? The emphasis of daily life infringes on what’s done. Memories of childhood? I fear I would have none if my sister’s camera had not been there to snatch every special moment that she was there to catch.
Her photos chronicled our lives, forestalling our forgetting, capturing tranquility or happiness or fretting. The fragrant past floods out from them in scents I now recall: new-cut grass and wheat and dust. That tiny baby doll I carried everywhere with me until its rubber rotted. That smell of crumbling rubber with which I was besotted.
The cherry trees and trellis, those friends far in the past The memories of dress-up that were never sure to last without my sister catching them with her inquisitive eye. She watched with care and caught them, never knowing then that I would chart my childhood through her photos—life tumultuous or calm caught there in the camera she cushioned in her palm and clicked into the future with just one lowered finger, insuring that my fleeting past was sure to always linger.
The pictures of her childhood were few and far between, but the pictures that she took of us when she was a teen form a history of our pasts so memories won’t fade. I wish that I had told her the difference she made. Why do we wait too late to take time for these reflections that might have helped us to express our genuine affections?
The last time that I saw her, months ago, so little there. My lips upon her dry cheek, my fingers in her hair. Conversing with her empty eyes, my attempts to reconnect when the time was past that she was able to reflect on her memories of taking them. What caused her action bold to put me in the wheelbarrow when I was ten months old and snap that classic picture. Was her camera new that day, a present on her birthday, the 23rd of May?
Did she take other photos that I have never seen? Besides her younger sisters, what subjects filled her screen? We were her willing models, accustomed to the orders of an older sister who adjusted hems and borders to frame the perfect photo that survives to this day to remind us of the sister who has quietly slipped away.
In contrast, this is the only photo I have of my sister Betty as a child. Without someone like herself to take them, she was more rarely depicted in photographs.
This is one of my favorite photos of my sister Betty, clearing out
her dorm room in college to come home for the summer.
My sister Betty Dykstra Wilcox passed away early this morning, November 5, 2021. Eight years ago, at the beginning of her battle with Alzheimer’s, I wrote this poem about a visit Forgottenman and I made to her house to try to alter it a bit to enable her to live independently for as long as possible. He scrubbed pots and pans and organized the kitchen while I sorted out and labeled bedroom drawers on the outside to indicate contents. When she grew distressed over our sorting out of items in the upstairs storage room, he whisked her off for smash burgers and she returned happy.
I will always be grateful for these last warm memories of my sister before she slipped completely into the clutches of Alzheimer’s. Every night, we three sat on the front steps. Forgottenman played his guitar and sang and the little girls from across the street would come running to sit in the grass and listen. One night their folks joined them and another night when we were in the backyard playing croquet with Betty, one of the little girls went into Betty’s house, got his guitar and brought it out to the backyard requesting that he play!
Then one night when we came in from the front yard, she wandered into the music room and we heard strains of piano music coming from her piano. It was the last time I ever heard her play, and this is the poem that was the result:
When My Sister Plays the Piano
The first notes, beautiful and true, float like a memory through the air. In the week I’ve been here in her house with her, she has not played the piano and so I thought her music was gone like her memory of what day it is or whether I am her sister, her daughter or an unknown visitor.
Yet on this morning after her 76th birthday celebration, music slips like magic from the keys: song after song from “Fur Elise” to a sweet ballad I don’t know the name of— sure and correct at first, then with a heartfelt emotion we had both forgotten.
“Slow Boat to China,” “Paper Doll”— song after song expressed in an unfaltering language— some synchronicity of mind and hand her brain has opened the door to.
While I listen, time stands still for me as it has for her so often in the past few years as yesterday and today shuffle together to crowd out all consideration of future fears.
For ten minutes or more, she segues from melody to melody with no wrong note. Then “Ebb Tide,” a song she has played from memory so many times, dies after twenty-four notes. Like a gift held out and snatched away, I yearn for it, pray she’ll remember.
After an uncharted caesura, her music streams out again, sweet and sure, for a staff or two— the sheet music giving her a guide her brain so often can’t. But after a longer pause, I know it is lost like the thread of so many conversations–– a hiccup of memory, folding itself away.
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus” chimes out like the tolling of a bell. The wisp of the old hymn, two phrases only— before it, too, fades.
That sudden muffled sound. Is it a songbook displaced from its stand as she searches for another, or the lid of the piano quietly closing on yet another partial memory?
R.I.P. Betty. Next July at the town reunion in Murdo, the town we grew up in, we’ll have a memorial for her and bury her ashes in the family plot. xoox
Forgottenman just sent me a video of Betty he took when he joined us for Thanksgiving right after we first met in person. In the first part, she is just inventing a song, but afterwards, I suggest she play “Ebb Tide.” She’s not able to play it on the little keyboard but she does play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” which she always played because it was one of my father’s favorites. It is pure coincidence that both of these songs are mentioned in the poem. A nice synchronicity.
I have pain in my back and water on my knee and not one single friend has expressed sympathy! I’ve called every doctor in town to explain my aches and my ills, but it’s all been in vain.
Not one can discover what it is that ails me. Each remedy that I’ve sought out simply fails me. The sun hurts my eyes and the rain brings depression. It hurts when I walk but bed rest brings compression
that freezes my spine so I’m forced to just lie here, seeking assistance from all who walk by here. And although I’ve no appetite, still I must eat, so there’s one request that I have to repeat.
If you’re going to town, could you help me out, please, and bring me a pizza? Sausage. Extra cheese. Because I’m so thin, the doctor prescribes beer. and since there’s a Quik Stop that’s really quite near,
could you pick up a six-pack, some ice cream and chips? For I simply must add some flesh to my hips. My bones are protruding so far that they hurt from the weight of the sheets and the thinnest night shirt.
I’m under the weather, headachy and thin. I cannot convey the bad shape that I’m in. My offspring don’t care and my spouse says I’m making it hard to stay with me because I’m just faking it.
I have to complain because I must confess it is impossible when one is ill to repress it. Although all my friends say I’ve bats in my attic, these ills you can’t see are not psychosomatic!
Slice of liver, ooze of spleen— add them to the soup tureen. See all the pallid corpses preen? They seek to woo the zombie queen. Complexions chalky white or green through the haunted house careen, much rowdier on Halloween than all the holidays between.
Please do not procrastinate when walking ‘neath these wires, for one who does so may not get that for which he aspires. Trick or Treat acquires more meaning . Must I even mention that straying too close to this web may bring unsought detention? Heed well my warning for tonight what seems to be is not. As you look for treats you seek tonight, you also may be sought. This spooky spider is not fake, in fact it is too real. It will abet your progress and make of you a meal.
This spider, viewed in my friends Beck and Lach’s yard, was HUGE. It’s body alone was three inches long. Just in time for Halloween. No need for other decorations.
I do not accept your recent accusal as anything but an attempt to bamboozle me out of the vestiges of my collection of Halloween candy that’s skipped your detection.
I’m thankful that I’m neither trustful nor dumb enough to be functioning under your thumb, for I find repugnant your plans to abscond with all of the candy with which I’ve grown fond.
For though you gobbled your candy down quickly, going through all of it lickety-splickly, I like to keep my candy yield near and eat one piece a day for the rest of the year!
When days are balmy, butterscotch is nice. I save all my chocolate for snow days and ice. And when the campfire sparkles and flickers, I like to devour my Halloween Snickers.
If it annoys you, you’ll have to make do with a few M&M’s that I hid in my shoe. The rest of my candy is where I have hidden it, to be consumed when only I’ve bidden it.
They gather at their tables in the heat or in the cold, ears perked for the errors in the stories they’ll be told. They’ll be listening for the puerile and and the grisly and the trite, jotting down their notes for the misstatements that they’ll cite.
Then, their criticism over, they’ll play another game, giving their approval and voicing their acclaim for a perfect metaphor or meter that is tight. How you built the tension and got it all just right.
Thus do we meet to ebb and flow, to criticize and praise.— to inform, amuse, maybe to bore or to amaze. This is how we come together first to teach and then be taught by sharing with each other the best that we have got!
I’d make conversation but my upper plate seems to be grinding my lower of late. I fear there’s a fissure that’s preventing their matching and somehow my back teeth just seem to be catching and locking which creates a problem in chewing, so eating’s another thing I won’t be doing.
I’m bungling everything done by my jaws. At talking and eating I’m taking a pause. For now I’ll just listen and watch you eat pie. If you give me a straw, I’ll simply get by by sipping my tea and nodding my head in avid agreement with everything said.
I could have stayed home and stared at the wall, but I couldn’t face not seeing y’all, so I will just sit here and soak in the news, forsaking my own chance to thrill and amuse. Until I’ve seen my dentist, you’ll just have to wait for the juicy story I was going to relate!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 