My mailbox is totally full, so I’ve been deleting old emails from the past 22 years. I had deleted about 2,000 without reading them, when I chanced to read a couple and realized that there are some real gems there, so I’m going to share a few with you. (2,000 down, 37,000 to go! No exaggeration.). Here is one from 2010:
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Ineligible
Your temper is an irritation
leading to much perturbation.
Solving every little trifle
with your fists or with a rifle,
in short, makes it debatable
whether you are dateable.
I fear your image has gone to pot
and eligible? You are not!
For Pensivity’s Three Things Challenge the words are: IRRITATION, TRIFLE and IMAGE
Click on photos to enlarge.
When I moved into my house 22 years ago, I could touch the top of these palm trees. They’ve grown, I’ve shrunk.
For the Nature Photo Challenge: Trees
Click on photos to enlarge.
Algeria’s Happiness Project prompt is to publish a story, poem or photo that reflects happiness. I posted a few!!!
“Davy Jones Locker”
Mixed Media Assemblage
17″ X 21.5 “
by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Davy Jones‘ Locker is a metaphor for the bottom of the sea—the final
resting place for sailors who are the victims of shipwrecks and is used
as a euphemism for drowning. Silver coins spilling from a pirate chest
seem to be doing these victims of shipwreck at sea no good at all. Media
includes sand and shells collected from various Mexican beaches by the artist.
The slingshot, cloth and even the plastic cup were found on the beach. The cup is covered with coral and was obviously once on its way to being incorporated into a coral reef. The tiny chest, the silver fish and the skeletons were the only objects added to help tell the story that were not collected on beaches.
For Jez’s Water Water Everywhere prompt
Today, I have been working on Chapter 12 of a book about my first few years in Mexico. This one was written in my journal a little over a month after I moved here in 2001. As will be obvious by my packing crate desk, I still didn’t have furniture! Please let me know if this chapter holds your interest.
Natural Rhythms
Yesterday during the sunny part of late afternoon, I noticed the dust and streaks on the kitchen and sala windows. I knew the windows hadn’t been washed since their initial washing when I moved in a few months before, but I hated telling either Jesus or Sofia what to do. I felt like they both had a pretty good handle on what needed to be done and I liked the idea of a natural rhythm being established that pulsed along on its own. So I didn’t say anything to Sofia about the windows.
She had come late again, although I didn’t notice how late. Immediately, she came into the guest room, where I had moved my computer in anticipation of the visit of the electrician. In removing breakable objects from his path, I was doing my part. “Senora,” she said excitedly in her normal fashion. She then proceeded to cough and sniff and show in sign language that she had contracted my flu symptoms.
“Is possible trabajar?” I asked, meaning not that I was worried if she could work but that I was worried whether she should.
“Si, si,” she insisted, but we moved to the kitchen to make tea together for both of us. There I dosed her with echinacea and goldenseal––the horrible liquid variety that I hated so much that I couldn’t make myself take it. But she is more stoic and swallowed the glass of water with drops in it with two horrible grimaces and a general trembling of the body. We chased it with a glass of peach juice. Next time, take it with less water, I instructed, a bit late for her present comfort.
Later, I heard much talking and splashing out on the terraza. I had been hearing the loud voices for over a half hour but had screened them out. Now I realized that it was Sofia talking to Jesus in a voice made lower and almost unrecognizable from her cold. She had been outside for most of the morning, talking as he swept and watered. What was she doing?
“Senora, Senora!” I heard.
I ran out of the sliders that led from the guest room all the way around the house and finally found them in the back terraza. Jesus was happily giggling and sweeping water from the fieldstone patio floor. Sofia was squirting water on the windows. Sofia was washing windows! My house’s needs were being met according to that long seamless communication that required only my silence.
“Did you call me?” I asked.
“No, Senora,” said Sofia. It was the third time that day that I’d heard her calling me and had gone to find her only to have her say she hadn’t called. Perhaps some mental telepathy was in play. First the windows, now this. My life was being simplified. Like a mother whose children had sailed off seamlessly into their own lives, I felt content.
Later, after the electrician had left, my plumber arrived and found the cause for our lack of water pressure for so long. It seemed to be a faulty water filter. More mysteries solved. I moved out onto the front patio to look at plants newly planted. The white of the repaired dome stood sorely against the sky like a bandaged elbow. One day I would have to figure out the color scheme for the repainting project. House projects stretched out in front of me like the line of leaf cutter ants that marched the edge of the terraza. Individual ants stood out clearly today, since each carried the pipestem of a vivid red lipstick blossom. At times they looked like the wings of vividly colored moths as they wove together and apart. Some carried their loads straight upright like periscopes or stovepipes. Others had cut off cross sections so their loads looked more like fat hula hoops.
Ant generals three or four times larger than the rest patrolled the lines, getting smaller ants out of difficulties, lifting caught flower barrels over higher zigs of stone or helping to disentangle plant collisions. One small ant struggled to try to extricate its load from a depression. It was carrying a piece of succulent shaped like a small pompon on a green stem, the pompon consisting of a dozen tiny green balls. Top-heavy, it kept landing in bowled depressions in the fieldstone and getting stuck. Time after time, other ants would come to help. They tugged and pulled and pushed. Again and again the small ant would get it balanced and start off again to land in yet another depression. Finally, he was well on his way over a particularly flat few inches of stone when the wind came up and lifted the load from his jaws, blowing it a good six inches out of the way. The same was true of an entire leaf being carried by one of the general ants, but in this case, the ant did not let go of his load and instead was blown with the leaf across the patio. The ants both abandoned their Herculean tasks, scurrying back in the opposite direction, fate having relieved them of annoying tasks their ant natures would not allow them to abandon.
A necklace of bright red lipstick blossoms bobbed before and after them. Who was the Mamacita being regaled with all of this floral bounty? Was it fiesta time in the ant world or was this just some particularly succulent provision that was worth the extra labor of traversing the entire terraza to obtain just it? Under the sink in the kitchen were six sticks of the insecticide chalk that had effectively stopped the onslaught of these leaf cutter ants against my hibiscus bush, but I couldn’t bring myself to end this gay procession, let alone to kill all of its participants. It was too wonderful, this colorful parade––its participants too determined and focused.
It was part of the workings of my house this day: Sofia now sweeping the floor, bringing out fresh flan, Jesus finished with his sidewalk sweeping and off to pay his electric bill, I moving my stool away from where I had pulled it to watch the ants and back to its position by my packing crate desk. The world moved around us, catching us up in its pulse and pulling us along. No boss. No list too organized. Rather, dozens of small lists lost in coat pockets and blown into corners. Someday everything would be finished. In the meantime, everything was here jumbled together. Things uncomplicated in their messiness were doing themselves, being done to, doing back. Something was being taught to me as I sat very still, letting myself be taught.
Memoirs of a Frequent Flier
It was in the spring of 1953 when I first realized that I could fly. It had been coming on by degrees—first in dreams, where I would hold my arms straight out, crucifixion style, and then pump them straight up and down until I rose from the ground to float through the air, feet hanging straight down below me, swimming through the air propelled by those pumping arms.
In the dreams, no one ever noticed me. Not the other kids playing “New Orleans” in my yard below me, not my dad out mowing the grass or my mom hanging clothes on the line. Birds flew by in their usual manner without changing their course, whizzing by so close to my ears that I became convinced that I was invisible to all nature–man and beast.
I was never stung by mosquitos when I was in flying mode, and for some reason, even during that long summer two years later when I was eight years old and flying every day, it never rained when I was flying. A few times the first raindrop fell just as my feet came into contact with the ground and I had to shift my mind to remember how to move my legs to propel myself and avoid getting soaked to the skin by one of those July rainstorms so dreaded by farmers trying to get their summer wheat crop combined before the heavy rain, or even worse, hail.
Hail! What would happen if it were to hail while I was flying? Would I be able to soar above the hail—to watch it fall to the earth below me–a wall of white water stones creating themselves just inches below my toes and falling straight down away from me? Could I see them forming? Turning to ice where seconds before there had been nothing, each one of millions a little miracle in itself?
I don’t remember how old I was when I stopped flying. All I can remember is one day remembering that I used to fly, long before, and wondering if the whole experience of that long summer when I was eight and less frequently in the years afterwards were just memories stitched together from dreams. Like so many other things, I can remember clearly when they began but have no memory of when they stopped. Perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps only the memory of this talent unique to me has faded, daily, as soon as my feet touch earth.
But I wonder, in these days of drones so easily and cheaply purchased on the internet, if flight such as mine has become an impossibility. With more people looking up at the sky, what is my likelihood of avoiding being noticed and if I were noticed, what effect would it have on my life? All the news agencies would call. Then Oprah and perhaps even the president. Perhaps Donald Trump would call wanting to make me into a reality show. Perhaps I’d be encouraged to launch a blog penned from above. How high up does Wi-Fi go, I wonder, and would I have to attach a Wi-Fi antenna to a beanie on my head and post the blog orally as both hands would be necessary for my flight, to prevent my plummeting to earth?
No, better that this miracle of flight be left behind with other marks of my adolescence: pimples and wet dreams and all those insecurities of coming of age. Perhaps they were what prompted my need to raise myself above it all. Now that I am well past being fully matured and in fact have embarked on that course that will eventually result in my sinking back into that earth I once rose above, I can make do with pleasures of that earth—chocolate and fresh ripe figs and a 5 o’clock Martini enough to raise me above the norm. And that truth that once I was unique is enough to assure that I still am—here in my Barclay Lounger with my New Yorker Magazine, my feet up on the step stool and commands that I can give through air simply by a push of the finger via remote control. Checking in to Oprah to see who she has found to fill my place this week. Keeping my secret. Knowing how thrilled she would have been. Rating my potential story against theirs. And in my own mind, I know that I would rise above them all.
The Royal Poinciana trees are blooming all over town. My favorite tree! I mourn the loss of my tree two years ago and need to find another place to plant one as the soil around it they say is infested with a fungus that will kill it again.
These glorious trees are still blooming all over town. I want to stop and photograph every one I see, but usually resist.
For Becca’s Sunday Trees prompt.
I think I said recently that I have just published my 10,000th blog during which I have written 1 or 2 poems every day for thirteen years making use of up to 6 prompts per poem.
A week and a half ago,I read a number of those poems to a large writing group I belong to and one comment was that I should vary my line length and not have all the poems rhymed and metered. It then occurred to me that given one poem at a time, this wasn’t obvious, but listening to them 12 minutes at a time might not be as effective. Then I imagined an entire book of them… and started thinking about the four completed but unpublished books that have been sitting in their folders on a shelf all these years along with hundreds of essays and short stories and other poems written earlier and realized that it was the 11 to 13 hours I spent online everyday that were keeping me from seeing these projects through.
So, I spent the rest of the day looking up and rewriting some of these chapters and essays and poems and I’ve decided that instead of doing the prompts for the next 13 years, I am going to publish on my blog some of the edited chapters and essays and stories and poems from the past. I will be interested in your thoughts about this. I imagine my readership might fall off since I won’t necessarily be linking them to the usual prompt sites, but I hope some of you will hang in there with me and let me know what you think. Yesterday, I had my hair cut for the first time in a year, so when I found this essay on my computer about a haircut 21 years ago, it just seemed to fit. So, here goes:
The Haircut
He clicked the scissors twice. On the first click, my stomach clenched, but on the second, I felt something break––like a tight rubber band. I didn’t look in the mirror to see the first lock fall to the floor, but by the second cut, I was ready to face facts. I looked to the floor where two eight-inch-long tendrils curled cozily entwined, spooned like lovers on a bed.
What was he removing from me, this pert young man in tight pants? What if my power was in my hair, or my sexuality? When he went to answer the phone, I bent over and picked up one of the strands, trying to read it like the rings of a two-thousand-year-old tree. This inch nearest the cut was probably growing out of my head, just making its first appearance, during Bob’s final months.
How much pain had that hair been infused with? How much silence? How many words unwisely spoken? How many words held back? Why was that inch not curlier and thicker? Why didn’t it display the strength I’d found in myself during the period of his dying that I hadn’t even known I possessed?
As Alejandro returned from the phone and resumed his task, I let the lock fall to the scuffed floor. The raised grain of the wood and flecks of paint gave an aura of age to the pile of locks which rapidly grew to blanket it. This was the hair I’d pinned to the top of my head as we labored together to empty our old house, to close down our studios and to pack the van for our move to Mexico.
Bob had liked my hair long, uncurly, natural––matching his own wild mane. When I was young, my hair had been my glory, and by keeping it, I’d tried, perhaps, to keep my youth. But now it was as though each snip snipped off that many years. Snip went the exhausting months of selling off all of our household goods in preparation for our move to the house we’d bought in Mexico. Snip went the dismantling of Bob’s eighteen-foot steel sculpture as his oldest son carried it away. Snip snip snip. Onto the floorboards fell a houseful of memories sold off to become parts of other people’s lives. Snip. The long-maned hand-carved wooden Rangda mask we’d bought in Bali. Snip. The last of our handmade lamps. Snip snip, the mask from the Berkeley flea market. Snip. The studios full of tools, the bins of screws and nails. Snip Snip the twelve-foot-long diamond saber saw made by Bob’s own hands with castoff parts from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Snip. A lifetime of papers cast on the dump heap: old teaching files, tax forms from the seventies. Boxes of chapbooks, journals, old letters.
Snip went the slow loading of the van with the remaining possessions that would go with us into our new life. Snip went the doctor’s hard news just days before we would have made our escape from our past life and our journey into our new life in Mexico.
Snip went those weeks of single-handedly nursing Bob at home. His death. His memorial. The long drive down to Mexico with his ashes in the toe of his kayak still lashed to the top of the van. Snip went my first year alone as I labored to repair and fill the empty house I’d thought would be ours.
Finally, Alejandro puts down the shears and begins to blow dry my hair, running his fingers through it to the roots––the most sensual experience I’ve had for a year. He turns off the dryer and I look in the mirror at a woman twenty years younger.
“I must have you,” I tell this woman, “I must have your carefree demeanor, your unencumbered life. Your freedom, your simplicity.”
“You done,” says Alejandro, clicking off the dryer and spinning the chair to give me a better look in the mirror, cutting me off from the past. Giving me her.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to check out the links and it turns out that one of them could have been the prompt for my story. It was “short-short-stories“
The photo, by the way, is of yesterday’s haircut, not the one 21 years ago!
Roadmap
I’m held captive by your wrinkles, dear, enraptured by your ripples.
I love your freckles and your moles and all of nature’s stipples.
They are sacred landmarks. When I find one that is new,
I must give thanks to nature for adding more of you.
Sometimes with the darkness around us rich and deep,
my mind goes on a walkabout as you lie asleep.
The roadmap of your body is the terrain that I pace—
the ravines and the gullies and your face’s fragile lace.
Some bemoan the changes that nature brings about,
and they bring a different beauty. It’s true, without a doubt.
But as I trace each special feature of your body and your face,
I’m reassured that nature’s carving instills a deeper grace.
For dVerse Poets Pub, the prompt was to write a quadrille about maps. This is definitely not a quadrille. It is a poem from my just-published adult coloring book: When Old Dames Get Together . Available on Amazon.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 