This is one of my very favorite photos..perhaps because I see so few sunrises. This one I saw on the road driving East from San Juan Cosala to Ajijic.
Dawn, for CFFC Time of Day, Aug 4, 2025
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For Monday Window, Aug 4, 2025
Bye Bye in Window
Out my bedroom window
Windows into bars
Peek in the window
Through the windows at a lakeside restaurant.
Doors behind windows.
Worlds outside windows
These gable windows have looked out upon a lot of history in this western town.
Mysteries within
My Studio Window
Click on Photos to Enlarge.
“Coup d’état” For the Three Things Challenge 141, Aug 3, 2025
Coup d’état
Build up all your borders. Put truth behind a scrim.
Remove all your immigrants. Trim and trim and trim.
Box up all your freedoms and lock them safe away.
Amend the 10 Commandments to “Ye shall not be gay.”
Dumb down all our children to increase control
so you can assure that you’ll retain control.
Tear apart two hundred fifty years of “free”
to put into your control what once was liberty.
Subjugate your citizens and say it is God’s will.
Then provide the Kool-Aid to see if they will swill.
Prompt words for the Three Things Challenge are: BORDER, TRIM, BOX
Lines, Colors and Patterns, for John’s Lens Artists Challenge #359
Last on the Card for July 31, 2025
Both of these photos were taken on July 31, 2025 in the Phoenix, AZ area. Click on photos to enlarge and see captions.
Walgreens in Peoria, AZ. Are they rushing Halloween or holding on to it?
This amazing earring was worn by a woman at the table next to us in Phoenix.
For Bushboy’s Last on the Card
“Forest Sunset” for Friday SOCS
Forest Sunset
In the forest, wild and lush,
hear the music of the thrush
break the stillness of the brush.
If else disturbs it, make it hush,
for we have fled the world’s mad crush
with all its craziness and rush
that grinds sensation into mush,
distilling it as mindless slush.
The world flares up, the clouds are plush
as we see all its bloodshed flush
into the sunset’s subtle blush.
The Friday SOCS prompt is “blush.”
Fire!!! (With update 2 hours later) (And another update the next day.)
My neighbors across the street in Mexico just called to tell me the transformer on the pole above my studio is on fire. I’ve been talking to her and to Yolanda’s family for the past half hour and it is still burning. They are waiting for the Electric Company to turn off the power because evidently they can’t put out an electrical fire with water. I am still in the U.S. Going home tomorrow. This is been quite a day. I spent the first half of it in the hospital having a bone marrow biopsy. Not as bad as I feared, but still…..
Just got a message from my neighbor in Mexico that Antonio from the Raquet Club and another man climbed up on my studio roof and put out the fire with an extinguisher. I can sleep in peace. Such a relief.
Aug 1––2:53 PM I’m home and all is well. Have electricity!!! Yay.
Unfortunate License Plate Spotted in Billings, Montana
My sister Patti spotted this license plate in Billings, Montana in 2016. We think he must have meant it to read “Retired.” We both saw it as something else!!! Hopefully he has since changed his vanity plate. (That last letter is a “d” not an “o”.)
The Woman in the Mirror
That Woman in the Mirror
The woman in the mirror has a better sense of humor than I do. This is because she does not need to depart to go into the world. She controls what is behind her and in front of her. Her wounds are my wounds. Her wrinkles are the selfsame wrinkles that fail to respond to the expensive face cream my sister sent me for my birthday. A gentle hint that my apparent age reveals her age, 4 years older.
The woman in the mirror does not necessarily reflect my feelings. She sometimes freezes in surprise at my tears. Chides me to get a hold on myself. She steams over at times and refuses to confront me. She does not flinch at sprays of toothpaste or a misting over of hairspray. She grows younger as the layers thicken. The woman in the mirror chides me to refresh my lipstick, define my eyebrows, pluck hair chins. Slowly, slowly, she ages—turning into first my mother and then my Grandmother, whom I had thought I had left so far behind. That self-pitying look? Shame on her, I chide. Those ever-lowering breasts, that additional girth? I will never get like that, I think, and then I remember.
There is a mirror in my house where my Grandmother cannot find me—a full-length miracle mirror where the one looking back at me is a woman in her 40’s, just barely overweight. She is my grandmother, stretched out—lengthened and diminished in width. It is the sort of mirror that was once seen in fancy dress shops that encouraged women to buy and buy. Like The Hollywood shop from fifty years ago, now long abandoned, shuttered and replaced by a Radio Shack…but whose charms can still lull me into a luxurious feeling that all is well. I am as I should be.
I flip off the bathroom light and move to the bedroom to catch a last glimpse of me in that magical full-length mirror, then climb into bed to dream and dream those slender dreams that, if we are lucky, are the ones that remain in our memory long after the mirrors have cracked and crumbled, like other more recent memories that fade quickly to give way to the past.
The FOWC prompt is “slender”.
Deep Voice for Esther’s Writing Prompts 76
Deep Voice
I am being visited by words.
Some come from the world
immediately around me.
Travel, experience.
Some come from my grandmother.
I listen to their shadows.
The voice of my mother
echoes from the center of our house.
Poems of the body,
where do you come from?
Books,
Sunday School
and Saturday night movies,
all equally determining
my voice.
Some fade away
but remain backseat drivers
as one after another takes control.
Nothing ever lost.
The Writing Prompts prompt this week is “Voice.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 