From my niece’s yard. Sorry, I didn’t get a photo of the entire tree.
For Cee’s FOTD.
Mystery Fruit
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Ashton Wildwood Park
This is the entrance to the Ashton Wildwood Park that has now been dedicated to my former brother-in-law Denis Wilcox who passed away a few months ago. We had the dedication for it on Friday. The dedication arch has not yet been completed, but here is the stone marking the area that he maintained for so many years. He was also on the conservation board for the park.
Above is a photo of some of his kids and grandkids at the dedication
And a photo of the whole crew: kids, their spouses, grandkids and former sis-in-law.
For Tree Square
Model A Still Going Strong in the 1950’s
These are photos of my sister Betty and her future husband Denis at her spring formal at Cornell College, Iowa in the mid-1950’s. This car was his pride and joy and I remember going on weekend rides in it when I visited them.
Yesterday’s Cars
Yesterday’s Cars
Yesterday’s cars slanted down where they should
have had fins at the tail, and were square at the hood.
Some required a stepstool to enter the door,
then had a big bump centered there in the floor
The grandfathers of cars weren’t for the faint-hearted.
They required you crank them before they got started,
and inevitably, when the tires went flat,
a service station wasn’t where you were at.
With no Triple A, the onus was on you
to figure out what you had to do.
The jacks were all manual. Tubes needed air,
so many the driver gave up in despair.
With Mom in the front seat and kids in the rumble,
dad would pump and unscrew and blather and bumble,
then put out his thumb to beg for a ride
in a car that was passing that had room inside.
He was not feinting his look of distress,
and neither was mom, although I confess
it was an adventure for sister and me
who watched the procedure giggling with glee
as inevitably, he would hoof it to town
and we’d open the car doors, jump happily down
and cavort in a field, searching out hidden treasure
and picking up cockleburs in equal measure.
Then when dad caught a ride back with a fixed wheel,
we’d drive on to a diner for a well-deserved meal,
then be on our way, trouble-free and much faster
for the rest of our trip that was free from disaster.
And HERE are another two special photos of Model A’s you won’t want to miss.
Prompt words today are yesterday’s cars, slope, require, feint and inevitable. Image by Philip Schroeder on Unsplash.
I must admit that this particular situation is fiction, although the predicament certainly must have been reenacted many times in an era earlier than mine.
Bingo!!!
Today on July 10th. 2021, I woke up thinking I had to record a very very strange dream and instead saw a message from Forgottenman that I had received my millionth view on my blog as I slept, so now at 8:55 AM, checking my stats, I see that I’ve had l,000,052 views. I guess I’ll never know who was the millionth. When I get home, I’m going to celebrate by actually starting the ball rolling on formatting my two completed books for publication. Please let me be as dedicated to that goal as I’ve been to the blog. My alarm just went off. Must be a signal that I ‘m on the right track??? I can see a bit of sun through a slight opening in the blackout curtain of the motel where I am staying. We’ll head back to St. Paul in a few hours. Then in a few hours more I’ll head to Wyoming. Life goes on….
Hail, Hail.
Click on photos to enlarge.
Today was the second day of our family reunion and we were sitting outside in my nephew’s backyard in Des Moines, minding our own business and talking one over the other when suddenly we were outshouted by a tremendous hailstorm with huge stones. Here are my nephews presenting some of the golfball-sized hail. Yes, I did get pelted with a few before running into the house and then grabbing a wash pan to put over my head and go back out to try to find my computer. No it wasn’t outside but safely inside in its case.
One Million Coming Up!!!
One Millionth View Coming Up!!!!
I started this blog in March of 2013 and started posting a poem a day for NaPoWriMo for the month of April. Then in 2014 after I had posted a poem a day for NaPoWriMo, I continued to write a poem a day to prompts, a practice I’ve continued every day since and today, on July 10, 2021, I will hit my millionth view. Chances are when this happens, I will be riding back to St. Paul from Des Moines, where I came for a memorial and family reunion, so I likely won’t even realize when it happens and will never know who my millionth viewer is, but since my views now stand at 999,982, it is bound to happen.
At any rate, I want to thank all of you who have both viewed my blog and furnished me with the entertainment of viewing yours all these years. There are a few of you who have viewed me and been viewed by me from the very first and I want to thank you, especially, for being part of the reason why I kept going.
In that time, I have posted 8,365 blogs. Over 2,657 of them have been poems and another 996 have been daily posts of photos of flowers for Cee’s Flower of the Day blog which as far as I can tell, I have posted every day since October 18, 2018. The rest of the posts are additional stories, poems, essays and my own photography posted for various prompts and I thank those who faithfully publish these prompts every day or every week.
I had declared earlier that when I hit my millionth view, I would stop blogging, but recently I’ve established another blog in addition to my WordPress blog, so looks like retirement is not in my near future. I will, of course, continue with the WordPress blog as well.
Happy blogging. For now, I’ll continue to see you here as always. oxooxox Judy
Posies for Patti
Mystery Flower: FOTD July 8, 2021
This flower grows on a very very long stalk outside my niece’s kitchen window. Does anyone know what it is? Since I know Janet will ask to see more of the plant, here are other shots. The stalks are 5 or 6 feet high:
For Cee’s FOTD
Pre-Trip Snafu
After a packing frenzy, I finally fell asleep at 3 this morning, then got up at 5 to get ready for my ride to the airport in Guadalajara to catch a flight to Houston and then to Minneapolis for a family reunion. I started writing this at 8 a.m. in Guadalajara. It is now 2:28 in the afternoon and I am in Houston waiting for my next flight. I’ve spent an hour and a half in the Guadalajara Airport waiting room, one hour waiting in the plane for a mechanical error to be fixed, two hours in the air, another hour and a half walking through passport control, customs, baggage claim, baggage recheck (I hope) and another few miles walking from the end of one concourse to the end of the other.
I hope my two hours of sleep last night accounts for the fact that I absolutely cannot remember rechecking my 50 lb. checked bag after picking it up from the carousel here in Houston. I do remember lifting it off the carousel. I just can’t remember wheeling it though customs and rechecking it to Minneapolis! And I am not going to backtrack another 5 miles, so I may wind up in Minnesota with only my carry-on. The good news will be if this confusion is due to lack of sleep and not the onset of dementia. This poem, however, relates the story of the beginning of my journey this morning as I sat in the waiting room at the departure gate for my flight from Guadalajara.
Pre-Trip Snafu
I have a special movie I’ve been saving to see.
It’s loaded on my laptop here, balanced on my knee
but I cannot watch it due to an oversight,
even though I have two hours left before my flight.
So I’m sitting in the airport feeling sort of lost.
I need to buy some earphones, no matter what the cost.
I knew I’d forget something even though I checked and checked,
but this egregious oversight I neglected to detect.
I penned a careful overview of what I knew I’d packed,
unpacked my bags and looked again to double-check each fact.
My boisterous friends requested that before I go
we celebrate my birthday, but I had to say no.
I was too busy packing , unpacking and repacking––
checking off the items to see what I was lacking.
Phone, computer, curling iron, hair dryer and comb.
I couldn’t think of anything that I was leaving home.
Of course it was inevitable something would go wrong,
and the realization was sure to come along
after I passed all the shops and five miles down the aisle,
weary of lines and walking. Ready to rest awhile.
No magazines to pass the time. My phone is out of juice.
No earphones to enjoy my flick. I guess I’ve cooked my goose.
Too late to remedy my lack, too far into my botch,
but real life’s all around me. I guess that I’ll just watch!
Prompt words are off, overview, boisterous, egregious and lost.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 