This is so touching.
(Click on photos to enlarge)
Isidro Xilonsochitl led this project to encourage students to decorate the telephone poles in San Juan Cosala. I took a little drive today to try to find some to share with you. Incidently, he is also a wonderful artist, the illustrator for my books and the painter of murals and eleven other works of art in my house. I’m a fan!
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.
Prompts today are memory lane, daily, dark, portrait and wash.
This beauty was one of dozens flanking the effigy of the Virgin Mary near the plaza in San Juan Cosala. The church is filled with hundreds.
“When you wore a tulip, a rosy red tulip–and I wore a big yellow rose.” (We just got the colors mixed up a bit.) For Cee’s Flower of the day. See her contribution HERE to complete the ditty.
Sometimes there is just as much beauty in imperfection.
The old making space for the new.
When I moved here eighteen years ago, my first visitor was my friend Linda from Oaxaca. Since Christmas was nearing, she brought me a beautiful poinsettia plant which I planted in the lower garden after the holidays. Over the next few years, it grew and grew, but when I had my studio built, it covered it up and I eventually forgot it was there. This year, my only poinsettia blooming was the peach–colored one I showed in a FOTD post a few days ago. But, surprise, surprise. As I exited my studio the other day, I noticed a flash of red behind the dense cover between the sidewalk and the wall and there, peeking out from around the corner of the studio, was this beautiful red poinsettia. Things like to grow in Mexico, neglected or not! So here, at last, is a shot from me of a red poinsettia. Here they are called “La Flor de la Nochebuena” (Flower of the Holy Night, or Christmas Eve). Merry Xmas, everyone!!!
For Cee’s FOTD
Overdressed
“So, I reckon you’re naked under all them clothes?”
It was either the dumbest or cleverest pick-up line she had ever heard. Everyone else seemed in a state of shock over what she was wearing, and already one person had tried to oust her, but she could see no signs that actually said “Nude Beach,” so she was sticking her ground.
No one on this earth was going to tell her what she should (or in this case, shouldn’t) be wearing. Next week she intended on entering everyone’s favorite coffee shop with no shoes, no shirt. That should balance things out a bit.
Prompts for today are reckoning, either, naked, oust and state.
Venus in the Year 2020
She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.
She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.
From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.
She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.
She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.
Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.
With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.
She
stands.
This hibiscus was poking up to the sunset sky head and shoulders above the rest, so no distracting background.
For Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.
Belated Wishes
My greetings on your birthday, I admit are most belated,
but I hope my guilt in this can be expiated.
I toiled to construct a card, wording it in rhyme,
and then invoked winged Mercury to present it in time.
(I’d addressed it with a flourish and signed it in gold ink.
The card was of a purple hue. The envelope was pink.)
But I fear this faithful messenger shows the effects of gout
which has curtailed the usual speed with which he gets about.
He had to take a taxi, which developed a flat.
So then he had to hitchhike to get to where you’re at.
Your doorbell is defective and your neighbor wasn’t in,
and by then I fear that his resolve was growing thin.
He sat upon your doorstep, but it seems you never came.
So it is your own tardiness, it seems, that is to blame.
As the midnight hour approached he finally gave up.
He found a little pub where he thought that he would sup.
He put your card upon the counter. It was there that he misplaced it
along with the good wishes with which this friend had graced it.
By the time he had informed me of his failure at this task,
I fear your day had ended, so what I now must ask
is that you don’t feel slighted by your real card’s surrogate—
the fact that it is Hallmark and the fact that it is late.
This card can’t compete with the first one I created,
but you share the guilt, friend, for the fact that it’s belated!!!
Prompts today are flourish, address, belated, invoke and speed.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 