Please click on the photos to enlarge them.
For fourteen years before I moved to Mexico, my husband and I made hundreds of art lamps–no two the same. He did the stone and wood structures and I did the willow structures and also made the washi paper from mulberry bark to create the shades or outer coverings.
For Cee’s B&W Lighting of all kinds.
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
I am reblogging this blog on breaking eggs and unbroken yolks in honor of Word of the Day’s prompt word “Unbreakable,” which was posted too late to make it into my earlybird poem published earlier today!
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2020/07/30/unbreakable/
THE ORCHIDS AND AMAZING LEMON SOUFFLE ACCOMPANIED THE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR DIANA–A NEW FRIEND OF MINE AND A LONGTIME FRIEND OF SHARON, WHO PROVIDED MOST OF THE EGG-ASSOCIATED PLOT POINTS FOR THIS STORY.
SINCE SHARON HAD SPENT ALL DAY BREAKING AND BEATING EGGS AND SQUEEZING AND ADDING LEMONS, NOT TO MENTION DRIVING ME OFF IN PURSUIT OF GIANT LIPS TO PHOTOGRAPH, SHE REMAINED UNCHARACTERISTICALLY SILENT AS JOANN REGALED US ALL WITH TALES OF FILM MAKING AND DISTRIBUTION. SHE’S A GOOD STORYTELLER, AND JOHN (AS WELL AS THE REST OF US) LISTENED WITH PLEASURE.
DIANA, WHO WAS BUSY TRYING TO RECOVER FROM A CASE OF SHINGLES, WAS A VERY GOOD EGG AND SEEMED TO BE ENJOYING THE EVENING HELD IN HER HONOR.
MEANWHILE, SHARON, ALTHOUGH SILENT, HAD BRAIN ACTIVELY ENGAGED, PROMPTED BY JOANN’S TALES OF A HORROR MOVIE SHE PRODUCED AND DIRECTED YEARS AGO. NURSING MOTHERS MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW…
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Yesterday’s helpers, no help for today!
Early Riser
Asleep before midnight, I wake before dawn,
and though I stretch and stifle a yawn,
here I am blogging—intrepid adventurer.
For once, no sleepy sunrise malingerer.
The dogma of habit broken this morning,
I retrieve my prompt words without any warning
that two of my regulars are still unhosted.
The person responsible has not yet posted!
So I end up my poem feeling lost—broken-hearted.
If I’d known two were missing, I wouldn’t have started.
I might have slept longer if I had known
that I’d have to come up with more words of my own!
Prompt words today are dogma, intrepid and midnight. (Alas, Ragtag and Word of the Day were not yet available.)
For Cee’s FOTD
Yolanda saw me putting this on my desktop and remarked that
it looked like the coronavirus. So it does. But beautiful, no?
A couple of hours of looking through old photos of the non-digital sort yielded two photos of the blackbirds whose sunset flights were described in this poem. In these photos, they have not yet gathered into the chains they form to fly to the cornfields between Chapala and Guadalajara. Here they are just lifting out of the acres of cattails that rimmed the lake back when it was shrinking in size. This is just one wave of birds. After it lifted, there would have been another and another—tens of thousands of birds—as I recall, some yellow-winged and some red-winged blackbirds. In the years since then, the lake has thankfully come up to its original banks, as at the time I moved here in 2001 there were places in which you had to take a taxi from the pier to get out to the lake. It was estimated that the lake would be totally gone within five years, but luckily people banded together to save it. I’m glad to have the lake restored and there are still thousands of white pelicans as well as numerous egrets and herons and other birds, but I do miss those glorious swells of blackbirds.
(If you want to see the birds, you need to click on photos to enlarge them.)
(Please click on images to enlarge.)
Rain
I am simpatico with sight, enamored of my hearing,
and yet when both give signs of the rainy season nearing,
I find a new sense opening as the memory
of that long redolence of rain comes flooding back to me.
That first whiff of petrichor—-the breath of dust and rain
brings a reunion of senses swirling back again.
The touch of rain along my arms, the taste upon my tongue.
The song of it in ditches when I was very young.
Every sight excited now as it was then.
First its gentle pattering, then its thundering din.
It beats upon my windows, streams down from the eaves.
Soaks into the soil, forms droplets on the leaves
as though they are mementos of the thunder and the light
that has served as a foreshadowing of the rainstorm’s might.
Every sense appealed to. Riches above reason.
Every prayer is answered in the rainy season.
Words for the day are breath, simpatico, sight, redolence and long. Image of the boots from Rupert Britton on Unsplash, used with permission. All other images by Judy Dykstra-Brown.
