Tag Archives: angels

“Hope” for SOCS, Sept 5, 2025

I can’t resist reblogging this blog I wrote in 2016 for the SOCS Saturday prompt, which is “Begins with ho.” After the poem, there are additional links that finish the tale if you have the patience to read them.

Hope

IMG_5964Hope wears a white apron and a pensive smile!

Hope

I hope life turns out as you wish and is a bowl of cherries.
I hope you find a run of luck and that it never varies.
The whole world would be lucky, if I had my “druthers.”
Every line would catch a fish. All orphans would find mothers.
All endings would be happy. All lottery tickets win.
But as I stop to think of it, I have to think again.
If all of us were winners, winning would lose its distinction.
Every hunter bagging game would lead to their extinction.
It seems that often one guy’s luck brings bad luck to another.
If you’re the family favorite, then it cannot be your brother!
So if I must express my hopes I guess that I’ll just say
I hope that when it is your turn, good luck will come your way!

Now I have to tell the story about my camera, which showed up missing (oxymoron) the day after I’d met friends in the Ajijic plaza coffee place. I’d run a number of errands that day, and so after I had searched my house for over an hour, and my car, and my garden, I headed off for town. Was it at the coffee place? No. Either of the stores I’d visited? No. I headed down the street to Ajijic Tango, where I’d had comida with my friends. All locked up. Seeing a door ajar a few yards away from the entrance, I called into it. It must be the kitchen. I called and called and finally someone came. I gave them a note asking the owner to call me.Then I went home.

A day or so ago I wrote about a friend in Missouri who tends to straighten out my life for me on a regular basis? Well, I wrote to him bemoaning the fate of my camera. Within the hour, he had sent me a link to a local message board and lo and behold–there was a picture of my living room with friends I’d invited to a viewing of the new documentary of another friend all sitting in it! A picture that had been in my camera! Turns out the lady pictured above had been approached by a man who tried to sell her a camera. “He asked too much” she said in her message, which stated that when she’d inspected the camera, she had surreptitiously removed the sd card from the camera as well as three more in the pouch of the carrying case, then posted one of the pictures on the card in hopes of finding the owner.

Did she know the man who had the camera? She did. Long story short, she went to his house to ask about the camera. Sadly, he reported, it had stopped working. (He still didn’t realize she’d taken the sd cards out. Brilliant move on her part.) Did he still have the camera? No, he had given it to his son, who, it turned out, worked in the restaurant next to where I must have lost my camera! After a few more trips to enquire on her part, the next morning I recovered my camera from the son, giving him a good reward, although he didn’t ask. I then recovered my four sd cards from the angel pictured above and gave her a reward as well, in spite of her protests. And that is how my Music Man in Missouri once more came to my aid and turned disaster into luck. (If you regularly read my blog, you might have guessed that I cannot survive without my camera.) What does this story have to do with hope? Simply that I hope if you ever lose anything dear to you that you have two angels looking over you as I did!!!

Happy Holidays!!!!


Remembering Grandma at Christmas

The years have chosen to abrade
the paper angel Grandma made
that year when Christmas cheer was thin,
because for weeks we were snowed in.
Even Santa ceased his action
for his reindeer had no traction.

Weeks of snow and sleet and fog
even kept the catalogue
from providing a Christmas doll
when Santa couldn’t come at all.
And so the holidays that year
did not reflect our usual cheer.

No tree, no lights, no heavenly choir,
our only heat a roaring fire.
We kids complained to Mom and Dad
and by Christmas Eve, they’d had
as much of kids as they could stand
and that’s when Grandma took a hand.

Her silver scissors nipped and flew
creating something that was new—
a Christmas angel feathery light
that floated that December night
above our heads in fire glow,
hung by a string, rotating slow

around the room with wafting wings
descending from above on strings.
And from the dark a heavenly song
prompted us to sing along.
My Grandma led, with timorous voice
that song that always was her choice:

“Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, and all is bright.
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Sleep in heavenly peace.”

One by one, we entered in,
our voices first halting and thin,
but when my Grandma chimed a bell,
our family choir began to swell
up to the ceiling, throughout the room,
dispelling darkness, cold and gloom.

Mom made cocoa on the coals
while Dad made popcorn, filling bowls
we strung on thread to deck our halls
from curtain rods to lamps to walls,
along with paper snowflakes that
twirled on their strings to tease the cat.

In the firelight’s magic glow,
they made things magical and so
every normal Christmas since,
we love our turkey and pies of mince,
Christmas presents to poke and squeeze,
bubble lights and towering trees,

but what’s most special is when Pop
puts Grandma’s angel on the top
of the tree covered in flakes
and popcorn strings the family makes.
And when we sing her special song,
if angels sing, she’ll sing along.

For dVerse Poets, the last prompt of the year is “Holiday.”

I wrote this poem 6 years ago. It may not be Kosher to run it by again, but then Chritstmas isn’t a very Kosher holiday at all, is it?  Happy Holidays to one and all..be it Hanukkah or Xmas

Remembering Grandma at Christmas


Remembering Grandma at Christmas

The years have chosen to abrade
the paper angel Grandma made
that year when Christmas cheer was thin,
because for weeks we were snowed in.
Even Santa ceased his action
for his reindeer had no traction.

Weeks of snow and sleet and fog
even kept the catalogue
from providing a Christmas doll
when Santa couldn’t come at all.
And so the holidays that year
did not reflect our usual cheer.

No tree, no lights, no heavenly choir,
our only heat a roaring fire.
We kids complained to Mom and Dad
and by Christmas Eve, they’d had
as much of kids as they could stand
and that’s when Grandma took a hand.

Her silver scissors nipped and flew
creating something that was new—
a Christmas angel feathery light
that floated that December night
above our heads in fire glow,
hung by a string, rotating slow

around the room with wafting wings
descending from above on strings.
And from the dark a heavenly song
prompted us to sing along.
My Grandma led, with timorous voice
that song that always was her choice:

“Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, and all is bright.
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Sleep in heavenly peace.”

One by one, we entered in,
our voices first halting and thin,
but when my Grandma chimed a bell,
our family choir began to swell
up to the ceiling, throughout the room,
dispelling darkness, cold and gloom.

Mom made cocoa on the coals
while Dad made popcorn, filling bowls
we strung on thread to deck our halls
from curtain rods to lamps to walls,
along with paper snowflakes that
twirled on their strings to tease the cat.

In the firelight’s magic glow,
they made things magical and so
every normal Christmas since,
we love our turkey and pies of mince,
Christmas presents to poke and squeeze,
bubble lights and towering trees,

but what’s most special is when Pop
puts Grandma’s angel on the top
of the tree covered in flakes
and popcorn strings the family makes.
And when we sing her special song,
if angels sing, she’ll sing along.

Prompt words today are angel, lover, abrade, traction.

Thursday’s Special: Pick a Word, February 2021

Maternal, Guarding, Cohabitation, Groundless, Variegated.

 

Thursday’s Special, Pick a Word.