The prompt: Most of us know those famous words when Neil Armstrong first touched down on the moon. What will be the words transmitted when a human first sets foot on Mars?
Interplanetary Trick or Treat
Our trip was fine and we feel dandy.
We’ve come real far, so where’s the candy?
https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/118697376/posts/7274
Words from a Dying Snowman.
“What lights your world may bring about another creature’s ending.”
For Daily Inkling’s prompt: Words of wisdom from a Snowman in ten words.
Matt asked us to tell about our best birthday ever. I would have to say that in spite of being sick on my last two birthdays, they turned out to be two of my favorite. Here are links to posts that tell about this year’s birthday:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2018/07/03/birthday-reflections/
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2018/07/03/81429/
For Daily Inkling
The Awakening
She woke to a whiff of Darjeeling—that gentle caress to her nostrils that told her that Lorenzo had awakened early today. She could feel the press of his body on his side of the bed as he lay the tray there, ready for her when she was ready for it. He would not disrupt her, knowing all too well how she loved her Saturday mornings away from the press of the paparazzi and the demands of the fashion world.
On any other day, it wouldn’t be feasible to sleep in, but in addition to being a weekend, this was her birthday. She fell again into a sleep where there was no good reason for fantasy. Her own life was fabulous enough to be replicated in dreams. Both children grown and off to their own fairytale lives: Francesca in Crete with her minor royalty husband, Sebastian a skillful artist flying from one country to the next to fulfill the long list of commissions that stretched out to infinity.
All-in-all, she herself had lived out all her childhood fantasies and only now had it become feasible to start to delegate tasks—grooming some of her most talented protégés to take over the designing and running of her couturier salon. Time to lie back and take it easy and let Lorenzo pamper her in all the ways he knew so well.
She stretched luxuriously, reaching her arm up to hit against the silk of her padded headboard, but strangely, hit instead against wood. Curious. She opened her eyes. Light leaked into the room from between bent venetian blinds. Where was she? On the edge of the bed, a slightly paunchy old man with a day’s stubble on his cheeks sat studying the center foldout of a magazine he held at arm’s length. As she stirred, he looked up from it, his eyes widening in surprise. “Essie?”
She looked down at her own wrinkled hands, extending from the sleeve of a cheap pair of pajamas. She stroked her cheeks, dry and wrinkled , and wiped a small line of drool from the corner of her mouth. “Where am I?” Her voice felt as flaky and dry as her skin, her throat almost choking with the words.
“Yer here in Elm Gap,” he said, “where we’ve always been. Essie, do you remember what happened, yer slipping on the ice and falling sideways against the water tank? Do you remember anythin’, Essie, of the twenty years since then?”
“Twenty years? I’ve been asleep for twenty years? What of Lorenzo and Francesca and Sebastian? Where are they?”
“They’re right here, Ma, waiting for you as usual,” a straw-haired woman said from the corner of the room. She, like her father, was rounded and nondescript—a thirtyish childlike frumpy creature much like the girl Essie had been. She was patting a tall pile of romance novels. “I been reading them to you for twenty years, Ma. You woke up just in time, cuz Ladonna LaRue, their author, just died and there won’t be any more. But now you won’t be needing her life any more, because you’ve returned to your own. We always knew you’d return to us, Ma. This is your lucky day. And ours.
The prompt words today were skill, disrupt, whiff and feasible. Matt’s prompt was to create a simulated world. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/09/rdp-friday-skill/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/09/fowc-with-fandango-disrupt/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/09/whiff/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/daily-addictions-2018-week-44/feasible
For Daily Inkling’s Simulation Theory.
Photo Credit: forgottenman
Abandoned
Grass sways by the abandoned house
I cower inside––a trembling mouse
exposed to the bright flash of day
when all else has gone away.
First my father, then my mum
go away and never come
again to shelter, feed or love.
Life is a winging mourning dove
that makes us and then flies away,
making green grass into hay,
the flush of life and then decay,
a harsh light turning shadows gray.
Life swells like paint–a curling blister.
It peels away my older sister,
then also takes my younger brother
and never comes to bring another.
A shadow passes over me.
A sparrowhawk. I dare not flee,
for life is mainly perilous.
It makes us just to feed on us.
Outside I see the preening cat.
It waits for me––patient and fat
in tall grass by the abandoned house
wherein I hide–a trembling mouse.
Daily Inkling’s Prompt: You’re walking in the woods, and there is an old shack in the middle of nowhere. You open the front door to find a completely different realm entirely unlike our own. Describe this new domain. (This is a reblog of a poem written two years ago.)
Matt asks, “If you could experience any movie again for the first time, what would it be?” I think it would be “Emma’s Shadow,” a Danish film made in 1988 about a young girl neglected by her wealthy parents who engineers her own kidnapping and is adopted by an impoverished sewer worker. It is absolutely charming and it has been so long since I’ve seen it that it probably would feel like the first time I ever saw it. I actually found it online and bought it years ago. I need to look it up when I get home. I still have a t.v. with a built in V.H.S. player.
http://www.danlaustsen.com/movie/emmas-shadow
https://normalhappenings.com/2018/11/06/rewind-replay-daily-inkling/
The Fruits of Nature
Wind chimes in the autumn by stripping bare the trees.
A vine of clouds now choke the moon. Stars fill the sky like bees.
Summer is clearly over and arctic winds are coming.
Small squirrels mine the oak tree with their insistent drumming.
Our backyard orchard gives its last small shelter to the birds
although its leafy plumage is diminished now by thirds.
Where months before small families chirped their hunger to the skies,
empty nests have been laid bare to marauding eyes.
No danger now, unless the murderous blue jay stores away
the memory of their placements for a future day.
The trees stand strong and sturdy, their roots below entwined,
watching one more old year steadily unwind.
What new pleasure in this scene will we newly find
once all the fruits of nature are pared down to the rind?
The word prompts today are: chime, over, arctic, oak tree, orchard and this sketch by Kira. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/rdp-monday-chime/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/05/fowc-with-fandango-over/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/kiras-sunday-scribbles-15/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/daily-addictions-2018-week-44/arctic
Welcome to Kira’s weekly inspirational art piece.
https://normalhappenings.com/2018/11/05/the-old-oak-tree-daily-inkling/the old oak tree
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/daily-addictions-2018-week-44orchard
A Diet Most Fowl
My Dad’s one foolproof diet that he used to quote to us
entailed no calorie counting, no planning, mess or fuss.
He said, “It’s very simple. Put just one thing in your mouth.
Merely eat the north end of a duck that’s flying south!
The Daily Inkling prompt today was to create a fail proof diet.
https://normalhappenings.com/2018/11/04/results-guaranteed-daily-inkling/
The Flatterer
He was much given to compliments that most folks found annoying
as they tended to consider them saccharine and cloying.
I did not mind his compliments. Admiration was just fine,
but there was bound to be a time farther along the line
when I had a bad hair day and I was not going to buy it.
But once again, he won his points by simply being quiet!
For Daily Inkling’s prompt: Undervalued.
The Letter “C”
Here’s to the letter “C” that marks what is in the middle.
Somewhere between “A” and “F,” it has been known to fiddle.
While “A” studies most diligently, “C” is bound to shirk.
It has a certain phobia regarding too much work.
It’s head and shoulders above “F” and far better than “D.”
Nobody ever flunked a course by maintaining a “C.”
And yet it calls no sound its own. It’s either “K” or “S.”
At birthday time, we’re given kake and winning brings suksess.
We’re stopped dead in our trases. When we’re kissed, it’s a karess.
Why “C” has no sound of its own, not one of us kan guess.
When the sirkus komes to town, it’s happened onse or twise
that the krokodiles eskape. It isn’t very nise.
Townfolks run and skurry—skared as they kan be,
for katastrophes kan happen when krokodiles run free.
It isn’t too konvenient, as you kan klearly see
to be a kurly letter the likes of letter “C”
that’s firmly in the middle, with no sound of its own.
Does “C” dream of being “S” when it’s fully grown?
For “The Letter C” prompt by Daily Inkling.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 