Click on photos to enlarge.
Sharon and Linda’s birthdays, reunions after many years, Malanna’s successful job interview, making good use of old stamps, good food, good friends, good cheer, temptations of the Chinese market, spontaneous dance, grandkids and wontons and the birthday cake decoration that wouldn’t die!!!
Reconnections
What has been severed can be reconnected.
Stitches can stitch up what has been dissected.
Humans are fallible. All make mistakes.
Thus we are given a chance at retakes.
When we strictly label an act as “The End,”
we only signal our refusal to bend.
When a solution’s offered and we refuse it,
we’ve been offered a chance and chosen to lose it.
We’ve denied a lesson and chosen defection
in lieu of a chance to learn reconnection.
Consider the paperclip—invention most clever
that helps to rejoin what we once chose to sever.
Granted, some things may be better off parted,
but things we think ended can still be restarted.
Some things are clearly better off righted,
and after small partings should be reunited.
Prompt words today are paperclip, fallible, strictly, sever and lesson.
Reunion
We perambulate the meadow, our eyes drinking their fill,
our memories straying farther up over yonder hill.
The tirades of an angry world do not survive the climb,
leaving us to peacefulness simple and sublime.
The higher up thoughts wander, memory grows hypoxic,
screening out the terrors of a world that has grown toxic.
Wild poppies sway and bend to currents fresher than below
as what we both remember overtakes what lies below.
We draw fresh energy and joy from everything we pass.
The cicadas churr rain’s promises from the obscuring grass.
Small creatures race for burrows, unaccustomed as they are
to the human menace that approaches from afar.
But our thoughts pass without harming, for memories pose no threat,
and we shed years and worries the higher that we get.
Remember all those years ago, those passions that we shared
with each new faltering kiss and each new secret that we bared?
Though the present is what nourishes, youth vanished way too fast.
What harm can be in going back for a light repast?
Prompts today are memory, passed, thought, hypoxic, tirade, perambulate, fill.
Two years ago, when I visited friends from my childhood that I hadn’t seen for scores of years, we had a wonderful time going through a box of mementos and then gathering around the piano to make music as sweet as the memories. Susan is a wonderful pianist and Karen a professional-level singer with a lovely soprano voice that always sends chills down my back. Patti and I, good high school altos that we once were, created the harmony. A perfect day with three of my favorite people whom I don’t see often enough. Sweet Harmony for sure.
Small Reunion
The pianist deftly presses out her chords.
The soprano’s voice slides smoothly from her throat
while we others strain until “Dear Heart” syrups our vocal chords
and we slip with less effort up and down the scale—
old friends singing even older songs.
The small dog snuggles in,
balancing on the plush chair back.
The mother of the pianist and the soprano
observes from her frame atop the piano.
All husbands out and about on other business.
Old letters reread, old memories pulled from forgetfulness,
each of us is left at the end richer—hearts refilled
from a shared past. Every word
has been a song of its own—
our notes blending together
in perfect harmony.
The prompt today was harmonize. This is a rewrite of a piece blogged two years ago. I’m getting ready for Camp Estrella so there won’t be much time for blogging for the next week!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 