Tag Archives: The Daily Prompt

Still Life With A Small Town Girl

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The Prompt: Sparkling or Still—What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.

Still Life With A Small Town Girl

For many years when I was small and far into my teens,
my summer days were filled with little else than magazines
and books and all the other things a girl in a small town
brings into her summers just to make the days less brown.

Day after day of reading soon led to dreaming, and
my shade beneath the cherry tree became a foreign land.
I did not know the name of it, but in this foreign place
the people did such lovely things. They kept a faster pace.

There were many things to see and people who liked doing—
circuses and carnivals, badminton and horse-shoeing,
imaginings and plays and travels. People who liked dancing.
Instead of trudging down the street, these people would be prancing.

I dreamed such dreams of bigger towns, and far-away towns, too.
All summer, I lay in the grass, dreaming what I’d do
when I was so much older and could go out on my own.
I’d wander off into the world. Explore the great unknown.

Now six decades later, I have done it all—
so many of those things I yearned to do when I was small.
I’ve been to places far and wide—Africa and Peru.
In England, France, Australia—I found so much to do.

Plays and concerts, dances, films, museums, garden walks.
Lectures, movies, workshops, classes, roundtables and talks.
Tours and treks and trips and sorties—guided meditations.
Somehow life seemed fuller packed with exotic vacations.

But now that I am sixty-seven, I’d appreciate
if all this activity would finally abate.
I dream of slower days that I’d spend dreaming in the shade
where all my memories of days spent doing would just fade

into the past and leave me to dream here in this place,
swinging in my hammock, at a slower pace.
Leaving my activity to stream from head to pen.
Filling up the page with all the places I have been.

And making some sense out of why I had to go and go,
speeding up the days that back then seemed to me so slow.
I guess I had to travel to find others of my kind
to teach me that life’s riches are mainly in the mind!

Brief Admission

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The Prompt: We all have that one eccentric relative who always says and does the strangest things. In your family, who’s that person, and what is it that earned him/her that reputation?

Brief Admission

It’s true that I’ve been withdrawn since the day that I was born.
So I don’t write about myself. I do not toot my horn.
And that is why my post today will be unusually short.
My natural loquaciousness I will have to abort.
The one who does the strangest things within my family?
I cannot talk about because I fear that person’s me!!!!

 Judy’s note:  This is the first day of our writing retreat.  Looking forward to it!  Ten women, a palapa on the beach in a country that produces all of the tequila in the world! What could go wrong????

Fruit Salad

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Fruit Salad

It was 1973. I’d been in Australia since September of 1971 and was ready to travel again. You’ve heard part of the story—the hard and adventurous part through Timor— but I was now in Bali, which was an undiscovered paradise at that time. I spent over a month there, sipping “magic ice juice” and trying to avoid durian. We were living well on $1 a day. 25 cents for bed and breakfast, a quarter for lunch and 50 cents for a lobster dinner at night. Pot and magic mushrooms were available by the grocery bag full and were not yet a hanging offense. Everyone was high all the time!

We stayed in a house with a man who had 4 wives, but was the loneliest man in Bali, afraid to spend time with his beautiful new wife lest his oldest wife find out and demand equal attention. If he bought one wife a gift, it was the law (of both his religion and his house) that he buy an equal gift for all of the others, and feeling financially challenged, the result was that he stayed away from home and his “crony wives” as much as possible. He took us to the rice paddies to see where the village bathed and was disappointed, I think, when we didn’t remove our clothes and join them.

We toured temples where signs said, “It is forbidden to enter women during menstruation” and visited elephant caves, the homes of famous artists, had massages and avoided bare-breasted old women who kept trying to raise our blouses to see what our breasts looked like. Certainly there must be something wrong with them that we kept them covered all the time. One of our fellow-travelers, a very large-breasted woman who was a practical nurse from New Zealand, posed nude for a Balinese batik artist, but we never saw the fruits of his labor.

On certain evenings, the entire town of Kuta turned into one huge gamelan orchestra with the floors of entire small buildings covered with kneeling players, mallets in hand. Processions would wind through the street toward temples, the women with high stacks of baskets and floral offerings, the priests making animal sacrifices of small chickens—everyone in the trance of the music and the occasion, some of us still under the trance of the magic mushrooms we’d consumed in an omelet 3 days before.

You couldn’t eat the salad, but the fruit, the music, the rice paddies, the temples, the sacred monkey forest, the art, the people and the price—you couldn’t beat.

The Prompt: Salad Days—Is there a period in your own personal life that you think of as the good old days? Tell us a story about those innocent and/or exciting times (or lack thereof).

Daily Post: Play Date

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Play Date

 

My sister’s house has sold and they are cleaning out her attic. My niece and I make one trip more and I find my old dollhouse, collapsed, in the garbage can. I take the pieces out—some of them—and stash them in her trunk. I’d thought them gone forty years ago when the tornado took the roof off my parents’ house, but now, here they are like the leaves of memory blown miraculously back to me.

When she sees I’ve taken them, my niece asks what she should do with the dolls she found in the back recesses of her mother’s attic storage room—the one I hadn’t got to on my last visit—perhaps because of the roofing nails sticking through the wood which made reaching back behind the eaves a physical danger.

I find them where she has stashed them In a suitcase in her garage, and when I open the case and see the first doll staring up at me, I think it is a “find” from some antique store, like the dishes in my sister’s China cabinet or the tiny figures on her shelves. One rubber arm, sticky with age, has burst open and streams kapok like a froth of bleached and fermented blood. Other limbs have decayed to nothing but empty puddles of congealed rubber. Only the torso, held in place by a sagging pink fancy gown; and the face, stained red in places from some surface it’s been pressed against for too long, are still intact. As I lift the first doll from the suitcase, the other doll—the size of a toddler—stares up at me, one eye unhinged, her hair in pigtails sealed with rubber bands. When I lift her by one arm, her head turns, her legs pump and I realize this is my Ideal walking doll. When you raise her arms, one at a time, she walks toward you and her head swings, side-to-side. Hard and beautiful, she was not a doll to cuddle and she would not sit. She stood propped up against one corner of my room, rarely played with. What, I wonder, has happened to the bright blue dress she wore? Then I look closer and see that she’s still wearing it—faded to paleness even in the dark. What is here is original—her hair, her limbs, her dress, her petticoat—but her shoes and socks have been lost to another little girl, perhaps, or have jiggled off in some trunk and been left behind.

I’m 1500 miles away from home, yet I load the child-sized dollies into my boyfriend’s trunk: my sister’s doll in it’s fancy pink floor-length formal, my doll with her eye gone wild in its socket. They won’t make it home to Mexico in my suitcase this time, but it is impossible to leave them there in the suitcase to be thrown away by someone who has no memory of them. They are not collector’s items. They have been too neglected in their lives since they stood propped up in the corners of our rooms, then in the corners of our closets, the basement, my sister’s trunk and then her attic 800 miles from where they called us their owners and stimulated our imaginations to the extent they were able.

They’ll now reside in my boyfriend’s garage in Missouri until the time comes when I can carry them back in an extra suitcase or he can mule them down for me. If they were miniatures, I could include them in a retablo or a memory box, but each head is larger than the largest assemblage I’ve ever made. The closets of my house are full and overflowing, as are the wall-to-ceiling cabinets in my garage and studio and every area of my house where I’ve had room to build a closet. But I must use them. Give them some purpose for still existing other than to fill up room in some box on some cupboard shelf.

I imagine a memory box of gigantic proportions and suddenly, I have to make it, even if it takes up all the work room of my studio, and I start to plan how I could take my own doll back with me and what I’ll have to leave: the case of books that I’ve just had printed or my clothes or all the cartridges for my laser printer? If I wear a baby carrier, will they believe it is my baby, sound asleep? And what sensation will I cause when I try to stuff her into the overhead rack?

When I start to plan what else will go in the memory box with her, I remember the metal dollhouse sides and suddenly, I’m planning another trip back to Missouri, where I will make the mother of memory boxes—four feet square—and I wonder how my boyfriend will react to this and what I’ll do with it when it is finished. But somehow all these practicalities do not matter, because this dolly, relegated to corners for its whole life, is finally going to get played with!!!

 

The Prompt: Antique Antics: What’s the oldest thing you own? (Toys, clothing, twinkies, Grecian urns: anything’s fair game.) Recount its history — from the object’s point of view.

 

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