Thanksgiving

Each year, during some quiet moment during this season of Thanksgiving, I like to number a sheet of blank paper 1-my current age. Then I list everything I'm grateful for in my life, my community, and the world. This exercise quickly silences any murmuring and complaining I may be tempted to do. Perhaps it will do the same for you. What are you grateful for this year?

This exercise works well with students of all ages too - no matter what course you're teaching.

Mom Day Love

I am blessed with flowers & love.

             






                                                

            Enough said.

                                                                            

Grace & Magic

My latest blog post for the Minerva Rising Literary Journal at minervarising.com.

Grace & Magic

It was the summer of 1972. At the time I lived with my parents on a modest 110-acre dairy farm. Imagine a white clapboard farmhouse with a front porch, a weathered gray barn, pastures abuzz with grasshoppers, and black-and-white cows slurping water out of a small, shallow pond.  

I tottered on the brink of adolescence, bookish and lonely. Our closest neighbors lived a mile away. My best friend lived on the other side of town. And then, city people “from away” purchased an abandoned house just up the road—maybe a quarter mile or so. They created a summer retreat and returned year after year. I don’t know about you, but over the years a person here and a person there have unexpectedly touched my life. Each time I’d never ever be the same again. One of the city people, a girl my age, became the first of them.     

She had traveled to Boston and Chicago, took ballet lessons, ate yogurt—whatever that was—and gasp! wore a bra. These observations elevated her to a dizzying height of sophistication I couldn’t match. My greatest accomplishment to date had entailed riding my bicycle four miles to the local mom-and-pop store for potato chips and root beer.    

I offer you a poem in tribute to memories of those who grace our lives with magic.  

Lost to Inexperience

Once, I watched you twist your long hair into

a tight bun against the soft nape of your neck,

and shut my eyes while you fastened it with

a shiny hair clip.

I wanted to kiss you when you turned around

and smiled at me, but the moment passed

into other moments and disappeared into the air

like a wisp of smoke.

Another time, you baked sweet cinnamon bread,

served me warm chunks slathered with honey butter,

and brushed crumbs from my lips.

My fingers brushed against your hand, and you

slipped away, pirouetting in perfect form across

the wooden floor until you paused, and bowed

to my inexperience.

My favorite photograph shows our faces in shadow,

your arm draped across my shoulders.

I kept the picture on my dresser until it faded,

and I couldn’t see our faces any longer. 

After graduation you attended Julliard.

I worked in an office filing people’s taxes.

When I called you one rainy Saturday,

Oh, is all you said.

Writing Circle

 

This week I started a 5-week writing workshop at a local cancer center. The flier for the workshop includes the following information:

 

Writing is a valuable tool for tapping into our memories, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Writing relieves stress, improves communication skills, and provides clarity, perspective, and potential solutions to life’s ongoing challenges.  

Writing is also a meaningful way to celebrate and record our experiences and life lessons for our children, grandchildren, and future generations to come.   

The Pen in Hand Writing Circle provides an opportunity for you to write in a safe, comfortable atmosphere. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation are on vacation while you write. This is not a therapy group though painful topics may arise in your writing. That’s okay. Release, clarity, and insight are often found while writing through the discomfort.  

Our time together will include guided writing exercises that invite reflection and discovery. Elements of nature, scraps of poetry, literature and music, art, photographs, dreams, and letters will inspire us. We may share our writing with the group if we wish though sharing isn’t required. We’ll write and discover what our souls are longing to tell us. 

If I write what my soul thinks,

It will be visible, and the words

Will be its body.

n  Helen Keller

Writing Muscles

I'm blessed to be a member of a writing group that has been meeting for ten years. We meet twice a month and provide each other with honest, constructive feedback on our creative projects. Writing exercises flex and tone our writing muscles. Recently, we responded to the following prompt: "I Am From . . ."

Here is my response:

I am from ancestors
who braved the sea,
waves of hope rolling
beneath their feet
and salting their prayers.

I am from a mother's dream
of love and redemption,
her breath and blood
spinning the alchemy
of time into the breath
and blood of my body.

I am from silence
before language
was found. I am from
words strung across
a landscape of years
spotted with laughter
and tears.

I am from a morning birth,
snow outside the window
singing a song of mystery.

The prompt was chosen from Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider, a valuable resource for writers, writing groups, and those who wish to begin one.

Nature Note

PammieSue Beak is always searching for good eats in the grass.

Tin Heart

Each morning, between 4:30 and 5:00, an old sedan of some sort pauses at the blue box stationed across the road from our home. The driver takes five seconds—tops—to slide our newspaper into the box’s pocket. I’ve never glimpsed his face or heard his voice, but I’d recognize the tinny rattle within the car’s exhaust system in any lineup.

The carrier is a name scrawled onto a greeting card every Christmas, tucked between the newspaper's pages like a surprise gift. He’s a ghost on the periphery of my morning—there, then not there, a glowing afterimage behind my eye.   

I wonder whether he takes note of the lamplight shining in our kitchen and the darkness in the house next door. Who is awake? Who is brewing coffee? Pouring milk into a child’s cereal bowl before school? What is the hound dog’s name that bays at his approach and then settles back into rabbit-y dreams? Does the carrier listen to the radio, or does he listen to the silence?

Miles unspool beneath his wheels, heading west. What entertains his thoughts in the glow of the dashboard? What melody beats within his heart? Only he knows.