Gayle Sands is our host today for the second day of the August Open Write at www.ethicalela.com. She brings us a challenge to write a nestling poem in the essence of Irene Latham. You can read her full prompt here.
I’m reading Ada Limon’s collection of books, and I chose Forgiveness from The Hurting Kind as my base poem. If I were adding to a list of the things I would hold close forever, it’s Limon's poem. Here is mine, taken from hers:
Silent Water
dumb hearts
hurting each other
shadowy places
scars
bound to the blades
bound to outrun
Today, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 1 of the August Open Write inspires us to write poems about hands. Denise Krebs of California is hosting today’s writing. You can read her full prompt here.
Welcoming Magnolia Mae
yesterday, these hands
gripped handlebars, holding on
for the ride with friends
yesterday, these hands
swaddled babies, bandaged knees
as children grew up
yesterday, these hands
stitched a quilt for a grandchild
I will meet today
for today, these hands
will build Legos and fairy
gardens first, and then…..
today, these hands will
swaddle a new granddaughter
in rosettes and sage
so that tomorrow,
these hands will be remembered
this heart full of love
A colleague shared that she thought I’d enjoy visiting a bookstore she’d visited on her birthday.
The Underground Bookstore is in Carrollton, Georgia on the downtown square.
She was right. This place is charming, and the literary candles that use scents from items mentioned in their namesake books are delightful.
You step down into stairs so old they’re not built to code, and immediately the smell of books and the antiquity of bookshelves greets you like an old friend. Staff reviews line the shelves under featured titles, enticing you to read all the books.
And the poetry section……oh my! The poetry section had a few holes here and there (no Harjo, only one Limon, and only two obscure Collins) but still an amazing collection of those lesser-known poets and titles that sell the books. I came away with a couple of Sarah Kay books (one signed), one Collins, one Macfarlane/Morris (signed), and a book I needed for a book club that is already well underway – – Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
After dinner on the square, we went to the most aromatically-roasted coffee shop ever, the kind with old brick walls and people talking in comfortable chairs around a round table and folks on computers doing work, ……..and right there in the middle of it all, the two of us…….reading books.
We both worked on projects most of Saturday after visiting our own local coffee shop and Savored Sunday afternoon on the streets of another town this week, and the twist-up was a beautiful way to end the weekend and start the week ahead.
I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for several reasons.
An Indigo Bunting performs acrobatic moves in a tree
I’m cooking dinner for a friend who is now cancer-free after radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, and I’ll get to see her today for the first time since early June.
I’ll finally finish a quilt for my new granddaughter and get to see the true “rag quilt” look of the final product.
I’ll get to read from the next book in Sarah Donovan’s book club, even though the hammock is out of the question on what is supposed to be the hottest weekend of the summer here.
The weeds that are completely out of control will get handled by someone else.
There’ll be some time for birding before it gets hot outside, when the birds are most active.
There’ll be some time for writing chapters in two books I’m working on with my writing group.
Some pressure washing might happen.
And the other thing that might happen is a trip to an underground bookstore where they sell these candles that use the scents of things in the books they’re named after, like Alice in Wonderland with the unbirthday cake fragrance, and Anne of Green Gables with some lemon and jasmine. A co-worker told me about this place, maybe an hour from here, where she started Christmas shopping last weekend because of all the unique gifts she’d found when her husband took her there as part of her birthday celebration.
For now, I’m settled into my writing chair, enjoying the early morning silence of the house. I’ve taken the boys out for their morning relief romp, and they all came back in and settled back to sleep right away. I can hear a Carolina Wren singing at the top of its lungs through the kitchen window, and the faintest light looks like pinholes through the tree leaves against the eastern side of the Johnson Funny Farm.
Five minutes from now, at a quarter to seven, I’ll be outdoors with a steaming cup of coffee, starting a bird count to mark the species I hear and see.
And I won’t be rushed to get showered and dressed today. I’ll savor my coffee and my own private bird concert on the front porch way out here in our remote corner under the Loblolly pines of rural Georgia and give a thousand thanks for the blessings of another sunrise to enjoy the spectacular splendor of the woods.
Lately I’ve been grounding myself in my rural Georgia blessings by rereading Gladys Taber‘s books about her life on her farm, Stillmeadow, in the hills of Connecticut. Every sentence she writes, it seems, takes me to comforting places that fill me with the joy of memories and the inspiration to carry on the traditions and legacy that my mother left.
In the August chapter of Stillmeadow Calendar A Countrywoman’s Journal, Gladys shares, “Corn stands silken in the field, chicory stars the roadside, and goldenrod mints her coin. The kitchen smells of spices and syrups, ming and sweet pepper. It is the time of “putting up,” a rewarding time for country-folk. I believe it is an instinct in man to store things against the winter, even when there is a supermarket a few blocks or miles away. It is part of the rhythm of life.”
When my children were young, I’d meet my mother at the halfway point so that the kids could visit a week every summer with their grandparents. Just a few weeks ago, as I was visiting one of my girls, we passed a Dairy Queen.
“That makes me think of all those times Mimi would take us to get a Cotton Candy Blizzard,” she shared. “Those were the best days of my life. I loved making strawberry pigs with Mimi.”
My mother had a fig tree, and they’d all go out and pick figs in the back yard and strawberries from a neighbor’s patch. Mom would get out the pressure cooker and a box of clean Mason jars and lids. Everyone had a job to do well beyond the picking – – washing figs, hulling strawberries, slicing fruits, measuring sugar, stirring. It was a day-long event with everyone fully-aproned, and they stocked our pantry and theirs with all the toast topping they needed for the coming winter months.
My grown children still call strawberry figs “strawberry pigs,” from their days of childhood mispronunciations.
When we moved onto the Johnson Funny Farm in 2008, I found a little twig of a scratch-and-dent turkey fig on the clearance rack at Home Depot and bought it for $3.00. My husband put up the orange plastic netting around it to keep from running the tractor over it, and today it stands taller than a clown on stilts and is more solid than any prize bull.
My scratch-and-dent clearance fig
I walk out to the fig tree this morning, inspecting the forthcoming fruits, anticipating their ripening. A fig harvest heralds the end of summer and beginning of fall – my favorite time of year! And I feel my mother’s arm around my shoulders, erasing all distance between heaven and earth, assuring me that the time spent doing simple things with those we love is the best gift of all. The simple act of making memories transcends years, space, and distance and preserves the togetherness and belonging – – the “putting up” of love scooped and slathered freely like a medicinal balm at the twist of a jar lid when it’s needed in the winters of our lives.
Several years ago, my father sent me a stack of books from his collection by Gladys Taber.
“Read these,” he urged. “You’ll see yourself in these pages.”
So I did. And he was right.
Gladys Taber lived on a farm named Stillmeadow in the Connecticut hills, where she wrote for Family Circle, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and other popular magazines. She published over 50 books.
I live on the Johnson Funny Farm in middle Georgia, where I make a feeble attempt to add to my blog every day.
Gladys was a lover of animals. She raised her precious, spoiled rotten Cocker Spaniels and treated them like her children. She even made friends with 2 skunks.
I’m smitten with our three Schnoodles. We call them our four-legged sons and share our meals with them at every sitting. I watch birds and serve them specialty seed.
Gladys and her friend Barbara Webster exchanged letters for years, even publishing one full year of correspondence between their farms in Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge, sharing details of farm life in the 1950s.
I’m fond of mailing postcards to family and friends.
Gladys’s love of the countryside is evident in every carefully crafted sentence, rich in her descriptions of the simple pleasures of farm life.
We, too, are so fond of our corner of this planet that we audibly say, “Ah, back in God’s Country,” when we come back home from anywhere else. We’re “those folks” who take Sunday evening drives just to admire the landscape and praise the Creator for the rolling hills and the cows in the meadows. We catch our breath with every rustic charm – split-rail fences, old barns, rocking chairs on porches, sweet tea in mason jars, sheets blowing in the wind on a clothesline, clumps of wildflowers at the base of a mailbox.
I turn to the July pages of Stillmeadow Calendar and begin.
“July comes to Stillmeadow clad in silk-blue dawns, blazing gold noons, and violet dusks. Heat glazes the air, leaves droop, and the pond level begins to drop. But night is lovely as a dream, and we can go outdoors without a sweater. Sitting in the garden is inadvisable because the mosquitoes and gnats are busy, but a brief walk is possible.”
I connect with Gladys. These could be my own words now, 80 years later.
I glance out at the drooping leaves, heavy with the heat of the day here in middle Georgia and look to the western horizon, the copper tangerine sun hanging low in the branches and think, “What did I ever do to deserve this slice of heaven on earth?”
And for a moment, I feel the knowing spirit of Gladys here with me, nodding enthusiastically, urging me to love it while I can. She’s smiling from a better place, assuring me that for now, this’ll do.
Today’s host for the last day of the July Open Write is Mike Dombrowski of Michigan. You can read his full prompt here, along with the poems and responses of others. Today, Mike inspires us to write a poem about a time we experienced anxiety, and to include how we overcame it if possible. I chose to write about my mother’s last breath.
Common Threads 