Our first camping weekend of 2024, and we arrived in heavy rain on our favorite campground within an hour from home. It's pretty full - campers pepper the campground, and kids are out on brightly lit hoverboards, while others are riding bikes and playing frisbee. Folks are walking their dogs (and vice-versa), and one site had its smokeless fire ring going this morning after the drizzle stopped and there was a damp chill for the reckoning.
The dogs were nestled back in the crook of the teardrop on the bed, under blankets like little humans, their heads resting on the pillows in a deep schnoodle-snooze.
I was making the coffee for breakfast when the sweetest moment happened - one I shall never forget, connected to another moment that I shall also never forget.
The first one happened in May 2013, when I got my fingers slammed in the trunk of the honeymoon getaway car at my son's wedding as the happy couple were leaving. I assured everyone I was fine, fine, fine, but as we drove back to the hotel, I cried and carried on because I was afraid I would never be able to write again since I couldn't bend my fingers yet and they looked a lot like a package of Ballpark franks after being in a sandwich press. It sent my husband into such a panic that this moment of fear became forever etched into his scrapbook of memories he'd rather forget. But I was fine, am fine, nothing broken or chopped off.
Which makes this morning's moment all the more special.
I handed him the water bottle as I made coffee
more and more recently I've handed him tight lids
I apologized ~ my hands don't have the strength they used to have I explained again
it’s a scary feeling, this change of neediness
He smiled took the bottle uscrewed the lid handed it back
Special Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for inspiring writers, especially sleepless ones.
#messages in the madness
The melatonin was working fine, just fine, I thought, but I figured either we had a rogue sound machine with broken buttons or that one of the machines was possessed. I kept hearing things, but my husband didn’t. Just like when the car starts making a sound, only not a car but a tiny little white noise machine.
So finally, finally – – he in his melatoninlessness began hearing mysterious sounds, too. I didn’t know whether to cry, be scared, or celebrate.
If your children tell you they hear funny voices at night, believe them and check the sound machine. They’re in there.
The windows should all be open, but Gemini didn’t listen.
A week ago, Lainie Levin posted an announcement that I wish could be reposted every day. Below, she states that engaging with others is the single most powerful thing that builds community during this challenge.
I emailed her immediately to ask if I could repost this announcement. She readily agreed.
Which brings me to a connection that stopped me in my tracks. I was having a conversation with the Poetry Fox as we were working out the details of his visit to Georgia from North Carolina. I asked him to describe what his events look like, and he told me that he sits at his typewriter and writes on-demand poetry for people who give him a word. He said, “And really, it’s not even about the poem. It’s about the connections I make and the people I get to meet. Those moments of connecting with someone are what it’s all about.”
I’ve thought about this again and again as I have returned to the conversation and the blog announcement and reflected on the power of connection. This community would be nothing without it. I realize that when I wake up during March and get to open the blogging windows and drink my coffee with an entire community and we’re all talking to each other about the slices of our lives and what is happening, there is power in these moments. We may all be tired and worn thin some days, but I know things about you – the people in my community – and I know many of your family members and how you spend time.
I know Paul likes to cook and actually likes Brussels sprouts (I thought I was the only one), Glenda likes to travel and has a voracious appetite for adventure (and will be having quite an adventure today – – I won’t spoil her surprise, but be on the lookout for something uniquely and colorfully …..uplifting)! Denise hikes in the desert and has a stargazer window in her house, Fran watches birds and is teaching her little granddaughters to love them too, Maureen also has two young granddaughters who love music and art and the outdoors, Peter is beginning to grieve the loss of a loved one and many of us are keeping his family close in our thoughts, Barb loves poetry slams and art exhibits and spending time outdoors, Sally checks in on her mom and has a granddaughter with new shoes, Margaret lives on the bayou and has the cutest ducks that jump into the water on jump day, and Joanne loves flowers and gardening. And I’m getting to know each of you, too!
Even though we all live in different places across the nation and beyond, I imagine a high rise brick apartment building where we’re all sitting in an open window chatting, waving, greeting each other at the start of the day, and smiling, rather like we might look from windows on the cover of the New Yorker if someone illustrated all of us in one drawing. We’d see floral window boxes for the green thumbs, cats and dogs with the animal lovers, and food cooking on the stoves of the culinary artists. We’d see children playing with grandmothers and, in a Paul Fleishman Seedfolks-ish kind of way, we’d all be connecting, contributing in beautiful ways to the community vegetable garden and sharing what we have to share, helping as we can, reaching out as we have needs that others can help meet.
Connection. Conversation. Sharing. Caring, Responding in kindness. Giving. Living.
Because that’s what community and connection are all about, and it’s also what writing is about – – reaching the next person. Not the word choice, not the capitalization of proper nouns, and not the run-on sentences (which, like Brussels sprouts, I love, by the way).
Thank you for these marathon days in March where we build our own neighborhood, and the Tuesdays throughout the year where we keep in touch! And to the owners of the Slice of Life apartment building for letting us move in for a month, rent-free, a huge debt of gratitude is owed for all of your hard work in keeping the lights on and the water running.
You each make a difference!
Slice of Life Challenge
Slice of Life Challenge community connections: open your windows!
pour a cup of tea share family recipes show trip photographs
compare hobby notes reveal hopes and dreams share fears and shed tears
open your windows! connect with fellow writers plant seeds. water them.
Last year, Denise Krebs asked me to share what I had done to plan a National Poetry Month celebration in my rural Georgia town. Today, I’m sharing a list prose poem (I think I just totally made that combo form up) of How To Plan A Poetry Event In Your Town. I’m currently, still, and always in the planning stages, so these are some of the things I’ve done to plan this year’s event (and last year’s too). At the end of April, I’ll share a picture tour of these events that began in February this year (we couldn’t wait…). Stay tuned.
Painted canvas in the palette of awakenings poetry – ready for lettering!
21 Steps to a Town Poetry Celebration: A List Prose Poem
1. Ask the local Arts Council to pick a theme that fits your town. Imagine the infinite possibilities when they pick Awakenings after two years of the same theme of Bloom. 2. Say a prayer of thanks that your community works together to make poetry happen and has given you the title The Crazy Poetry Lady. (Move over, Crazy Cat Ladies!) 3. Ask a friend to write a poem on the theme (the one who writes a book instead). 4. When he writes the book, set him up with a poetry reading and book signing event. 5. Ask another local poet to read and sign his new book, too, in the coffee shop. 6. Think back to Fran Haley's post on The Poetry Fox and invite him to town with his Fox suit and his vintage typewriter to bang out poems in under 70 seconds when folks throughout the land give him a word and then watch them be amazed when he stamps it with his little fox paw print, suitable at once for framing. 7. When he agrees to come from North Carolina, create canvases for the Chamber of Commerce windows of all the poets' verses. Paint the backdrops in shades of sunrise awakenings. Pretend you are a New York City window dresser and borrow easels and buy fishing line and eye hooks to hang the artwork, then stand back and wonder if any Crazy Cat Ladies will loan you some poetry cats to curl up in the window display. 8. Set up a Progressive Poetry Walk around the town square (read it in sections on stands). Since people will come throughout the land to see the fox, they’ll need something to read while they wait in the long line. 9. Make YouTube shorts of directions on how to write poetry for those who think they can't. 10. Set up community poetry writing kiosks with QR codes to scan for directions and create a community Padlet to showcase the writing online. 11. Ask the Georgia Poet Laureate to come read her poems in the coffee shop, too. Jump out of your skin with excitement when she sends you two poems that will appear in her new book and allows you to put them on a canvas in the Chamber window. 12. Plan an Open Mic night so those throughout the land can come listen....read.....recite. Note that 2 other community partners planned them without your prompting this year….and smile that your seeds are blooming. Pray your garden will grow and grow theoughout the land. 13. Bask in the glow of what poetry does in a town and a state and a nation and a heart. 14. Invite all your writing group friends to come to 1828 Coffee Company on April 25 at 6:00 to read their poems and drink the best coffee in all the land with you. Because Glenda Funk keeps a suitcase packed and ready, you know. 15. If they can't be here in person, invite them instead to record themselves reading a favorite poem or one they've written and send it to you or upload it to YouTube so you can make a QR code and put it in frames all around your town and throughout the land. 16. Create canvases of their verses to go in the Chamber windows, too, on your theme: awakenings. 17. Wonder why you haven't created a collection and put it out on Amazon. 18. Start a Word document of all the poems you'd put in a poetry collection on your theme. 19. Decide to self publish a short collection and choose a title and create an action plan. 20. Bask in the joy of poetry and all the healing it brings to a heart and a town and a state and a nation and a world and a universe. 21. Don't wonder where you'd be without the gift of poetry. You don't even want to know.
and then wonder if you can rewrite 21 into a poem all its own…..try a Haiku….
you don’t want to know where you’d be without the gifts of life-changing verse
its healing magic reaches in, awakens souls throughout all the land
Shelley of Oklahoma is our host today for the final day of the March Open Write, encouraging us to write poems to help us relax. You can read her full prompt here. I have one of those conferences today – the kind in a town with a gas station and a stop sign and maybe a hot dog in the gas station and nothing else, and I’m driving in with coworkers from an hour and seven minutes northeast, and I’m not overnighting so I have to leave early and get home late and I know the coffee’s gonna suck because it always does when they have those plastic canisters of powdered creamer and only pink-packet off-brand sweetener.
But I’m trying to relax.
Really.
Frumpy
Relax - no one cares whether your pants match your shirt or that they're wrinkled
Relax - no one cares that the tops of your feet are white as unbaked bread
Relax - no one sees you picking at your fingers of chipped nail polish
Relax - no one knows your Odor Eaters are now expired by three months
Relax - just because you forgot to tweeze your lip doesn't mean don't go
After all: you're the driver....others are counting on you to get there
Relax - your oil got changed, your gas tank's full and your car is vacuumed out
Relax - your riders might find your car is cleaner than theirs (not driven)
Relax - wait, is that .....is that a seam coming out? It's right on the butt
Nope, don't relax. Go change pants. Nothing clean? That's what long sweaters are for.
Heck, grab a blanket and wrap up like a student .....relax for a change!
Rex Muston of Iowa is our host today for the 4th day of the March Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. He inspires us to use our kitchen junk drawer to inspire poetry. You can read his full prompt here.
A kitchen junk drawer is second only as frightening to me as forgetting a piece of clothing and showing up at work for everyone to see all truth. It’s downright scary except for the drawer I did clean out last weekend. I still have one to go, and it’s the worst one. An invitation to explore those quirky drawer corners is fantastic! I love that even in the oddities, the junk, there are revelations of life and memories.
Unbanded
One junk drawer is empty ~the middle one~ but the one on the edge is chock-full of random bits and pieces
a years’ supply of 9V batteries for the smoke alarms we change often because Boo Radley shivers at the smell of toaster heat and smoke alarm chirps
plus the goat ball banding tool and bright orange bands as if the whole horrid thing needed a screaming fluorescent proclamation across the farm
and a vintage unfiltered cigarette- sized box of Happy Family ceramic pigs from England
a mama and twin piglets but no daddy there was never even a space for his unbanded self
now from the Funny Farm kitchen windowsill Mama smiles with a sparkle-eye bats her eyelashes and thinks….
Special Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Challenge!
Katrina Morrison of Oklahoma is our host today for the second day of the March Open Write at http://www.ethicalea.com. You can read her full prompt here. She explains that misheard lyrics are called Mondegreen. I’m a fan of Coxy.Official, and when the whole bed is shaking with my laughter at night, my husband knows I’m watching Nathan Cox on Tik Tok. He’s the king of music Mondegreen, and so thanks to Katrina, I now know this misheard lyric genre has a name. Coxy’s short clips are for adults, and it’s not the words as much as his reactions that get my tickle box turned over. Now it makes me want to go find the exact lyrics for all those songs I often mis-sang growing up. I was never sure whether Clapton was saying she don’t ride, she don’t ride, she don’t ride cocaine or she’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright cocaine, but either way you sing it, it works in the song.
My poem is about a text that became our own new phrase shortly after we married.
James Coats is our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com, where on this first day of the March Open Write, he asks us to write about the anarchist in us. You can read his full prompt here. When I was reading the prompt, my fingers were already running to the computer before the rest of me had even left the bed. I’m convinced that the most compelling poetry, and all writing really, lives in those shadows, lurks in the pain. My sympathies ahead of time to any PK parents out there and sincere apologies to any well-behaved PKs who turned out good.
When You Want to be Gryffindor But Your Slytherin Roots Say No…….. Slythindor
Okenfenokee swampland mud
plus Southern Baptist preacher’s blood
mix them and you’re bound to find
they breed an offbeat, lawless mind
this reptile in me, like Slytherin magic
broke dad’s sermons something tragic
stealing church chalk so I could play teacher
(kind of what you expect from the kid of a preacher)
I learned to smile, doodle tie in my hair
when I wanted to strike and crawl out of there
but
let me assure you, if you’ve ever wondered
there’s an upside to this P.K, life I’ve encumbered
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers for making writing magical!
Earlier this month, Margaret Simon shared a post about a book of poetry by Georgia Heard and Rebecca Kai Doltish entitled Welcome to the Wonder House. Each featured room is full of wonderful things – the room of science, the room of imagination, the room of nature, and so many more! I ordered a copy right away, and I discovered what a charming book it is…..hence, today’s visit to the Room of Charms. Thank you, Margaret, for sharing the book. Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone, and may all good luck and charms be with you all weekend.
Tomorrow begins the March Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com, and I hope to see you there. James Coats will be hosting with a prompt to inspire us on Saturday morning. I like to blend all of my daily writing into one blog post that serves as a poem for the Stafford Challenge, a slice for Slice of Life, and a poem for the Open Write so that I can triple-dip into three different writing groups with one poem or slice. That’s my writing strategy when multiple writing opportunities intersect on the calendar.
Common Threads 