Tag: ancestors

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We Have a Ghost

Last month, I started writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Goldberg’s book was among those recommended at the top of my reading list by the chair of my doctoral committee a decade ago, and the messages about writing remain timeless.

Today’s topic: How are you invisible?

I’m not invisible, but our ghost is the closest thing to invisible around here, even though the presence is translucent. It’s an orb.

We’ve done a lot of unearthing of things around here lately. First, all the trees came down and I wonder whether some poor Civil War soldier is still looking for the missing button on his coat. Maybe he thinks it is in our garage.

Next, we lost Dad in June and have had to clear out seven storage rooms and his house, and in the process of preparing for the estate sale, I’ve brought home things to price – – such as old coins and all my great grandfather’s briarwood pipes and other relics that might have conjured up a spirit following them here with me.

I knew we had this invisible ghost when my eyes flew open, wide awake suddenly from a deep sleep where I thought I’d heard a noise. I turned on the camera in the garage, certain I was going to have to call 911 for an intruder. But that’s not what I saw.

I saw an orb. It was hovering and floating around just as you’d expect any ghost to do, all ethereally, very demure out there, not rattling any chains or slamming any objects around. It floated over between the camper and the truck like it was planning for how to pack when we go camping, and then it went off screen toward the Home Depot clearance sale fig tree before returning to the garage and floating unhurriedly in between the cars.

My husband woke at this point and asked what I was doing.

“We have a presence,” I told him. I added, “Don’t think me crazy, please. I have proof.”

When I explained I was waiting for the ghost to come back out of the garage, he pointed out it might have slipped through right underneath the camera where I couldn’t see it exit. Then, as an afterthought, he pulled up the camera in the living room – the one we use to check on the dogs – and there was no orb floating around in there. Good thing – – that’s just on the other side of our bedroom door.

I snapped a few photos, but then realized I needed to renew the Ring subscription to capture any video.

Flash forward to two nights ago, and I now see two orbs in one of the videos.

And last night, I captured sound for the first time. We’d gone to bed shortly before the time on the two videos that prompted the camera to record. I will check those out today and post them another day so that you can hear the clicking and breathing of this ghost. Perhaps this evening we will move more cameras around to this side of the house so that we can see from other angles as well.

Here on the Johnson Funny Farm, we continue to attract all the quirky animals, people, and spirits. We look forward to finding out who this is and how we can help. We feel it’s a friendly presence with some kind of unsettled business. And like all the wildlife around here, it has come to a safe place to find some peace.

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Day 5 of the August Open Write with Anna Roseboro

Anna Roseboro of Michigan is our host today for our fifth and final day of the August Open Write. Anna encourages us to walk through poetry from #VerseLove 2024 and apply the TIME acronym to the elements of a poem and construct a verse about one of our choice. You can read her full prompt here. I chose Stacey Joy’s Our Old Kitchen Table to think about these elements in her poem and to write about each.

Time

Imagery

Music

Emotion

Tabletime Tempos

Through all these tender table times
In games, gatherings, cartoons, showers,
Meals, drumrolls of dice and laughter and tears against
the backdrop of time ticking
Emanating life tempos tintinnabulated and tolled, thus told
around the old kitchen table

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Surgery Day – A Visit from Her Mimi

Throughout her life, my mother loved birds. Songbirds, water birds, and birds of prey. She could spot a hawk from a mile off, as if she’d had some inner sensor alerting her to their presence.

My brother Ken and I often share pictures of hawks when they manifest themselves to us, especially on significant dates – birthdays, holidays, or times of concern. We often mention that we saw Mom sitting on a wire by the highway making sure our seatbelts were fastened and our doors were locked.

My children often share how much she meant to them – taking them to Dairy Queen for Cotton Candy Blizzards, making strawberry figs in the kitchen, taking walks along the beach. They called her Mimi.

Imagine the deep feeling of comfort when my daughter and I were leaving for the hospital from our hotel this morning and noticed, resting on the wire directly above the car, a hawk – seeing us off, assuring us that her spirit was right here with us in these tense moments of anticipating surgery. A tonsillectomy is rough surgery for an adult, but Mom’s spirit affirmed for us that we are on the way to better days ahead.

I’d parked the car with her guidance the night before. That inner voice told me, arriving after dark, to park near a light – not on the back side of the building, as had been suggested by hotel staff at check-in. I followed that voice. She is always steering me in all the right ways, right down to parking the car for safety and so she’d have a wire for a better morning greeting.

Even brief appearances and signs bring deep comfort to us! Mom knew how much this hello from Heaven would mean to us.

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November Open Write – Day 2

This week, Fran Haley and I are hosting the November Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. Come join us as we write poetry together. You can read Fran’s full prompt on the website along with the poems of others or the prompt only, here below.

Title: Belonging

Our Host

Fran Haley is a literacy educator with a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and dogs. She lives in the countryside near Raleigh, North Carolina, where she savors the rustic scenery and timeless spirit of place. She’s a pastor’s wife, mom of two grown sons, and the proud Franna of two granddaughters: Scout, age seven, and Micah, age two. Fran never tires of watching birds and secretly longs to converse with them (what ancient wisdom these creatures possess!). When she’s not working, serving beside her husband, being hands-on Franna, birding, or coddling one utterly spoiled dachshund, she enjoys blogging at Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life. 

Inspiration 

As Kim Johnson mentioned in yesterday’s Open Write: Come April, she and I will be honoring National Poetry Month by facilitating discussion of The Hurting Kind, the most recent book by current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón (you can join us via Sarah Donovan’s new Healing Kind book club). 

Let me linger a moment on the word healing. How often, how long, have we cried out for healing as individuals, families, communities, nations, humankind? When a group of students asked me what superpower I’d want most, that’s what I said. Healing. Oh, to lessen suffering, restore wholeness, impart peace…

In contemplating the despair and destruction of our times—of our human history, honestly—I cannot help picking up the inextricable thread of belonging. Think on this: How much pain stems from the need to belong? To know, to have, a safe place of being? 

In a May 2022 interview with Angela María Spring of Electric Lit, Limón speaks of inspiration for The Hurting Kind: “We are all part of a community, we’re all connected. And sometimes we work so hard at trying to fit in somewhere to find our community, to figure out what it is that makes us connected…you’re already connected. You already have all that you need. And it’s in everything that’s come before you and it’s in everything that’s going to come after.”

That is the spirit of today’s poetry writing.

Process

Read Limón’s poem, “Ancestors”. Note that her images and metaphors are drawn from nature. She writes, exquisitely, of being from rocks, trees, and the “lacing patterns of leaves,” concluding with “I do not know where else I belong.” There are telling lines about roots and survival.

Considering the whole of your life: Which places impart the greatest sense of belonging to you? Why? Concentrate on details and possible symbolism of these settings. What’s the story? Which people are connected to these places? They’re often, but not always, family. 

Try writing free verse or a prose poem incorporating these meaningful images, perhaps borrowing the phrases I’ve come here from and/or I do not know where else I belong.

Fran’s Poem

Origins

(after Ada Limón’s “Ancestors”)

I come here by way of the king’s river
a moody expanse, as vast as the sea
gray-green depths
with bell-topped red buoys
bobbing, bobbing
Right, red, returning
 —a rite of passage

I’ve come here from bridges
yes, most of all from bridges


traversed by my predecessors
seeking livelihood

—did they ever encounter
bridges in their dreams

the way I have?
Distorted structures of dizzying heights

spanning waters at dead of night
absurd angles

impossible to navigate


I never think I can

but I always
find my way.

Like a pigeon, released

driven by some coding
deep in my DNA

I’ve forsaken the riverside
the mammoth steel cranes

the sound of buzz saws, rivet-guns,

metal striking metal
—over time, making a man
lose his hearing

to return, to roost
here in the dawn lands
where abandoned gray houses
and weathered-wood barns
sink decade by decade
into the earth

—for it always
takes back its own


where white-spotted fawns

guarded by their mothers

step like totems from sun-dappled woods

swelling with cicada chorus 

—little living buzz saws
echoing, echoing in my blood
the generational song

—I don’t know
where else I belong.

Your Turn

Kim’s Poem

Ancestors Speak (inspired by Ada Limon’s Ancestors)

I’ve come here

from island and swamp

from Spanish Moss live oaks

from river and ocean

from marshland spartina

from cypress and mangrove

magnolia and black gum

Georgia roots running deep

all sunshine and black water

chaos and order

from hermit and hoarder

from ghosts that still speak

of lies that were spoken

of promises broken

of sermons not lived

the hard slap of truth

I don’t know

where else

I belong.

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#VerseLove April 30

Sarah Donovan is our host for Day 30 of VerseLove and our host of this space each month for writers who crave togetherness each month as we come together to celebrate our words and thoughts ~to share the joy of writing. She helps meet a deep need in each of us. I adore the prompt today, and I ran for my journal from 2019 when I saw the topic. I thought back to the first year I participated in VerseLove and looked for that first prompt that changed the trajectory of my life from grief over my mother’s death to connection with others whose pain shone through their heart holes, too, who showed me how to use the sunspots to write and heal. To every writer who shares the journey, thank you for all of the inspiration you bring. This morning, my grandson writes along with me as I revise my first-ever VerseLove poem, Blackberry Winter.

Blackberry Winter, Revisited

It’s a Blackberry Winter I wrote in 2019
beginning a poem about all the good things

later this morning, my first grandson 
               will make elderberry jam toast
                         plus cheese omelettes 
                                   on the Lodge cast iron griddle
   wearing my apron 
         (he doesn’t know about the apron yet)

but first: raindrops on rooftop, fresh coffee,
wi-fi (stronger than coffee, finally), computer charged,
comfy chair, whisper-soft pajamas,

thoughts ready to materialize
three schnoodles tussling on grandson’s 
sleepover mattress as we write together
in the living room

words forming on pages: his pen, my keyboard
to the first #VerseLove prompt of 2019 from Sarah:

….the good things in our lives….

there are those who bring
more warmth than raindrops and coffee,
more comfort than chairs and pajamas,
more joy than words ~ 
   ancestors whose cast iron presence
      and apron strings linger in kitchens
       hugging us tight about the middle

and those we ancestor ~ grandchildren 
who write right next to us
about all the good things in our lives
on this elderberry toast and cheese omelette morning.

– Kim Haynes Johnson, April 2, 2019 and 4/30/2023