For today and the next four days, three of my writing groups intersect. As part of The Stafford Challenge, I have committed to writing a poem every day for a year. In the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, we blog every day for the month of March, and for Ethicalela’s Open Write, today’s prompt drives the writing for the other groups as well.
Leilya Pitre of Louisiana’s prompt at http://www.ethicalela.com can be read in full here. She inspires us to write poems about the Ides of March with its foreboding feeling of doom.. While my time slice today is 12:28-12:59, I can tell you that during that 31-minute segment of my day, I’ll be praying and moving plants indoors and securing outdoor furniture to prepare for the storms my daughter is experiencing this morning in Owensboro, Kentucky that are heading our way this evening. Everyone has been anticipating and preparing for these storms all week. Right now, I’m praying for my children who are enduring baseball-size hail and 70 mph winds in their first round this morning.
I made up my own poetry form today. I chose to write an Ides of March Time and Date poem, using the time of her text and the date as my line formations. My daughter sent a text at 5:51 on 3/15, so six lines have that many words in that order. 5-5-1-3-1-5.
Have you ever had a surprise come your way when you least expected it, and it turned the day around? That’s what happened to me yesterday right before lunchtime.
I’d had a morning, already. My father had fallen out of his chair during the night and EMS had to come help him get back up. I was worried, as he was supposed to be getting his chemotherapy but instead ended up getting treatment for pain from his fall. I live five hours north of him and was waiting to hear the report from my brother when my sister-in-law who lives on the south side of the Johnson Funny Farm texted.
Text from my Sister In Law
out of the clear blue
just before lunch
my sister in law texts
asking if I’m in my office
I got you somethingshe reveals
we do this from time to time
buy small gifts for each other
usually I get her Hot Tamales
spicy-like-us cinnamon jellybeans
or York Peppermint Patties
but today there’s a new twist
in the sweet mix: a key lime parfait
because that’s what we ate on
our most recent girls’ getaway
together
sweet surprises win the day!
and together, we win life!
Actual Key Lime Parfait I couldn’t wait to sample…….
Top o’ the mornin’ to ya! I took a spur-o’-the-moment trip south to visit my family as my brother and sister in law and I try to help Dad tackle some tasks he can no longer do on his own. Chemotherapy has zapped all of his strength, and we (and others) continue to try to help where he will allow it – which is not nearly enough for any of us to feel satisfied, but that will take the luck o’ the Irish and a lot of prayer to change. He’s testy with us, seems skeptical, and wants to be left alone. He’s made it quite clear.
Before my brother and I visited him, I had a little extra time to check out the Ace Garden Center on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and I’d spied a little leprechaun in the robust fairy garden section that I’d planned to go back and get after visiting with Dad. I was there to look for spider plants, known for improving air quality by giving off oxygen in their transpiration process. But leave it to fairies to lure me down the aisle of wonder and intrigue. While I don’t have a dedicated fairy garden, my whole front porch is filled with fairies in their own plant container homes.
Imagine my delight when my sister in law, Jennifer, asked me to swing back by the house after visiting with Dad. She’d known just the medicine I’d needed – – a little fairy magic to cheer me up! She’d read my blog yesterday morning and beat me to the fairy section, choosing the perfect assortment of fairies – and the leprechaun – to sit on the edge of my shamrock plant as a gift – – making them so much more meaningful. Each time I look at the leprechaun, I smile. And what she didn’t know was that I would have picked the fairies dressed in green – – for an extra sprinkling of Irish fairy dust!
When I opened the gift, a black nose appeared out of nowhere – – JoJo, one of their black labs, sensed the magic and joined the fun, studying this leprechaun and his trio of fairy friends, as mesmerized as any dog has ever been. Her fixation on them – even trying at one point to take the leprechaun by the beard and run off with him – lightened the mood and made us all laugh.
Sources say that there are no female leprechauns, and that these little magical creatures are the unwanted children of the fairy family – – grouchy, closed off, and untrusting. With their stubborn, curmudgeonly, cranky attitudes, even leprechauns need someone to show them some love – trouble is, they have a hard time accepting it.
I have reasons for understanding the close relative of the leprechaun in folklore – the Clurichaun, drunk and surly beings who are known for clearing out entire wine cellars. And I must admit: I, myself, a mere human, along with my brother and sister in law, had broken into some wine over the weekend. But let’s be real – – the leprechauns drive them to it.
There comes a time in life when all children can do is clap if we believe in fairies, to envision Mary Martin as Peter Pan rallying us along, to hope the lights don’t fade too quickly.
Welcome to the first day of the 2025 Slice of Life Writing Challenge, where bloggers post each day of the month. You can find the home page with links to blogs across the world here. I’m writing about things that happen in time increments this year, described in yesterday’s post.
A little over a decade ago, my adult daughters and I went to the Bodies exhibit at Atlantic Station in Atlanta, Georgia. We drove the short distance from our rural farmland into the city and spent the day examining every part of a human body, all preserved behind clear plexiglass cases to show how bones, muscles and organs function as parts of systems, all packed into the skin-covered suitcase of a lifetime.
We entered one room where an entire body had been cross-sectioned, sliced in horizontal sections from head to toe the way one might casually slice a carrot coin-style while preparing dinner. Knowing the bodies had all been donated to Science and were real people at one point in time, I was in the rabbit hole of endless wondering: when was this person born? What was her name? what did she do for work? did she have children? did she ever, for one second of her life, have any inkling that millions of people would study every inch of her dead body, parts she herself had never seen, all preserved and on display in such an arrangement as this? I wanted to scan a QR code and see a video of what she’d looked like on the playground when she was 5 years old, her mother pushing a swing from behind as her dress sash rippled in the wind, little Mary Jane shoes and lacy socks pumping to keep momentum. And after wondering all these things about how she’d lived, I wondered how she’d died, ruling out the obvious impossibilities: she wasn’t eaten by a shark or crushed by a falling rock.
The dark, shadowy fascination of that day has stayed with me for all these years, and I often find my mind transferring the concept of cross-sectioning things that I never would have considered cross-sectionable: a bird, a plane, a castle, a car, or even time itself, like some Stephen Biesty book that my son used to enjoy when he was young. I have even wondered what the waking hours of my day would look like cross-sectioned here in my little corner of rural Georgia.  Perhaps, even what those same exact cross-sections of time would look like cross-sectioned across our country by fellow bloggers from points across the map – or even the world. Throughout March, that’s my plan as I participate in the Slice of Life Writing Challenge at www.twowritingteachers.com. I’ve created 31 equal increments of time from 5:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., and I’ll write a poem for a blip of living during each sliced segment of a part of my day throughout the month- emotions, senses, mundane or fascinating work or home tasks, and maybe even a daydream or two.Â
Jessica Handler led a session on using sensory details in writing to make characters come alive
We shared our favorite techniques using what we’re currently writing as our material for organizing in different ways. Mickey is a master at teaching how to outline!
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted the writer’s conference to last a full week, and I wanted to stay in a lodge with other writers, where we could sit in the common room by the fire in the evenings in sweatpants and scarves and sip wine and share writing. But I keep that vision in my mind, that image of total peace and bliss, and carry it with me back into reality on the heels of this fabulous winter break.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference.
Common Threads 