Patchwork Prose and Verse
Happy 250th Birthday, America! It’s a great day for watermelon, and a great day to be born. My son, his wife, and their children await the birth of a son and baby brother. Whatever we do today, it’s day to celebrate.
Watermelon Seeds
soon there will be six
in this growing family
he is due today!
Yellow Jacket Sweatshirt, 1969
Uncle Robert
Georgia Tech Engineering Grad
gave me my first Georgia Tech
Yellow Jacket sweatshirt
and my first gerbil, Brownie
in a cage with a wheel
which lasted longer than the sweatshirt
I still haven’t outgrown small critters
After six days of travel to Portland, Oregon for a poetry conference at Lewis and Clark College with Stafford Challenge members, I am back home in Georgia and attempting to transition back to my regular time zone. I made myself get up at 5:45 this morning for coffee and yogurt and a snuggle with my schnoodles. I stepped outside to check the world, and the birdsong assures me the harmony on the farm is still in tune here in the quiet hush of the rural countryside.
It’s my first day home being off contract for summer before I officially retire in August, and I have two goals: write/post, and get myself back in the zone. I might push it and do a load of laundry just to have clean socks. Memories are swimming in my head, full of the love and exhaustion of travel – the best kind of tired that tells you you made the most of it all and came home changed in a way that only travel and friends can change you. How truly Steinbeck the journey, the best kind that leaves you stumbling around with a cup of strong coffee trying to recover from one trip while simultaneously and secretly plotting the next.
But whatever the day holds, my heart and mind will carry all the fresh air and green trees and memories of the Pacific Northwest. I’ll read poems and remember my time there, holding it all close with a foot on both sides of the country today.
Be
there’s a bench beyond the allium
nestled beneath a tree
beside the cobbled sidewalk
come sit and be with me!
Today’s host of the third and final day of the June Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Leilya Pitre of Louisiana. She inspires us to write poems about the souvenirs we bring home from trips. You can read her full prompt here, along with the poems of others and the feedback given. I have written mine today as I await a flight home from Portland, Oregon to rural Georgia, fresh on the heels of a delightful writer’s conference trip with my friend Glenda Funk of Idaho. I’ve used the style of Ada Limon’s Instructions On Not Giving Up.
Souvenirs from Portland, Oregon
more than the t-shirts and canvas bags
more than the keychains and shot glasses
more than that obnoxious prayer request card
cussing to God about the souls
of His other children
in the pew back compartment
someone intentionally forgot
to put in the offering plate
that I claimed as a bookmark
so I can pray the same sort
of prayer for Sam, Gavin, Kellen and all of us sinful humans
(yes, all of us !*(^ing %*m#@$$es)
more than the signed books of other writers
more than the leather shopping treasures,
it’s the photographs that really get to me
that keep the memories alive
stances of trees, slants of slate rooftops,
smiles of strangers and those we love
(yes, all of us !*(^ing %*m#@$$es)
standing beneath waterfalls
in the bend of the rainbow
God’s promise of hope for all His children
cloaked in the prayer shawl of His grace and mercy
(yes, all of us !*(^ing %*m#@$$es)
yes, I’ll take them. I’ll take them all.
Here we are, my brother Ken and I, November 1972. He was turning 1, and I was helping him celebrate at the round oak kitchen table where we shared so many childhood memories. Ken was the non-morning kid who hid behind the cereal box, daring anyone to look at him in the mornings and promptly growling at those who stole a glance. He turned out just great – – I couldn’t ask for a better brother, and we are blessed to be close siblings in adulthood when so many brothers and sisters aren’t. Even though he was the proverbial Grinch of his morning domain as a child, today he is in the top two percent of the most loving and giving adults I know. Kind, smart, and cool under pressure – – a very level-headed person, especially compared to me – – not always kind, not nearly as smart, and certainly not cool under pressure. Level-headed is debatable.
We’ve spent the past year cleaning out our parents’ home of long-held treasures (and some we found in seven storage units that were picked up at estate sales along the way for a retirement plan antique store they never quite got off the ground once Mom got sick). Somehow, I was fortunate enough to end up with our childhood breakfast table, and while not every memory right now with Dad brings warmth because there is a certain amount of anger in all the grief, the table is the ONE piece of furniture I can look at and actually smile and remember nothing but the happy times, including the way my brother grumped to the table in his “footer things,” pajamas with feet, slumped his blanket up in the chair, climbed up and moved “his” cereal box into a shield position like a morning cheerfulness boundary between him and the morning people family he was born into. It was an unspoken rule in our home to look anywhere but in his direction, because he was vigilantly guarding the air space on his side of the table, like a soldier in a trench with a growl gun propped and loaded.
And I think of all the coffee and conversations, decisions, laughter and tears throughout the years.
Table Tanka
today I sit here
with family history
faded memories
running my fingers along
the edge of present and past
Sometimes the picture speaks in ways we cannot. I’ve been sifting through tubs and tubs of family photos, digitizing them and organizing them in folders to share with family members who, like me, would rather have them on a flash drive than taking up prime real estate in photo albums in the back of the attic. In some cases, I’m sharing via Facebook Messenger if I find those taken with friends who would enjoy the throwback. On a random weekday morning last week, I sent this one to my childhood friend Nancy so we could both remember the years we created floral arrangements with the help of our mothers as we competed in the annual Garden Club’s Christmas Flower Shows.
I wasn’t expecting this response, and it showed me how the power of the photograph can often reach back through the years and find the places that older generations can remember – – like trying to scratch an itch that you never quite can find, and then suddenly you find the sweet spot of relief. This is Nancy’s reply:
How to Make it Count
you’ve bought the shoes
you’ve worn the dress
you’ve taken the trip
now….
send the picture
tell the story
share the memories
Horizon Nonet
one
day we
just let her
explore the beach
chasing seagulls in
surf, taking flight of her
own , freedom not yet tasted
in a big world where horizons
beckon us to follow distant dreams
It’s been a year. Dad died on Friday the 13th of June, 2025 in the wee hours of the morning, after succumbing to complications from pulmonary fibrosis aggravated by both colon and prostate cancers. He was an avid reader and antiquarian book collector. He never met anything he didn’t want to collect, but he couldn’t live without books. My brother Ken and I hope heaven has a big library since he couldn’t take any of them with him. Dad’s brother Greg, also a collector but who has more of a book salesman approach to managing the accumulation, is helping sell the books and getting them to “all the right targets,” as Dad so famously desired. A book in the right hands is indeed able to change the world.
Heavenly Tanka
today marks one year
that we haven’t had you here
(are there books up there??)
more important: are there dogs?
most important: Mom is there…..
A Borrowed Line Poem from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Swing
Rickety Swings
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
when phones and screens are nowhere to be found
when birdsong and laughter are the sounds
when families gather on rickety swings
Strong women raised me, and it took a village. Before my mother died, she called her husband’s older sister and handed her the reins to be sure she’d be there for me; she knew I would need my Aunt Ann’s sage advice. Elizabeth Ann Haynes Downing, a retired educator who lives an hour north of me in Atlanta, Georgia, knew well the road I would be traveling as my brother and I would be left to navigate our Dad in her absence. Other than Mom, no other person on the face of the planet had ever done such a thing successfully, and no one has since. But Aunt Ann understood what we were up against. She, too, had tried her hand at it a time or two. I have two other wonderful aunts, but Ann has a keen insight into our family dynamics that no other aunt has lived.
My Aunt Ann has been a strong presence in my life from the beginning. Below is a picture of her holding me in the spring of 1967 when I was 9 months old, and she still “holds” me today! She shops better for me than I shop for myself and has been that aunt who would buy clothes for me and for my children and send boxes of them our way. Throughout the years, her church had an annual “gently used items” sale, and she’d get there early and shop for each of us.
Ironically, she knew both my college roommate’s mother and my husband before I ever did. When I moved to my current town in Georgia to be closer to my college roommate after my first husband and I divorced, Stacey and I discovered that her mother and my aunt went to Tift College together, and they still attend those get-togethers even today. Even more surprising, Ann recognized my husband Briar (Stacey introduced me to the man who is now my husband) as the manager of her grocery store from his younger days when he was a Kroger manager! Briar and I enjoy meeting Aunt Ann and Uncle Tom at the OK Cafe, one of Atlanta’s favorite classic diners, as often as we can get to the north side of Atlanta.
And advice. She has helped me make decisions and provided guidance as my closest relative second only to my parents. In many cases, she gave career advice that only another educator can give – – like how to get to retirement the fastest way when you know it’s time and find yourself looking for the door. I wish every girl could have an aunt as wonderful and loving – and smart – as my Aunt Ann! We keep in close contact with her children, our cousins Elizabeth and John, and my brother and husband and I enjoy getting together with them whenever we can find our way to be in the same place at the same time!
In December 2025, we celebrated Uncle Tom’s 90th birthday, and here we are below in the kitchen of their home in Brookhaven, Georgia.
I’m so blessed by this strong woman in my life, who talks family and education and politics and religion and books and all things life with me. The good Lord sure winked on me when he gave me an aunt this loving and kind!
Strong Women Shadorma
everywhere
I’ve been, you’ve been there
by my side
wisdom flows ~
one woman to another
strength from the tap root
Common Threads 