Tag: haiku

Posted on

Calling All Book Club Recommendations

all I want to do

is turn pages and get lost

in a mystery

to read poetry

biography and memoir

fiction, non-fiction

I’ll take all of it,

add it to my TBR

pile, curl up, and read

Come sit right here by me if you’re a reader. Settle in, pour a cup of coffee, and let’s have a book chat. I want to hear what stories have kept you reading this year, and how your reading has inspired new adventures.

I’ll go first. Right now, I’m reading Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson, which will be the January 2026 pick for our Kindred Spirits book club. It has me on the edge of my seat at every new twist and turn. I especially like that the setting is taking me back to our trip to Woodstock, Vermont in November of 2024, where we had one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had in my life, complete with Vermont maple syrup that was made from the trees on the property where we were staying. A friend and member of the Kindred Spirits book club recommended Woodstock as a stop on our trip after NCTE last year, and we used her exact trip itinerary from a trip she’d taken with her daughter in planning our own. While my husband and I were in Woodstock, we took some time to go exploring a few back roads while we were there, and I have some of the setting assigned to places we saw, such as the famous bridge. It’s hard to imagine that a crime like the one in this book could happen there, but where there are humans, there will be crime. This book inspired me to wrap up in a blanket I bought from the Vermont Flannel Company while I was there and to pull up the photos from that amazing trip and add them to the new digital photo frame my daughter sent us for Christmas. Oh, to go back there!

The Kindred Spirits dive into exciting fiction, and this group tends to gravitate toward thrillers. Once we’ve finished reading a book, we plan some sort of adventure to go along with what we have read so that we allow our reading to inspire new discoveries. You can see our reading choices and adventures from 2025 here. We’ll be meeting December 19 to put the first six months of our 2026 list together. I’d like to ask for your favorite book recommendations. Please help us out ~ which books have you read recently that you savored, and what made you fall in love with them? Also, have you ever been part of a reading retreat where everyone reads a few books and then drives an hour or two to a mountain lodge for a weekend to talk about those books, read more books, sit by the fire, eat delicious food, visit a spa, and shop in the stores on the town square? We’ve heard of those retreats and are thinking of trying one sometime this year, so we’re all ears for your most exciting book experiences as we plan a few slices of life.

A street scene of Woodstock, Vermont
My husband sits by the fire of the Woodstock Inn as we wait to eat dinner
My second favorite shop in Woodstock, where I bought our favorite blanket (the bookstore was my favorite)
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers
Posted on

December Cozyla

My daughter sent a text to alert me about a package to arrive shortly as she tracked its movements. She asked me to call when we opened it so that she could give us a few pointers about it (I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more my children have started offering pointers on how to work things).

As we FaceTimed, she watched our excitement when we realized she’d sent us a digital photo frame.

How wonderful! I exclaimed, already thinking of all the photos I would upload and wondering if I would be able to figure it out. It would be nice to see snapshots from our recent week in the Great Smoky Mountains. When I’ve wanted to see those photos, I’ve had to scroll to them on the camera and search – – but a digital frame would keep them rolling and keep us thinking of the family members who mean so much to us!

That’s not just any digital frame, Mom, she explained. That’s a Cozyla interactive frame. If you invite all your kids to upload photos, we can send you pictures anytime and you can see them pop up in real time. You’ll hear a Boo…Boop and it’ll be a notification alerting you that we’re sending you new pictures.

I set it up while she was on FaceTime with me and already have nearly 200 photos in the album. I’m going strong, and I didn’t need as many pointers as she (or I) thought I might. I can’t wait to get my first notification that a new photo has popped up. We’ll be on the lookout for new smiling faces of our grandchildren – – which is like a new gift every day, especially during the holidays with all their excitement. It’s even more so since with four children in four different states, we don’t get to be together in person nearly as often as we’d like.

digital photos

family togetherness

keeping moments fresh

Posted on

A Finished Hardscape

We’ve needed for about 2 years to redesign our front hardscape bed when the river rocks we’d put down many years ago began looking dated and worn. Instead of taking them up, we left them as the base, killed the weeds, and laid new landscape fabric over the top of the lackluster layer. We began the process a month or so ago, knowing that pacing would be important for us at our ages. Still, we wanted to do it ourselves because we’ve always enjoyed creating a vision and making it happen – – together!

We started with bright white rock (which will turn a light gray in about 6 months), curving one edge of the rock to prepare for the next layer. We also wanted to use black rock and possibly some pine straw as a way to blend some landscape into the hardscape – pine straw not really being the first choice, but a budgetary consideration and trade-off for the black rock I really wanted to be able to include in the overall design. It’s a lot like building a house – – you have to make some sacrifices to realize some gains. We added a barn scene Christmas flag and moved the American flag to the Purple Martin pole while we clean out their house, and added a faux boulder to the mix. A few solar pathway lights, a couple of my late mother’s birdbaths, and a pre-lit Christmas wreath with a sparkly red bow completed the design we’d needed to update for a handful of years. We pulled out the elephant ears and the jasmine that was everywhere, even climbing onto the roof.

Our goal was to create a low-maintenance garden look that doesn’t require a lot of weeding or fluffing. Our budget was to not break the bank. But with rocks being $12 a bag and covering the space of the bag itself times 2, we were only within budget for the white rock section. Added plants will only happen minimally henceforth, and only in pots so that we can keep the pruning and weeding under control and raise the pots if we can’t bend.

The finished hardscape

We’re satisfied with the finished look, and more than happy that the front bed work will carry us to the next decade….and now, once we’ve let our backs recover for the winter, there’ll be the beds in the back of the house that will need some attention come springtime. For the first time in my life, I see why senior citizens choose condominium living complete with groundskeeping fees. It’s tempting. Very, very tempting.

—–for now our sore backs

keep reminding us that we’re

not twenty years old…….

Posted on

November 22: Wreath Seeking

The tree is up – all we need now is a Christmas wreath!

Today we’ll go hunting for a new wreath to go on our exterior garage wall and one for the back door. It’s the best way to spend a Saturday – seeking wreaths! We’ll have one of our grandsons along to help, too, and we can’t wait to spend the day with him.

Last year, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we rented a car in Boston to make a loop through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts following the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Convention I was attending at the time. As we left Kennebunkport, I spotted what I thought was a fruit stand on the side of the road. It looked a lot like where, in my rural Georgia county, we would pull over and buy watermelons or tomatoes. But as we neared, I could see that the people who were gathered around the long tables were not tenderly squeeze-testing tomatoes or thumping watermelons. They were creating fresh wreaths using the greenery stacked in piles on tables behind them.

A wreath-making stand! There is still a part of me deep inside that craves this L.L.Bean-style wreath that is all made of fresh evergreen and so natural and simple that it would rival any wreath that feels the need to proclaim Christmas in any other way than through real live nature, just greenery and berries. So it just might be that we find a wreath frame and some zip ties and twine and wire. It just might so happen that we take our little hacksaw and sharp camping axes and put on our hiking boots and go to the back side of the property and gather evergreens that we cut fresh to put on the frame and make one ourselves, New England style.

It would do my heart a lot of good to make a wreath with our grandson today. But we’ll have to be careful to watch for the elusive lellow bear if we trudge out into the woods. He’s out there somewhere…..

Wreath Seeker’s Haiku

it’s wreath-seeking day

balsams, firs, cedars, spruces

today we seek wreaths

Posted on

November 7 – Country Evening

Country Evening

rural countryside

full moon rising, stars falling

Great Horned Owls conspire

Now that the trees have been harvested, we can see shooting stars from our front porch!

We have a pair of Great Horned Owls who like to chatter late into the night.
Posted on

October 23: Mammogram Day

Mammogram Haiku

here’s a reminder:

get your yearly mammogram

schedule yours today!

Today’s the day – – it’s a squeeze and press kind of morning here in middle Georgia, and I will step bravely up to the cold metal instrument of torture and try my best to relax my shoulder as the images of my left and right breasts are taken. I will breathe, count to three, pray, and think of all the fun I was having a week ago from today as we drove through Cade’s Cove to see bears and other woodland animals, and how a prayer brought a bear and her two cubs right across the road in front of us. What a great morning that was!

Metaphorically speaking, I hope there are no bear sightings today, but if there are, I pray they are tiny little cubs that are caught early.

That is always the hope and prayer of a mammogram, and I send that one up today.

It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Have you had your mammogram?

Posted on

Gratitude for the Kindred Spirits Book Club and My Writing Group Friends

Kindred Spirits From L-R: Jennifer, me, Martina, Joy, Jill, Janette

Last year, we started a Central Office book club in our rural Georgia school district. This was Janette’s idea, but she graciously allowed me to help organize its inception. We asked another local book club if we could read their books they were not using, and we gave each title another round of reading before placing these in Little Free Libraries according to the grant provisions with which they were originally purchased. This club has become a sisterhood, and much like my writing group friends, our interactions go beyond the daily water station office talk into what goes on in our lives and how we feel about issues that arise in the books we read. We connect on a deeper level this way.

We’re a cross-section of society, which lends to richer discussion. I’m the oldest. Martina is the youngest. All of us are mothers and wives. Two of us are real sisters (Jill and Joy). Four of us are grandmothers. Two of us are preachers’ kids. We’ve all been through some tough times and bring differing perspectives to our conversations. But what’s most important is that we are all readers, we understand that every book is not going to get five stars but that there is something to take from each, and we embrace our collective voice on womanhood and readership. We’re the Kindred Spirits – and we are aptly named.

Last April, I shared a poem with our group each day during National Poetry Month, and while most were written by well-known poets, one or two were poems that I wrote. They know that writing poetry is what keeps me balanced at all times, but particularly in tough times – of which there have been many lately in my life. When my father died in June, I was sad that he would not be here to see the book I’d been working on for so long come out on Labor Day weekend.

Imagine my surprise when my Kindred Spirit sisters knew I was feeling down and threw an after-lunch dessert party for me and presented me with a poem that they had all written to cheer me up and celebrate me. I was moved to tears as they explained that they had each written two lines, and that the lines appeared in alphabetical order according to their names: Janette, Jennifer, Jill, Joy, and Martina.

I framed it and keep it among my greatest treasures; it means so much to me that in a time when I was grieving, my reading sisters built me up and reminded me that we are all in this together – – and that the tears along the journey can be turned into laughter and joy. We feel it in our local coffee shop on our small town square each month as we sip our brews and talk about the characters we have come to love (and dislike). We feel it at work as we deal with our day to day duties, and we will feel it in the movie theater later this week as we watch our monthly novel come to the big screen: Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You.

I’m not sure where I’d be without my reading group – and my writing groups. Today is a day to celebrate all of you (if you’re reading this, it includes you, too) who make a difference in my life. My glass is raised to you, dear friends, for all that you mean to me. You inspire me, and I appreciate each and every one of you!

Poem written for me by my Kindred Spirits book club
Front: Jill, Janette, Martina; Back: me, Joy (Jennifer is missing)

Books We’ve Read in our Club So Far:

The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

The Wedding People by Allison Espach

One Tuesday Morning by Karen Kingsbury

God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Regretting You by Colleen Hoover

and

Selected Poems-a-Day for National Poetry Month


Book Club Haiku

we’re always on the

lookout for our next great read

….any suggestions?

Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers for hosting Slice of Life
Posted on

Revealing the Theme: Haynes Family Fireside Stories 2025

On the first night of the trip, I got Sawyer to share the theme of this year’s trip since the gathering we had in June was sad for everyone. We wanted to shift the grief of our Dad and Papa to togetherness and fun by telling old stories by the fire and making new memories as we get out and go adventuring. And so our theme is……

Sawyer revealed our

family mountain trip theme:

Fireside Stories! (Shirts)

Sawyer shares the theme
for this year’s trip: Haynes Family Fireside Stories 2025
Our cooks for the first night ~ Briar and Andrew
Silas kicks back in the porch swing
Cousins reunite and share their own little stories
Kitchen fun
Sunset on Day 1
Rule #1: Never think that kids will wait to decorate the pumpkins. More on that later.