Tag: togetherness

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Timeless Wisdom

My cousin Elizabeth, center, with us and her parents – my Aunt Ann and Uncle Tom

As far back as I can remember growing up, my dad’s only sister, Ann, has been an active part of my life. She married Tom Downing before I turned one, and they have been there through it all ~ birthdays, holidays, weddings, graduations, and funerals. Aunt Ann can shop for me better than I can shop for myself. She has an eye for putting together an outfit, and she has done this for me and for my grandchildren on several occasions. When my mother died, sisterless herself, she’d phoned Ann with a request before she left this earth.

“Be there for Kim when I’m gone,” she’d asked of my aunt. “She’s going to need you. You know why.”

It didn’t take me long to figure out why I would be spending hours each week on the phone with her. She was the only one who could help me navigate my dad, her brother, who didn’t particularly care for strong women. He was all for women in leadership roles – until they tried to lead him anywhere, and trying to help my dad in his later years would take strength and something I lack when my patience runs out: tact. And so Aunt Ann, always a strong Southern woman to the core and dripping in class, carries the torch as the voice of wisdom whenever I need to talk. She helped me through those final years with Dad, who did not know how to do life without my mother and swore off help from anyone until the bitter end. I could not have survived without my Aunt Ann to lean on.

When my cousin Elizabeth called to invite us to Uncle Tom’s 90th birthday this past Saturday, my husband and I made the drive to their home in Ashford-Dunwoody in Brookhaven, just north of Atlanta, to be part of the festivities. We were blessed to be part of that day, sharing in the memories and the moments of belonging as family. In the midst of the holiday season, with this being the first Christmas without Dad after losing him in June, these times seem to carry more weight. As I walked through their house, each room brought back such memories of all the years there for various events, and I felt the shadow of my childhood self playing games on Thanksgiving Day in the basement while the men watched football and the women cooked. The moments of today carry far more layers of meaning as I return to their home, the place of old pictures and relatives long gone now. Ann and I stood on her front porch for a few moments alone together, remembering the space where we’d all stood smiling as Uncle Tom brought his camera for photos, the space now every bit as sacred as the circle at the Grand Ole Opry, preserved through the years and taken into the newer building just to keep the same floor where the stars have all stood.

We wish Tom a very happy birthday, and cheers to the years ahead and all the years behind along the journey that brought us to now.

it all matters more

today than ever before

these crossroads of life

Aunt Ann’s porch of family pictures through the years
Aunt Ann and me (we both wore cranberry)
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers
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Open Write Day 2 of 3 November 2025: Traditions Tanka with Mo Daley of Illinois

Mo Daley is our host for today’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. She inspires us to write tanka poems to share our traditions. This may be one you’d like to try today, so I’m including her directions below.

Mo writes, “This time of year always gets me thinking about traditions. There are many my family and I look forward to celebrating with each other. I really love hearing about other peoples’ traditions, too. Hayrides, Oktoberfest, pumpkin patches, bonfires, corn mazes, pumpkin carving, and cooking might be some of the traditions that come to mind when you think of fall. Today’s poem is a way for you to flex your poetic muscles while letting all of us learn a little bit more about you and the traditions you observe.” 

Mo inspires us with these words: “Write a tanka or series of tankas telling us all about a favorite, or maybe least favorite, fall tradition. A tanka is a traditional Japanese poetic form of 31 syllables over 5 lines. The syllable count is 5/7/5/7/7. Usually there is a turn in the third line. Consider focusing on sensory images to help us feel like we are right there with you. “

You can read Mo’s poem at the Open Write today by clicking here. In my poem below, I feel the need to clarify the spelling of the yellow bear. My first grandson could not say yellow, so when my son suggested they go on a bear hunt on our farm in rural Georgia to find the highly-elusive-never-before-seen yellow bear, my grandson couldn’t stop talking about the lellow bear, and none of us have called it anything different ever since. I still have the picture of them setting out to find it, and it warms my heart to think that one simple moment, one slight of the tongue, became a family tradition that remains to this day.

Traditions Tanka

first, the pumpkin bread

that started when they were kids

I tie the apron

sift the flour, mix in the eggs

add sugar, spices, pumpkin

dominoes thunder

onto great granny’s table

the one I redid

while the bread bakes, we play games

we pair with grandkids

we all walk the farm

looking for the “lellow bear”

every eye stays peeled

lellow bear is elusive

someday, we might catch a glimpse

the coffee pot stays

full of fresh brew to help us

keep up with these kids

Scrabble (turntable version)

for adults, post-kids’-bedtime

togetherness fills my soul

I take a deep breath

they were born last week

now here they are, with their own

tears of gratitude well up

Several years ago ~ from the time of his first bear hunt to early teens
The walk that started it all: the first hunt for the elusive lellow bear
Today, the hunts continue
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Packing for Family Togetherness

We leave today for Tennessee. Rewind to the part back in June where we were all together when Dad died, and two of the kids didn’t make it in time to see him one last time. We were all too sad to enjoy the time we were spending, and one said, “Mom, can we wait until we’re a little happier and get a place together in the fall?”

I said yes. Fast forward to now, and here we are – packed and ready to go.

We’ve got the door code to the VRBO, and we’ve got a full tank of gas and 75% of the groceries we’ll need for 14 people for the week. We’re taking turns cooking dinners and we’ll forage for breakfast and lunch whenever we feel like getting up and shuffling to the kitchen unless someone feels like getting up and cooking big. With 6 of the 7 grandchildren and our 4 children and two of their spouses, we’ll spend time swimming in the indoor pool, watching movies in the home theater, and playing games in the game room. It will be good to be in a place to enjoy togetherness rather than trying to figure out where to go and what to do each day. A ride through Cade’s Cove and a picnic may be the most exciting thing on the list, and it’s about our speed. Slow.

And I’ll reveal the family theme, on t-shirts, sometime tomorrow evening. The kids left it to me, and I think we’ve got one that we’ll all enjoy as we hang out by the fire this week. Stay tuned for that!

We’re Packed…..

dominoes and cookie dough

puzzle mat and all of that

decks of cards, Scrabble, too

all the things we love to do

camera, phone, and PaperWhite

family shirts and pumpkin bites

groceries and snacks galore

there’s no way we could need more

all of us, a week together

snuggling in October weather

heading up to Tennessee

us and them and you and me

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Open Write Day 1 of 3 September 2025 with Kelsey Bigelow

Today’s host of the first day of September’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Kelsey Bigelow, who works as a mental health poet and renowned author of books, slam poetry events, and writing workshops in Iowa. You can read all about Kelsey and visit today’s prompt and poems here, as she inspires us to think about what lives on the “good side of memories.” Today’s writing is rooted in stream of consciousness writing that can live on in that form or be the start of one that takes root for another.

It’s All in the Kneading and Knowing

the happiest thing

I’ve ever tasted was that moment

when in my grief

soul-gutting tears in a

big-enough-for-all

walls of a VRBO

reverberating sniffles

and crumpled Kleenex

and happy laughs of

oblivious grandchildren playing

with their newest cousin

trying to teach him

to walk at six months

and believing he could

the strains of Amazing Grace

sung to a guitar

by the rest of us trying

to sing with the best of us

believing we could

as we all sat piled high

on the curved couch

pajama-clad, remembering

*******. ********

then one broke the silence

asking for a happier moment

in the autumn – another together

time when smiles returned

then another added

yeah, when

any of us can

make a word from tiles in

turntable Scrabble

and another added

yeah, and only if Mom

brings the pumpkin bread

and right then

in those delicate moments

I knew three things:

that I had taken the reins

as the newest family elder and

that tradition of togetherness

lives on in food tried first

as a flopped recipe

when they’re toddlers, then tested

again and again to perfection

by the time they’re teenagers

and can’t think of gatherings

without it and

that families too

are like that ~

learning to walk

learning to sing

learning to bake

learning to live on

believing

through all the tears and laughter

that together

we can

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Raccontino Poems

My friend Margaret Simon of Louisiana is always inspiring me to try new forms. We write with several overlapping writing groups. Margaret hosts Poetry Friday and This Photo Wants to Be a Poem, organizes Spiritual Thursdays, blogs with Slice of Life, hosts and writes for EthicalELA during #VerseLove and the monthly Open Writes, and is a member of the Stafford Challenge. She has also published several books, and we presented a poetry writing workshop together in April at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. She recently posted that the Poetry Sisters had written Raccontino poems, which are couplets of any number where the even-numbered lines end on the same rhyme and the title is expressed in the last words of the odd-numbered lines. I raise a glass to my writing friend Margaret today. You can follow her on her blog Reflections on the Teche. 

Family Vacations

packing suitcases ~ memories to make
experiencing life before we leave

there is no better way to spend our time
than taking a trip ~ a welcome reprieve

from routine demands, a fortress built for
placing importance in what we believe

things we can only learn as we travel
(like setting aside our personal peeves)

savoring now, embracing family
holding presence as belonging we weave

interlocking fingers: togetherness
fastening futures ~ no regrets to grieve

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Open Write September Day 5

Barb Edler of Iowa is our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com for the final day of our September Open Write. She encourages us to celebrate our writing group through poetry of any form today. You can read her full prompt here and read the poems of others. On the heels of a celebration of the Labor Day launch of our books Words that Mend and 90 Ways of Community earlier this week, I can’t think of a better way to write today than in thanksgiving and heartfelt gratitude for a group of writers who make a difference in how we live and how we think.

If you don’t have a writing group, I encourage you to find one ~ and you can use this one as a great model for a face to face group in your own corner of the world after spending a few hours looking back at the prompts and the feedback. Get the books, read them, and feel the deep need to fix places you never knew were broken. Too many of us have lost our footing and found ourselves floundering and then discovered the power of writing and what it can do. Today is a day to celebrate the power of the pen and the ways it connects us with others. Anna Roseboro said it best at our celebration: if poetry can do this for us, imagine what it can do for our students. We all need poetry and writing in our lives.

Photo by Thirdman on Pexels.com

Belonging

we step from shadows

into glowing candlelight

from our scars

we discover soothing balm

from mourning and grief

into reassurance there is

reason to go on

we come from loneliness

to take a hand of belonging

from disconnectedness

to welcoming acceptance

we leave our fears

step into the fold of peace

we leave disappointments

find spiritual hope

we feel our hearts

pulled at the words

someone else’s

shadows

scars

mourning

grief

loneliness

disconnectedness

fears

disappointments

are our own moments

our own memories

and we know

we know

we know

this is no ordinary

writing group

these are

our lifelines

our people

our friends

our family

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This Photo Wants to Be a Poem

My friend Margaret Simon of Louisiana hosts the weekly Poetry Friday Roundup by posting a photo and inviting writers to compose a poem inspired by the photo. Last week, she visited the North Georgia mountains with her family as a Christmas gift to her children and their families, and she posted her cherished moments of making memories with them. She invites us this week to write a poem about this photo of her mountain house. 

Margaret has been using the elfchen form, also called an elevenie, in which the lines fall into the sequence of 1 word, 2 words, 3 words, 4 words, and concludes in summary fashion with 1 word that ties it together. She will announce her One Little Word tomorrow, and hints that it may be the last line in her own poem (Connection), so I’m giving an enthusiastic nod to her choice by using a form of connection as the last word in my own poem. You can read her post here, along with other poems that were written about the photo, and her picture that inspires her poem (and others) is below:

Mountain House photo by Margaret Simon

Presence

unhindered

time spent

unhurried memory making

letting presence be presents

connecting

Try an elfchen! These are fun to write, and what a fabulous way to preserve memories – using photos and short forms of poems. I like the way just a few words can encapsulate an entire experience and bring all the memories and good times rushing back. 

A special thanks to Margaret Simon for inspiring my writing today. Some of my greatest blessings are my writing community friends, who encourage and inspire me to be better. 

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Family Yule Log – Part 2 of 3

Part 1

Part 2

At 8:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, my daughter and I began our first-ever Yule Log baking adventure in our pajamas in a rural countryside VRBO kitchen that was unfamiliar to us. When our Kentucky family got together to plan the Christmas dinner, everyone decided to divide the menu and each prepare a dish. Ever so daringly and boldly, she volunteered us to bring a Yule Log. She’d found an ambitious recipe online and had shopped for all the ingredients. She measured them into bags and brought them to the rental house.

By the time we arrived back from the only open store, a Dollar General on the backside of nowhere, we were well into the Christmas Eve hours when children are tucked into bed and elves begin working their magic. And we needed more than magic. We needed divine intervention. Lots and lots of prayer – my One Little Word for 2023. 

The recipe looked intimidating. We watched the video of the woman making it to try to ease my apprehension. So much had to go right, and I was fearful of a flop.

The old whipped-cream-on-the-nose baking pose

To ante up the challenge, we were using dishes that weren’t ours, cooking in a gas oven we didn’t know. The cardinal rule in baking is to “know thine oven,” and this beast was a complete and total stranger from another realm. 

Somehow, though, after all the beating of the egg whites with sugar to form stiff peaks and folding in that mixture with the flour and egg yolk and cocoa, she pulled a perfectly baked chocolate sponge cake from the oven, ready to be inverted onto parchment paper and rolled in a thin white towel and placed in the coolest part of the room to set before spreading the heavy whipped cream on it and re-rolling it. My daughter was unflappable throughout the whole process, but my nerves were on edge the entire time. I was trying not to show it. 

The cake is ready when it springs back into form when pressed

We watched the recipe video again when it came time to unroll the cake and spread the layer of whipped cream on the inside. 

The entire process involved phases of blending, folding, baking, setting, cooling, spreading, rolling, unrolling, and waiting. It also involved a lot of laughing to keep the nerves under control. It felt a lot like walking across a landmine with someone who didn’t know we were on a battlefield with so many potential pitfalls. 

As every step turned out, my daughter smiled through the entire process. She was baking a miracle as I stood amazed. Turns out, she hadn’t read the entire recipe before she started. Each small step was not overwhelming to her. I, on the other hand, saw every mile of the long journey and knew how risky it could be.

It came time for the rolled log to be iced, and her artistic flair came out in full force. 

She evened out the chocolate buttercream frosting into consistent thickness and began her artistic presentation using a fork to make bark lines, even making an elliptical shape to make it look more knotty and authentic, like an owl might pop its head out at any moment and ask us whoooo we were. She softened a Hershey bar and began the tedious process of shaving thin chocolate curls with a sharpened knife. And she placed peppermints in a Ziploc bag and crushed them to look like shimmering snow to top the Yule Log. 

And when her masterpiece was finished, she stood back and admired it with pride. 

“Look what we did, Ma! Thanks for making it with me. Without you, I probably would have given up.” 

I hugged her close, thinking, No, dear daughter. This is all your creation, not mine. I never would have even attempted it. You are far more courageous than I will ever be.

She inverted a mixing bowl to cover it like a cake lid and placed it in the refrigerator to chill overnight. I admired her accomplishment and thought of that Yule Log as a metaphor for all the ways we need each other. 

And we hugged goodnight, looking forward to sharing it with family on Christmas Day.

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Family Christmas

We celebrated Christmas with the Johnson side of the family last night and played a couple of games of Left Center Right on the heels of dessert. The dinner menu was kept simple – Stouffer’s Lasagna, Cole’s garlic bread, and salad, with peach cobbler a la mode for dessert. Christmas and Thanksgiving are the only occasions on which I get out the good dishes and set the table with a tablecloth, chargers, placemats, fabric napkins, and a centerpiece – in our case three, to honor our departed mothers. We still don’t have much to drink from besides Mason jars, so we use clear Solo cups for our sweet tea. These dishes, I should mention, were given across the years (like my beloved Nativity set) as Christmas gifts from my mother and my former mother-in-law to build a set a few rungs higher than our basic white lead-free, chip-proof Corelle which came on the scene when I felt the first signs of arthritis.

Dishes that have been family gifts over the years

The ancestral kitchen spirits are always welcome, but on holidays we go a step further in summoning them; we light candles for Briar and Kyle’s mom (Pat), Bethany’s mom (Barbara), and my mom (Miriam), as we do on other holidays to remember them and keep them close.

Ollie with Briar bringing game luck

I do not believe in fancy seating place cards, though, not when there is theater box candy screaming in the dollar store to be used for this purpose. Everyone had a favorite at the top of their plate: Reese’s Pieces (Jack). Milk Duds (Briar), Raisinets (Kyle), Sugar Babies (Jax), Junior Mints (Andrew), Hot Tamales (Bethany), SweeTarts (Cece), and Boston Baked Beans (me). 

Fitz sits with Bethany

Even the dogs wanted in on the fun. We think the one reason Briar won both games when he was the only one who had to be coaxed into playing was that Ollie sat in his lap bringing good vibes. Fitz stayed with Bethany, and Boo Radley stayed under the table and with Kyle.

We exchanged gifts and sampled a libation or two, and our gift with strings attached were lottery tickets for the 620 million Powerball drawing on Saturday night. If any of us wins on those tickets, we have to give the other 7 folks in the picture 5 million dollars each. What’s 35 million on 620? We each placed our ticket on the coffee table and put a finger at the top of our ticket so we can check all the numbers via that photo. Nothing like a little family accountability in case someone tries to plan a surprise move to Switzerland suddenly.

Folks usually hope and pray for a white Christmas. We are hoping and praying for a green one!

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The Best Present is Presence

I didn’t want them to leave, even though we go back to work tomorrow and most of our grandkids have another week of homeschool before they take their Christmas break. Sawyer is in 3rd grade, Saylor in 1st, and River in PreK. Beckham and Magnolia aren’t in their school years yet.

Aidan, the oldest and a teenager, lives in a neighboring county and attends a private school there. He has finally caught – and exceeded – my height. We’ve been back to back and heel to heel for a year now to see when the day would come, and it has happened!

Even though it’s far from our normal routine where we live with three Schnoodles, having part of our family come for a visit is a joy! They are a lively bunch, and they make us so proud!

We love taking pictures each time we all get together. Our daughter in law sets the timer and makes the run to take her place before the click, while we all watch the flashing light and say “cheese” on repeat until it stops. She’s an iPhone wizard!

This year, no one felt like getting dressed for a picture, so we didn’t. It was a rainy, cold weekend and we were busy staying warm and playing dominoes and watching movies and eating nonstop. So we opted for the reality photo, the one where you have to keep calling everyone to get outside and no one can pry themselves off the couch or chair they’re occupying. No one wore anything except pajamas with a coat or robe (and not the family matching kind with the coordinated Tartan plaid that looks planned and professional). A couple of us had shoes on, no girls had makeup on, and one or two of us might have brushed our hair or teeth. We simply ran out in the misty drizzle for a photo to mark the occasion.

L-R: Saylor, Kim holding Beckham, Briar in back, River, Aidan, Sawyer, Marshall holding Magnolia, and Selena

This may be my favorite picture of us ever taken. When our grandchildren are grown and look back on these days spent with their grandparents, this is what I want them to remember – that we were happy just the way we were, and that we chose to savor every moment relaxing together at home. And that we didn’t need a crippling blizzard to know how to stay in our pajamas and drink coffee and chocolate milk all day and stay cozy.

It’s true: the best present is presence.