writing prompt

Intense Contentment

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There’s a pot of potato soup at a slow simmer on the stove.  Everything about this day is slow.  Unhurried.  Leisurely.  Unfolding gently from the dark of predawn to the sunset at 5:07 pm. It is a day to burrow into all the comforts that make home home.  Pumpernickel bread is baking and the house is filled with the smell of caraway seed.  Irish butter was procured for the bread and mulled cider will round out the evening menu though Louisa is considering making gingerbread for dessert.  She nestles deeper into the chair as she considers the expenditure of energy that will take. 

Gingerbread would be good.  There is heavy cream to turn into whipped cream, but the kitchen is spotless, and she is not sure she wants to clean it again.  Louisa ponders.

Royce is napping upstairs.  She figures she has the house to herself for another hour.  He is a marathon sleeper.  No 20-minute power naps for him. He says anything less than two hours is not worth his time.

The house is silent except for the hum of the furnace and the purrs of the cat.

She has not had the television on at all this day and silenced her phone several hours ago. 

Louisa is hibernating in the peace she and Royce have built in their 30 years of marriage.  All the rough edges have smoothed.  They fit together like the two halves of the yin-yang. Both are strong personalities, but they have long worked out their friction points without giving up their identities.  They are not two shall become one,  but two that curve together in all the right places. 

It was a lot of work. These past six, seven years have been ones of ease and plenty.  Love and friendship.  Passion and camaraderie.  He still makes her laugh.  She still makes him think.

The forecast called for just flurries, but Louisa estimates there are two inches of flurries accumulated on the back deck.  There is no place she needs to be.  There is nothing she should be doing.  All that concerns her is whether she wants to make gingerbread or not.

She decides that the smell of gingerbread baking will heighten further this intense feeling of contentment.  The warmth of it will further keep at bay the bluster of the outside world.

Can contentment be intense?  Is that an oxymoron?

She whispers a small prayer:  May all beings know this feeling.  But she doesn’t dwell on it.  She does not want to consider the reality of the the all-too real world.

She wants this day to go on and on.

An open letter to my 7 am writing group

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NOTE: I belong to a writing group that meets every morning on Zoom, at 7 a.m., except for Saturdays, when we meet at 8 a.m. We also meet on holidays, Sundays, and weekdays. This group has been my sanctuary—my safe space to grow as a writer.

Dear Ones:

“The universe provides” It always has—goes along with “this too shall pass.”

I understand it’s common with many artists, writers included, that those closest to them are the least interested in their work.  The “that’s nice, honey” phenomenon.  With one notable exception, this has been true for me.  My family couldn’t give a flying fig about my two books, the two I’m working on, or my blog.

They accept that I’m a writer and take some pride in telling people that, but have no interest in actually reading or even hearing about my passion projects.  And so, the universe conspired until I found my tribe. 

I get encouragement from the most unlikely places. 

It tickles me pink that somewhere in Malaysia, some teacher uses one of my blog posts in his or her English class.  I reposted e.e. cummings’s in time of daffodils – a favorite of mine with one of my photos of my beloved daffodils. 

Continue reading →

Mirror, Mirror

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Photo by Tuva Mathilde Løland on Unsplash

Mirror mirror on the wall, show me a secret, not if I’m short, not if I’m tall.
Mirror mirror on the wall,
Give me the insight to love, to love one to love all.

They used to scry with bodies of water – peer at their reflection until their psyche, or the spirits, were revealed and spoke to them in the language of prophecy or riddles.  And then mirrors were used.

Something happens when you look deep into a mirror.  Deep.  Beyond the reflection.  Beyond the need for a hairbrush.  Beyond the application of lipstick.

Gaze into your looking glass and see what you can see.  Alice stepped through.  You can too.  There’s another world in there.  It may look like this one or not. Animals might talk. So might trees.  The dead might gather with messages of love or ones of warning.  You might see a secret path and the way out of a problem that wasn’t there before.

Perhaps the glass will waver and mists swirl.  What do you want to learn from the mirror?

I want to learn that my body is a small part of who I am.  That beyond my body, into my innermost being, there exists purpose that goes beyond pain and limitations.  That my body is temporary and my spirit eternal. I want to realize that though my body is failing, I am not.  I am well along the path to wisdom.

My innermost self, the me that I protect from this place called reality is not the illusion.  The refection is.  The Bible says Through a Glass Darkly. 

Yes. 

You must look closely. Gaze into your eyes.  We’ve been told they are windows to the soul.  We can see another’s thoughts in their eyes.  Witness their emotions even if we don’t know why, even if we don’t understand why.  We can detect anger.  Impatience. Love.  Joy.  Boredom.  Eyes reveal.

Look at your own.  Fall into them.  Beyond the color – blue, brown, green, hazel. What do your own eyes tell you?

If you see pain, love yourself more.  If you see anger, love others more.  If you see impatience, give yourself grace. If you see joy, give it away. If you see resolve, follow through.

Mirror mirror on the wall. . .

The Tree on Williams Street

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The crab apple tree in front of our Williams Street house wasn’t imposing or even all that old, but it was perfect to climb and hide in.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Actually, I wasn’t all that hidden when sitting there, but most people didn’t look up to peer for children amongst the branches.

I clocked a lot of hours in that tree.

Williams was a dead-end street so there wasn’t much to see other than the occasions when the neighbor’s teenager would climb onto their roof and play his trumpet.  Weird kid. Bad trumpet player, but I suppose he should get credit for practicing.

I’m sure that I dragged a book up there with me now and again, but I don’t remember reading in the tree.  Of course, I read everywhere.  I read like most people breathe – everywhere all the time. 

I was older—12, 13, 14 – on the cusp – living my life, but also waiting for it to begin.

I do remember one vivid day at 14 when I waited for my boyfriend while sitting in the tree and there he came, bepopping down the middle of Williams, carrying the largest heart-shaped box of candy I’d ever seen.  Whitman’s.  It was Valentine’s Day – a special occasion.  I usually did my tree-sitting in the summer.

I liked being in the tree. I felt hidden and the configuration of the branches made climbing easy.  The trunk and major limb were in such a position as to make reclining in the tree very comfortable for my lithe teenage self.

One summer I took to making caftans out of old sheets.  I’d waft around in yards of white percale dragging behind me and eventually climb the tree –no mean feat in an oversized sheet and sit there pondering the universe. Feeling spiritual and Egyptian in my badly sewn caftan.

Kenny-the-roof-trumpeter had nothing on me in the weirdness department. 

I do remember dragging bags of Doritos into the tree with me. I carried the bag in my clenched teeth reserving both hands to scramble up the tree.  Doritos were the new snack and took the country by storm.  There were two flavors – plain and taco.  I loved the taco ones and considered the bag a single serving.  I was always hungry in those days. A bottomless pit of hunger and volatile hormones.

I’d wipe my orange-stained fingers on my caftan when done. 

So, there I was, a long gangly teenager in a bedsheet streaked with orange stains perched in a tree going through puberty one long summer day at a time.