Haiku in Honor of My Six-Year-Old Granddaughter
Whose Favorite Color Is Green
Riding in the car
I muse aloud: Look how green
the fields are today.
From the carseat: Yes.
Greenest green I’ve ever seen.
—Children are poets.
Photo: The sunset of the green field. Bardia Photography. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March. This is my sixth year participating.
Breakfast duty at school… I see raised hands.
I go over.
I am expecting one of the following:
I can’t open my milk.
I can’t open this [bag of apple slices].
Can I have a paper towel? I spilled my ____.
Can I have a cup of water/a spoon/a fork/ another biscuit?
I have my responses ready:
Have you tried?
Have you tried?
How did this happen?
Put on your mask and go get it (x3)… and sorry, you only get one.
This is what happens, however, when I get to the little girl sitting with her sister and cousin:
Child: Look, my apple has a z on it.
Me: A z?
[Child holds up apple slice. Peel has been nibbled so that, yes, a sort of letter z remains]
Me: Wow, that IS a z. I guess you could say z is for apple. No—zapple!
[Child giggles]
Child: Yeah, I can eat it and have magic powers. [waggles fingers in air like a magician. Of sorts]
Older Sister [in spite of herself]: Yeah, you can go ZAP! [performs a ZAP with an air wand]
Even Older Cousin [even more in spite of herself]: Or, you could ZOOM.
Me: Ooo, yes! After eating the zapple, you could zap and zoom down the hall to discover a zebra peeking out of a room…
[offstage light shines on the faces of all three children]
Me [seizing the moment]: That would make a great story, wouldn’t it?
Even Older Cousin [with a determined nod]: I’m gonna start typing it on my Chromebook as soon as I get to class…
I leave them talking excitedly about What Happens Next.
Zapples clearly are magical.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Zapple… er, Slice of LIFE Story Challenge every day in the month of March. This is my sixth year participating.
a combination Slice of Life & Spiritual Journey offering
I grew up hating ashes.
They were a part of my everyday life.
My parents were smokers. Salem menthols. When their friends came over or when some of my mother’s family gathered at our house, smoke hung in the air, thicker than fog, like some conjured ghost constantly materializing, encompassing, lingering…
Sometimes I was given the chore of cleaning out the ashtrays. A debasing job. Dirty. Ashes are pervasive. Everywhere and never really gone, no matter how hard you try. Even now, remembering, the stench is my nose, the metallic taste on my tongue…
It would be a long time before I’d learn the seeming incongruity of ashes as the main ingredient of an age-old cleansing agent. Lye. Which was also used to make hominy and that Southern staple, grits. In spite of my heritage, I never learned to like them.
It took me longer still to understand ashes as symbolizing something holy. Ash Wednesday and Lent weren’t part of my Protestant church or family tradition.
I got the humility part early on, however. From stories. First there was Cinderella, named for the soot that clung to her skin and her clothes from ashes that she (too!) was relegated to cleaning. Ashes are pervasive… then the Bible. Job, stricken with boils, scraping himself with broken pottery, sitting in the ashes. The repentant king of Nineveh mandating sackcloth and ashes after revival preached by the pouting prophet Jonah. Eventually, the vivid image of Tamar placing ashes on her head, sobbing, in utter humiliation and grief after the assault by her half-brother. Priests were commanded to change out of their sacred garments before disposing of burnt offering ashes.
Ashes are pervasive…
At fifteen I stood outside watching flakes falling from the sky in late May. Not snow at that time of year, in the southeastern United States. Ash. From the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s on the other side of the country. The volcano’s side exploded with such force that plumes of ash rocketed skyward for miles. The snowlike flakes settled across the nation and parts of Canada. I caught these curiosities in my hands. They didn’t melt. They looked to me like flakes of human skin.
I thought of war.
I think of war now. As I write, scenes are all over the TV. Bombs. Destruction. Death. What once was, now in ashes.
I think of the gorgeous churches of Kyiv.
I think of the dead.
My second son is a recently-certified crematory operator. Traditional burials are steadily giving way to cremations now. One day I went with him and watched while he placed someone’s ashes in an engraved box urn. These ashes are different from other kinds. Pale powder, fine as talcum. One of the most reverent acts I’ve ever witnessed, my boy tenderly packing that human dust.
The ancient Romans had a saying, Memento mori. Remember that you die. It is the same idea behind Ash Wednesday rites: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, echoing God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19, after the Fall.
I’ve never had a cross of ashes placed on my head by a priest, but I understand the call to repentance. It echoes deep in my bones. I know the desperate desire for holiness in the face of raging unholiness. The need for whole–ness. I believe in repent and believe. I do. I repent. I believe.
I believe there’s an eventual reckoning.
Ashes are pervasive.
Volcano ash man. @Doug88888.CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March. This is my sixth year participating.
Thanks also to my Spiritual Journey writing friends and to Ruth Hersey in Paraguay for hosting on the first Thursday in March. Ruth chose the theme “ashes” in connection with Ash Wednesday (which is why my post is going up a day early this month).
My oldest son spoke this phrase to me, the title of a book he’s reading:
You are what you love.
That’s like being handed a toy for the mind. Something to turn round and round, to consider from every angle: What does this do? More importantly: What do I do with this?
I love my little granddaughters. But I am not my granddaughters. I am their Franna. No existential crisis here; we know who we are. We revel in each other.
I love books, but I am not books. Books might be me, however; their words, images, scenes, stories, live in my brain. They change me. They become part of who I am. They fuse themselves to me so that I carry them with me ever after. No, that’s the content. The stuff of books is me. Not the actual books. But I am neither of those.
I love birds, have always loved birds, even got a yellow parakeet for my sixth birthday. I watch for birds daily out here in the North Carolina countryside, especially hawks. Birds inspire me, lift my spirit, fill me with wonder. I write of them (and their symbolism) often. I’m not sure I could ever keep a bird in a cage again. But I am not birds, as much as my heart goes soaring after them or sings in response to them…and don’t even get me started on dogs.
I love my husband and am DEFINITELY not him. I love my home and…well, here maybe the lines begin to blur a bit. I can see where I might be my home, in a sense. I love my church. It’s a given that the people are the church, not the building itself. Some people love their work so much that they are their work, so there’s that.
I love my memories…oh, what a thought, me being my memories, my memories being me. Some great truth is at work here…
And now, just now, what comes to mind is a student at school who loves making little dragons out of paper. She gave me one recently along with a little paper tree (because “a dragon is nothing without his tree,” she said). Every day, more little paper dragons. She loves them. She is not them, although they’re enchanting and so is she, their creator. When she passes me in the hallway: Come and see my new ones. I have a butterfly dragon and I want to make a dragonfly dragon…look, this one is an ice-wing…they’re all colored with bright markers in superb patterns and one day she showed me a tiny paper dragon resting in a tent she’d made, somewhat like a royal litter, complete with tiny paper quilt.
She is not the paper dragons…but maybe she’s more than the artist. She loves creating the dragons. In doing so, she is creating something more of herself, within. Constantly.
Which brings me to writing.
I love writing.
Maybe I am writing. Maybe writing is me. I live in a constant state of composition as much as the girl making her paper dragons. A new thing unfurls in my mind (like you are what you love) and I am writing around it before I can get to a pencil or screen. The thing blooms like a rose, layer upon circular layer, grows like one of those capsules that expands after you toss it in water, waiting to see what shape it will take, what animal it will become. I don’t want the ideas, sensations, images, patterns to escape…they have meaning that I want to explore. Interconnected threads I need to follow. The snowy hawk perched on the power line, looking across an icy field. The cognizance in my four-month-old granddaughter’s eyes. The wide-flung arms of her six-year-old sister. The myriad notes from piano keys under my youngest son’s dancing fingers, the earnestness in his voice when he sings. Being on my corner of the couch, wrapped in a blanket, book in hand or laptop in lap. Dennis the dachshund burrowing under the blanket to snuggle close. My husband’s contagious, uninhibited laughter. The fragrance of cinnamon, like Christmas, and Vick’s VapoRub, like long ago, and memories, so many memories, that still live…
I really am all these things. They are me. Story is inextricable from life. Story goes on and on. We are story.
And that, I love.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March. This is my sixth year participating.
On this final, frosty February morn, I wasn’t sure I had stamina enough to endure the day. For a short month, February can be so long. Teachers know.
I bundle up. I get in the car. I sigh. Could I manage to take half a day? Is it worth it? Probably not. A moment at a time, a moment at a time…
I drive. The empty fields seem sugarcoated with ice. I look for hawks. I am always looking for hawks. I don’t know why they lift my spirits so. They just do.
No hawks. No plump little goats in the goat pen by the stop sign, either. But something different in the glassy pond…
A great blue heron.
Symbol of self-determination, paragon of peace, harbinger of spring. Stoic, tall, unflinching. Stunning.
Just the shot of strength needed for the day.
Photo: Great Blue Heron at Sunset. Maxinux40k. CC BY-NC-SA
I stopped to take a picture of my beautiful heron but it’s not clear enough to post. I have to content myself with sharing this one instead; mine looked so like this.
a bit of haiku
My colleague’s great-aunt
had a phrase for anyone
with nose out of joint:
Oh, they’ll be all right
after the swellin’ goes down.
—you gotta hope so.
an acrostic
The Artist’s Inner Dialogue
Today is a
Happy day
I feel it as I
Skip along the sidewalk
I feel like making
Something beautiful with
All kinds of colors
Red orange yellow green blue
And my favorites,
Indigo and violet…
Now I leave my happy beautifulness
By way of chalkdust
Or maybe fairydust
Where you can find it, too
Photo: Margaret Simon. “This Photo Wants to be a Poem,” Reflections on the Teche.
Thank you for the inspiration, Margaret.
Pleasant evening drive
after a taxing workday
heading to supper
ahead, in the road,
a little creature trotting
like some kind of cat
I said, What IS that?
I can’t tell, said my husband
so sphinx-like, it was
long, low, and silver
big pointy ears, feline grace
canine whiskered face
—oh! we cried, a fox!—
as it vanished, phantom-like,
in the shrouding woods.
We’d have known it right away, had it been red. We see those occasionally. Gray foxes are actually native to the area, however; the red fox didn’t appear in this part of the country until the 1800s. I cannot recall having seen a gray fox before. It was small and lovely, with a grizzled silver coat so prized by hunters. These are the only foxes that can climb trees.
I wonder where our enigmatic gray fox was going on its jaunt along the woodland road just before dusk…and how many more of its kind are about, in the secret places…
Photo: Gray Fox. Keith Wescourt. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Nothing shakes the smiling heart.—Santosh Kalwar
a pantoum
Nothing shakes the smiling heart
not loss, not fear, not pain
the heart-smile shines ever bright
even in the rain
Not loss, not fear, not pain
despite tales of gloom and doom
even in the rain
the smiling heart does not consume
Despite tales of gloom and doom
it needs no teeth, for
the smiling heart does not consume
while beating its joyful tune
It needs no teeth, for
the heart-smile shines ever bright
while beating its joyful tune
—nothing shakes the smiling heart.
with thanks to Ruth at SOS-Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog for the Kalwar quote along with the invitation to consider a smile and write about it. Note that in addition to the usual definitions of ingesting, buying, using, etc., “consume” can also mean “perish.”
On the last day of the February Open Write at Ethical ELA, Britt Decker invites participants to write a poem based on a picture book, taking inspiration from beautiful lines, illustrations, or theme.
My little acrostic is inspired by Inky’s Amazing Escape: How a Very Smart Octopus Found His Way Home, by Sy Montgomery (a true story).
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The Long-Reaching Tentacle of Adaptability
“Sometimes the keeper gave Inky toys. Inky liked to take apart LEGO blocks, and put them back together. He liked playing with Mr. Potato Head. One time, with his suckers, he pulled off Mr. Potato Head’s eyes and handed them to the starfish in his tank.”
Once upon a time, a
Child yearned
To understand why
Others seem such a
Puzzle
Until she learned
She didn’t have to solve them.
From Inky’s Amazing Escape: How a Very Smart Octopus Found His Way Home, written by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Amy Schimler-Safford. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, New York, 2018.
I am in awe of octopuses. Inky’s story is etched on my heart. There’s something so poignant to me in his giving Mr. Potato Head’s eyes to the starfish.
lit bits and pieces 