A girl and her grandpa

August 20, 2024August 20, 2024 / Fran Haley / 8 Comments

She’s almost three now. When he leaves the room, she asks: “Where’s my grandpa?”

She’s not afraid of his eyepatch or his closed eye beneath it. She commands him: “Open your eye. It’s laying down.” He can’t keep it open, even with the prosthesis. One day he’ll tell her how he lost that eye, that beautiful brown eye, so like her own. But not yet.

She knows he takes heart medication. She sees the bottles and pats her own chest: “That’s Grandpa’s medicine. For his heart. From the doctor.”

She knows he’s wearing a heart monitor. She crawls in his lap, tugs on his shirt, and says, “I want to see your heart.” He pulls the fabric over to reveal the monitor. She studies it. Her little brows knit.

She knows he sometimes walks with a cane. She finds it leaning against the wall and carries it to him. She doesn’t appear to recall his recuperation from spine surgery last fall, or that it was months before he could pick her up again. He started doing it before he should have. He couldn’t resist those little outstretched arms and the request, “Hold you.”

She wants me to play hide-and-seek in the house with her so he can find us. She hides in the same place every single time: behind a chair in the living room. She wriggles with anticipation and puts her fingers to her lips with a loud, stage whisper directed at me: “SHHHHHH!” She doesn’t know how obvious we are in our so-called hiding place. He plays along, walking through the house: “Where’s Micah? Where’s Franna? Are they in the closet? Are they in the bathroom?” She answers him with a high-pitched, drawn-out “Noooooo!” When he peers over our chair, she shrieks with delight.

She demands: “Grandpa, upside down!” He takes her little legs, swings her upside down like a pendulum. Her brown hair flies and her face radiates with glee. “Again!” she cries. “Again!” He will keep doing it until his back makes him stop.

She came to the recent wedding shower for her Dada’s younger brother. She crawled under the church fellowship hall table to play. Grandpa, the pastor, crawled under with her.

My first thought: They really are on the same level.

Second thought: Look how that back surgery paid off!

At dinner this week, he told her: “You are Grandpa’s little angel, Micah.”

She looked at him a moment, those dark eyes shining. She replied, “You are Micah’s angel.”

He always will be, my little love.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

The important thing poem

July 23, 2024 / Fran Haley / 6 Comments

For today’s Ethical ELA Open Write, host Gayle Sands invited poets to compose “important thing” poems. She offered this form, based on the boiled-down essence of children’s books and Aristotle’s philiosphy on the accidental purpose of things:

Begin with: “The important thing about __________ is that ________________”.
Follow with: An assortment of supporting facts and ideas
End with: “But the important thing about _______________ is that _______________”.

The poem could be about an object, person, concept, or belief. Anything.

For some reason, AI came to mind.

As it happens, Two Writing Teachers offered a suggestion for today’s Slice of Life Story Challenge: Write about a time you felt fear.

Many people fear AI.

So here we are.

The Important Thing About AI

The important thing about AI
is that it can do
so many important things.

It can
plan your lesson
make your presentation
craft your poem (in any form you choose)
write your dissertation
and your novel.

It can
compose your music
reinvent your image
create believable deepfakes
of visuals and news
that fit perfectly
in the alternate reality
of your preference.

It can
design your clothes
your house
your city
your travel
your vehicle
your financial portfolio
pretty much anything.

But the important thing
about AI is
that it’s the tool

not the builder.

Photo: pexels.com

*******

with thanks to Gayle and the vitally important communities at Ethical ELA and Two Writing Teachers

The greening

July 20, 2024July 20, 2024 / Fran Haley / 1 Comment

The Greening

On Christmas, my firstborn son
brought me a white poinsettia
from the altar of his church

I set it by the window
in the kitchen, facing east
expecting it would die soon

but it lives on, lush and green
from the abundance of light
and my increased watering

For reblooming, it must go
in the dark, thirsty and dry
but I can’t, I can’t do it

It’s the only poinsettia
I haven’t managed to kill
and my boy gave it to me

Let it stay pure emerald
drinking all the light it can
in its summer of content

growing a little bigger
every day, like my spirit
while my leaves begin to fall

*******

with thanks to Denise Krebs for the inspiration and septercet poem form in today’s Open Write at Ethical ELA

Green comfort

July 16, 2024July 16, 2024 / Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Written 7/9/2024

Today I type my thoughts while sitting by the green-gray Atlantic. Ancient undulations roll on and on like Time itself, cascading into new foam as brief and bright as this new morning.

The older I become (this is the last year of my fifties) the more I contemplate the brevity of things. Suddenly—it seems—the kids are grown with lives of their own. The granddaughters are older and smarter every day. Micah, age two-and-three-quarters, carries on a conversation like an adult. She knows what “be brave” means. She will need that attribute in life more than she can know.

I have.

My husband walks out into the waters for a moment. He’s not much of a beachgoer anymore, after all his medical crises in recent years. He’s here because I want to be. Because I need a little salt, a little sun, probably a lot of Vitamin D, and the comfort of this vast continuum. We loved the beach when we were young. Almost thirty-nine years into the marriage, the ocean is personal metaphor, a living promise, ceaseless.

Ever how grounded I may be in my faith, I am not immune to lapses. Today, as I logged on to write this post, WordPress offered a prompt:

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

And in my email inbox, a devotion from Our Daily Verse on increasing perseverance.

For me, the key to increasing comfort and perseverance in daily life begins with remembering that God is still God. No matter what. Not merely the limb on which I perch when I’m tired and despairing, but the whole of existence. The true eternal. Generations of our whole human history rise and fall like the ocean waves, and God holds it all.

The sun grows hot. My husband can’t take it for long, and, truth be told, neither can I. Our morning by the sea is brief. We must seek a respite. Somewhere shadowy and green.

I can’t help thinking of forgiveness as a green thing…well-watered with tears, surely, but under its lush canopy, comfort. Rest. Freedom. Peace. As we prepare to leave the shore, my husband and I watch parasailors. How peaceful it must be, so high above it all. I wonder what they hear up there. Here on the ground I hear the ocean’s roar, a strain of cicadas in the scrubby brush, and a baby laughing nearby, playing in the sand.

Some of my favorite sounds on Earth.

Along with the house finch singing as soon as we arrived at the beach this morning. I heard it as soon as I opened the car door. Instantly recognizable. It’s the beautiful song I hear on my front porch every spring and summer. In itself, the sound of perseverance. Of home. It seems to follow me everywhere I go. “Hello, Finch,” I called back to him, perched there in his crape myrtle tree, his little head and breast as red as sunset.

At a recent gathering, my neighbor joked that we’ve reached the time of life in which we just want to watch birds.

There’s comfort in it.

Yesterday while walking through the beach community I saw a green heron. I don’t recall ever having seen one before. A week ago I responded to a fellow blogger, wishing I could have seen the green heron she wrote of, so lyrically.

And one came to me.

The heron and I watched each other for a long awed moment, before she (?) flew to the other side of the pond and I walked on, to let her be.

I contemplate the symbolism of the green heron.

From a biblical perspective, my first go-to, it’s not great. Herons are “unclean” per the Law, i.e., not suitable for consumption, although one resource states that “The very poor of our western and southeastern coast states eat them”(in 1915, that is to say, per the ISB Encyclopedia, written just before the birds were protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act). I wasn’t expecting this, the act or the desperation. It’s been illegal to hunt and kill herons for over a hundred years. Furthermore, the green heron is known to be an irritable, angry bird.

Sounds like some people l know. I don’t want to be one of them.

There are a number of other spiritual meanings associated with the green heron, among them humility, patience, adaptability, wisdom, the ability to focus intently (heaven knows I need this; I used to be better at it than I am now)… and perseverance.

What it really comes down to, however, is how I felt when I encountered this bird. I’d desired to see it, and it came. We were maybe ten feet apart. The heron fixed its bright golden eye intently on me and I was awed. Encouraged. Curious.

It didn’t say anything but I imagine if we spoke the same language, it might have said Be watchful. Be brave. You will persevere. What you need will be provided.

All this in a space of a held breath, in a flutter of green wings, beside the still waters…

I believe. I walk lighter, a wordless green song in my heart.

My green heron

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Ghosted

July 2, 2024July 1, 2024 / Fran Haley / 18 Comments

A slice of memoir for my writing friends, who requested the story of my mail-order ghost…

******

The 1970s were steeped in tabloids, monsters, horror, psychics, UFOs, and ghosts.

Weird times.

And I was a weird little kid.

I thought I could see a lady sitting high atop a tree across the street from my house. Every day, year after year, she sat there, a regal bark-colored woman, never moving, just looking out over the world from her tall branchy throne.

I thought I saw feet in a pair of bedroom slippers left in my Grannie’s hallway…where was the rest of the person? None of the adults could make sense of my sudden hysteria.

Speaking of hysteria: My young parents, for some inexplicable, out-of-character reason, carried me through a haunted house before I was two. Just as they were exiting, a witch popped out from a secret chamber and her long hair swept over me. I have no memory of this. My father told me the story; he said I screamed and screamed, like I’d been burned. I figure it marked me permanently. Like a smallpox vaccination. I wonder what kind of immunity witch hair carries…

I recall being really being burned. I was afraid of cigarettes, of their red-hot circular tips, because some grown-up or other at a family gathering hadn’t thought to move his indolent hand out of the way when my preschool self went running through the living room. Maybe this is why I also feared flames shooting up from backyard charcoal grills (smell that lighter fluid?), from the flattop grill behind the counter of the local diner, and the whoosh of brilliant blue whenever someone turned the burner knob on a gas stove.

I was afraid of big smells. Like collards cooking. I’d gag and run out of the house (love to eat ’em now, though, with plenty of hot pepper vinegar).

My weirdest childhood fear (perhaps): Black toilet seats. Utterly terrifying. Why did anyone ever think these were a great idea? I wouldn’t even enter the bathroom at the doctor’s office, let alone “go,” because of that ominous seat. I sobbed and tried to get away from my mother. Not understanding, she became angry.

And I was afraid of ghosts.

So much so that I didn’t want to go to sleep the first night I stayed with my grandparents after Granddaddy retired and they moved back home to the countryside. Their cozy little house sat amid whispering woods, strange canals, and a tiny dappled cemetery situated diagonally to the left of their front yard, across the dirt road.

I took one look at those weathering old tombstones gleaming white in the dusk and thought Ghosts.

Grandma, I’m scared of that place.

Oh, honey. Don’t ever fear the dead. Fear the living.

It didn’t help.

Oddly enough, TV shows about monsters and ghosts did.

The Addams Family: How did Morticia move at all in that skinny black dress, drawn so tight ’round her ankles? How could a disembodied hand called Thing materialize from random tabletop boxes throughout the psuedo-gothic house to deliver mail or light cigars? My parents’ then-childless friends got a black Lab puppy and named it Thing. I loved that dog. She dug a big hole in our backyard; in the years to follow, I’d expand Thing’s hole many times over, along with my imagination.

The Munsters: Who could be afraid of Herman, with his goofy laugh?

Casper the Friendly Ghost: I quickly grew to love him and all the dark gray haunted-house scenery on the Viewmaster reels Grandma bought me. Casper wasn’t remotely scary. He was cute. And comforting. Somehow.

And so it was, one summer when I was nine or ten, I happened upon the little ad in the back pages of a magazine (or maybe it was in a novelty catalog, another 1970s staple):

Order Your Own Ghost!

I didn’t bother to read the rest of the details. The creepy illustration sold me.

I went in search of Grandma.

I would have it. My own ghost.

My land. What do you want this for?

I just do… please, Grandma?

She sighed, clipped out the form, addressed the envelope, enclosed the couple of dollars (?), and mailed it.

When the package arrived she helped me open it. One doesn’t want to slit a ghost by accident.

I’m not sure what I expected. I knew the ghost couldn’t be “real,” yet the ad had conjured a misty apparition in my mind, a filmy thing that would do my bidding. Could it be the allure of supernatural power? The need to overcome a fear by mastering it? Sheer curiosity? All of the above?

Would the the thing rise before me as soon as the package was opened?

Um.

No.

Opening the package the rest of the way, I found a folded white plastic sheet, deeply creased when I shook it out, a white balloon to blow up and place under the thin plastic, white thread for tying under the balloon “head” and to be taped to the top of the plastic so that the ghost could then be hung from a door or hook, etc., where it might move a little whenever we passed by (or if I decided to turn Grandma’s floor fan on it).

Oh, and helpful directions to locate a marker for drawing draw eyes and a mouth, if desired.

I felt like throwing the worthless stuff straight in the trash. When I eventually learned the term rip-off, this mail-order ghost would drift to mind.

Grandma, who’d tried to discourage the purchase in the first place, now tried to placate me: Here, I’ll blow up the balloon…

We assembled the sorry specter and strung it on the old bedroom doorknob where it dangled in front of the metal keyhole. I hated the sight of it hanging there, grinning at me.

I didn’t know it then, but Lessons were afoot…

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

It may not be at all what you thought.

Fears are exhausting.

Fears can be overcome by recognizing the inherent ridiculous (look up Harry Potter boggart).

Things and people will sometimes (oftentimes) turn out to be something other than they seem.

Above all: Life is a carnival, a strange journey of compelling facades and disappointing realities, a house of shattered mirrors with perpetual distortions and misperceptions obscuring truth, of false narratives and unseen, lingering harm lurking in the darkest corners, where occasionally flares a red-hot tip held in an indolent hand…

Ghosts are, in the end, about loss; what do we fear more than that?

I’d had enough. I balled up my ghost and smushed it into the trashcan where it belonged.

It was a beginning.

Ghost. David Ludwig. CC BY-SA

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Parched

June 25, 2024July 1, 2024 / Fran Haley / 7 Comments

She perches
atop the hummingbird feeder
at my kitchen window

Mama Bluebird

haven’t seen her in a while
she keeps a low profile

when new fledglings
are about

I think she’s playing defense
watching me
watching her
(bluebirds are
ferocious guardians)

until I see
her open beak

she doesn’t close it

I’ve never seen
such behavior
before

from any bird

I look it up

she’s suffering
from the heat

trying to
cool off

birds can’t sweat

she stays on this perch
watching me
watching her

I sense a plea…

I take a cup

run a little water
at the kitchen sink

carry it out
into the drought

(she flies away)

pour it on the top
of the hummingbird feeder

(it’s really meant
to be an ant moat)

and as soon as I return
to the kitchen

I see she’s back
sipping
sipping
sipping

she stays a good while

perched
parched

until she’s refreshed enough
to close her beak again

and fly

maybe back
to help her children

all I know
is that my soul

(sometimes just as parched)

rejoices
that I was able
to provide

this little oasis

when I have felt
so utterly unable

to ease
the longsuffering

of others

Thank you
Mama Bluebird

for refreshing
me

******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

For love of reading

June 18, 2024June 18, 2024 / Fran Haley / 4 Comments

with thanks to Anna J. Small Roseboro, today’s Open Write host at Ethical ELA, for inviting teachers to write poems of reflection on the past school year and projections for next…my thoughts came out this way, and so I’m calling it a prose poem.

For Love of Reading

Reading and writing were the great loves
of my childhood…for birthdays and Christmas,
I wanted books. And more books. I never thought
about them as keys to unlock life’s doors. In retrospect
I see that books were my lifeline, keeping me afloat
in a muddy sea of existence. I would read and find myself
in another world, another life. I didn’t think about reading
as amassing riches in my mind. My family didn’t have wealth
but I was rich, rich, rich in books. They were my
greatest treasures.

I never planned to be a reading teacher. I didn’t pursue
the vocation; it pursued me. My professional role changes
every year depending on funding and the current trend
for helping children learn to read. For many the struggle
is great. The battles waged by the Educational-Powers-That-Be
are great. Year to year the sands shift, the tides of research turn,
blame is passed, and verbal artillery is fired.
I have served in ranks wearing armor that didn’t fit me,
using approaches that didn’t dovetail with desired outcomes…
furthermore, we are not talking about war.
We are talking about what children need.

Every so often, the winds of war abate and through the smoke
blows a bit of fresh breeze. Let us name it Opportunity.
It comes offering me a chance to recruit volunteers
from the community to read with students each day. It comes
with a whole new library that I inventoried and archived
in preparation for next fall, a wealth of beautiful books
that are windows and mirrors for our young students
to pick from, with their volunteer readers. It comes
with taking donations of books to give to students
to keep at home. It comes with redecorating
a neglected space in the building, with an astounding gift
of bright new seating from the PTA, to make this space
special for our students. This is a sacred space.
Here people will give of themselves to others,
here relationships and lives will be built, here love will be born…

My reading soul rejoices.

*******

with thanks also to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
—writers need community. ❤

Red, white, and blue reflections

May 27, 2024May 28, 2024 / Fran Haley / 7 Comments

The words are in my head when I wake.

Memorial Day.

I should write about it, I think.

But my brain is restless.

For one thing, the weather.

I rise with the sun and patter, barefoot, to the kitchen. Pink light is spilling through the blinds before I open them. Thunder rolls in the distance. The forecast is severe. I stand in the bay window’s rosy glow as a soft rainshower begins. No birds in sight. The usual morning chorus of robins, house finches, cardinals, Carolina wrens is paused. Silence, but for the occasional caw of a crow near the woods. My neighbors’ freshly-planted roses are blinding red against the green grass, the weathered-wood fence. Stark white curtains hanging from their gazebo flutter like ghosts, like prelude…what’s past is prologue, as states the murderous Antonio in The Tempest.

That’s the second thing. Ghosts.

The imagery distracts me.

I ordered a ghost from a catalog, once. When I was a child. True story.

It was disappointing.

That was before I knew that ghosts have many manifestations. And to be careful what you wish for.

There’s always a cost. Ghosts aren’t free.

Why I’m thinking this just now, as the sun fades away into gray, as the lights in the house blink, as the skies crack open, releasing the predicted deluge, as my little dachshund curls into a ball on the kitchen rug, shivering uncontrollably…I do not know, exactly.

On the table I have a small arrangement of red, white, and blue flowers, in honor of the day and my country’s fallen soldiers. I recall learning that my first real home was once an Army hospital morgue.

It’s dim, but I can remember living in that shadowy house at age three, until my family was forced out. I wonder which WWII soldiers were brought there before their burial, before my time.

I light a candle by the flowers, against the encroaching darkness. At the window, a tiny ember-red flash. Male ruby-thoated hummingbird, undeterred by the tempest, coming for a drink of sugar-water at my feeder. Over by the wooden fence,in front of the gazebo’s billowing white veils, a fluttering of blue wings… bluebirds seeking to feed their young. Despite all. Above all.

Sustenance.

New thought: That’s what this day is about.

Sacrifice, prayer, and peace, too…in fact, the word prayer is mentioned four times in the legal language for the holiday (read it for yourself: 36 U.S. Code § 116 – Memorial Day). Peace appears twice. Contextually, in a call to pray for permanent peace, according to each individual’s faith.

That’s in the law of our land.

As the storm descends, I pick up my trembling dachshund. There’s no way to tell him it’s only temporary. I can only hold him ’til it’s over. Sustenance. The lesson of the birds. The whole purpose of prayer. Of faith.

Memory. It’s for teaching. If what’s past is prologue…it cannot be changed; but the present, the future, can. If we remember. If we do not remember the past, as the saying goes, we are condemned to repeat it.

That’s the lesson of the ghosts.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
-sharing your writing is a true act of courage.

The letter

May 21, 2024May 22, 2024 / Fran Haley / 23 Comments

I found it in one of my old Bibles when I was preparing to speak at a women’s conference.

A letter from my grandmother.

Postmarked September 29, 2001…not long after 9-11. In the wake of what seemed the end of the world.

She wanted to surprise me with a letter. She’d written dozens to me throughout all the years we lived in two different states, since I was six. In her eighties, however, her fine penmanship had begun to look shaky on the page. She had taken to making phone calls more and more.

She writes of the beautiful day: sunny and bright, the sky so blue. I’m planning to walk a short distance when I finish and feel good…

She writes of family, that she talks to my daddy every night, and tomorrow she will see him. She writes that my mother seems to be doing good, better than we even thought! I no longer remember the context of this statement; my mother was frequently in poor health, in body and in mind.

She writes of my Aunt Pat’s moonflower, presently blooming, and asks if I remember her moonflower growing around the stump of Granddaddy’s pecan tree by the old dirt road and that she once had another by the pump house…its runners grew on the pump house, shrubs nearby, and the fence.

For a minute, I am there, walking in long ago, seeing the profusion of white blooms, breathing their perfume…

Then she tells me not to worry about her. She had given up her house and had come to live with my aunt; at 85, unsteady on her feet and occasionally falling, she could no longer live alone. She writes: I have accepted it, like a death. You have to carry on.

She admits to crying a lot at first. Then: I’m not going to complain. I still have so much to be thankful for. I read recently that to be happy, you should act happy, so I’m trying to think happy thoughts and smile more…I think of you often because you have always been a big part of my happiness as well as Grand-daddy’s!

She read books; she played tapes of gospel music; she prayed for God to see fit to take care of our world problems. She writes of violence and violent people not knowing what being happy is.

She misses her piano, her most-prized possession. She says that since she couldn’t take it with her when she gave up the house, she’s glad I wanted it: I hope it will bring much happiness to you and the boys.

She would never know that my youngest would learn to play on that piano, that he would become a phenomenal musician, that he would learn to sing all the harmonies in gospel songs, that he would eventually obtain a college degree in this, that he would lead choirs.

She writes that she hopes to see me and the children soon, even if for a little while, knowing I’d go visit my parents, too. She so wanted to spend time with my children…

She closes with her love and prayers too.

Two tiny notes are included also, one for each of my children, then ages twelve and four. In the note to the youngest she mentions hummingbirds…they will soon be flying to a warmer climate but will come back at Easter.

As I hold these written treasures in my hands, savoring every word, a little shadow flickers at the kitchen window. A hummingbird, coming to my freshly-refilled feeder.

A year to the day after Grandma wrote this letter, my father would die suddenly. The flood of grief would overwhelm her; dementia would soon settle in, and she would be in a nursing home for four years until her death at age 90.

I reread of the beautiful day, sunny and bright, the sky so blue, that she’s talking to my father every night, that my mother’s doing better than anyone ever expected… I reread her words of acceptance and carrying on, of her great love and prayers for me. I think about how these buoyed me through every day of my life…even now.

I fold the letter back into its old envelope. I finish my lesson for the women’s conference, on learning the unforced rhythms of grace.

I carry Grandma’s letter with me.

I carry on.