On walking from the gym to my car at dawn

Dawn washed pearl grey

We have finally settled into spring

A robin’s lilting song

Appreciation

Wow!  What a wonderful thing this slice of life challenge has been!  I began with great trepidation, thinking “How am I going to fit in time to write every day?  I’m such a slow writer and I have no time as it is! And who would want to read anything I write anyway?”  But with encouragement from my friend, Linda, who showed me how to set up a blog, I started.  And now it’s finished!  And  I  am going to miss this community of writers and reading the daily snapshot of life on our planet that we create together.  What an antidote to the news you all have been; what a revelation, what a joy and a wonder it has been to read what you have written. Thank you!  Thank you!

 I think now I have a writing habit – and I will still sit here, in the pearl grey dawn of the mornings, writing.  I have new hope - maybe I will finish that novel! :-) Linda tells me that there is a Tuesday slice of life through the year, so we can wave at each other once a week.  I hope to see you all there!

And since today is the first day of poetry month, I would like to share one of my favorite poems:

Voyage

By Tony Hoagland

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages

And found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:

Sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas

and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which

all the characters who died in the middle chapters

make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,

and someone else says, "I'm only sorry

that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train

Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe

Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;

Icebergs and tropical storms,

That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage —

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love

And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass

& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,

Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,

and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,

under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves

By discussing the meaning of homesickness.

But there was no home to go home to.

There was no getting around the ocean.

We had to go on finding out the story

                                                by pushing into it —

The sea was no longer a metaphor.

The book was no longer a book.

That was the plot.

That was our marvelous punishment.

My Overactive Imagination

An homáge to Harold Monro and my Grandmother, Ruth

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

                                    I am eight years old living between

                                    Manhattan and mountains

Green glass, goblin.  Why do you stare at them?

                                    By all appearance an ordinary

                                    schoolgirl but I frighten my little friends

                                    ‘cause I know

Give them me.

                                    How to find real fairies in the garden

                                    flowers, how to find signs proving the

                                    frost witch has touched the maple leaves

No.

                                    My Grandmother reads me poems

                                    while I draw or comb my fingers through

Give them me. Give them me.

                                    My secret treasure box containing frosted

                                    bits of sea glass, green and blue, broken

                                    rhinestones and nuggets of gold and quartz

                                    my grandfather dug from the mountain’s heart                                            

No.

                                    Any small thing catches my eye –

                                    this could be it: the strange nickel that grants

                                    wishes, or the pebble from space that is really a

                                    telephone to the next galaxy, but no

Than I will howl all night in the reeds,

Lie in the mud and howl for them.

                                    I build goblins into the murky reeds of a drainage

                                    ditch and frighten myself while I search for

                                    young dragons                                                                     

Goblin, why do you love them so?

                                    I find a crack in the rocks by the trail and believe it

                                    a door into another world.  Isn’t that how the stories

                                    always start?

They are better than stars or water,

Better than voices of winds that sing,

Better than any man’s fair daughter,

Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

                                    How can this compare to reruns of Leave it to

                                    Beaver? Or Mayberry? My friends running home

                                    to canned laughter and TV trays

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

                                    I’ll trade these any day for a journey to the moon,

                                    fishing with Winken Blinken and Nod, with

                                    Captain Kirk and Bilbo Baggins

Give me your beads, I want them.

                                    My Grandmother reads me poems,

                                    I hunger for them

No.

                                    Why do you plague me with grammar and spelling

I will howl in the deep lagoon

For your green glass beads, I love them so.

                                    My Grandmother reads me poems

Give them me.  Give them.

                                    Why do you burden me with

                                    the five-paragraph essay

No.

                                    My Grandmother reads me poems

April Ice

Another three minute poem:

On the pre-dawn drive to the gym I determine not to complain

Friday is April but ice crackles and I walk with duck like care

Ah! It will melt by noon and I won’t have to water the yard!

Pirate Lightning

            We took our four kiddos to a truly amazing exhibit about the pirate ship Whydah.  My youngest son, who is seven, awoke this morning, dressed himself in his pirate costume (a bit small – it was Halloween from two years ago) and fed himself, all before the rest of us even knew the sun was up.  He woke his oldest sister, face painting kit in hand, asking her to paint a mustache, beard and gold earring on him – “quick, ‘cause we’re leaving any minute!”

            The exhibit exceeded every expectation.  We tied knots, walked through a life size model of the ship, raised the pirate flag, looked at real cannon and REAL pirate treasure, last touched by REAL pirates, whose names we now knew.  There were costumed interpreters as well: a period pirate with attitude and a proper Boston matron.  After talking with them about Boston in 1717 the matron asked my sons about where they lived.  The boys then spent a full fifteen minutes trying to explain the wonders of modern technology to the matron.  My ten-year-old son tried explaining electricity:

            “It’s like lightning, traveling along wires.  And we hold the wires up in the air on big wooden poles.”

            “Heavens above!” cried the Matron, “That sounds terribly dangerous!”

            My seven year old walked away shaking his head in wonder, “I guess they really didn’t have cars or electricity back then,” he said.

            There was a healthy dose of serious history as well.  The Whydah had left Britain as a merchant marine with money and goods used to buy slaves in Africa.  From Africa it went to the Caribbean to trade slaves for sugar and tobacco.  Then back to Britain to sell the new world goods and start the circle all over again.  But then pirates captured her!  We found that pirate ships were run as a democracy, albeit a violent one, with men of all colors and cultures elected to positions of authority by their peers.  British navel vessels at the time were strictly hierarchical based on class; the lower classes usually treated like dirt. 

            We got to the room where we saw the ship capsize in a fateful storm and sink to its 300-year resting place.  My seven year old sat next to me on a bench.  The light was blue, dim and flickering; we might well have been sitting quietly at the bottom of the sea.

            “Mom,” he said, “I think that the pirates actually got all their money from stealing.”

            “Yup,” I answered.

            “Stealing is not a very good thing to do.”

            “You’re right,” I said.

            “But the other guys were selling people to be slaves.”

            “Yup,” I answered again.

            “That’s not a very good thing to do either.”

            “You’re certainly right about that,” I said.

            He sat silently for a minute, then turned and looked at me.  His face was so solemn I felt my heart twinge.

            “Mom, now I’m not sure who were the good guys.”

And After They'd Killed the Dragon...

It is spring break and, inspired by the fact that I have found time to write my slice each day, I have decided to commit an hour a day to writing for the week.  This morning it turned into an hour and a half, more if you count this slice writing now.  I am writing a book and trying hard to ignore all the reasons shouting in my head that I shouldn’t bother.  It is becoming a secret indulgence.  I get so excited about the story; I have the plot all mapped out and have written most of my favorite bits a few times over.  But now there are these parts that I approach with dread.  How do I get my characters from important fun bit number one to important fun bit number two.  They are a bunch of heros on a quest, but sometimes there just seems to be a lot of hiking involved between monsters and storms.  Well today I found out that my characters really like just hanging out with each other and they are just as much fun when they are not in a pinch.  Writing every day is teaching me to trust that when I sit down to write something will come out – I don’t have to have it all planned out ahead of time.  Oops – my youngest is throwing up in the bathroom – writing is done for today.

Spring Break, first day

Well, spring is in the air.  And today is the first day of spring break, beautiful, awash in warm sunshine and potential.  My family is up and excited by the prospect of a week off.  What to do, what to do… I’ve gone swimming and three loads of laundry are in progress.  I noticed a lot of garden chores that need doing when I came home from swimming.  I am sitting upstairs trying to think what to write.  The kids are downstairs singing “I’m blue, da ba dee da ba dye da  ba dee da  ba dye, if I were green I would sigh da  ba dee  da  ba  dye!”  They have made blueberry pancakes and cleaned the kitchen.  I am overjoyed and grateful but now I don’t know where all those important papers are that were piled on the center island.  My husband has finally gotten into the shower and is singing, at the top of his lungs, little ditties of his own creation. I sit here still trying to think what to write for slice of life post.  My eldest daughter comes in and starts telling me a story of the complicated relationship shiftings in her high school.  I try not to let my eyes glaze over.  My second eldest daughter comes in to tell me we are out of toothpaste.  I tell her to start a list.  The boys are in the backyard now screaming with glee and chasing wild bunnies in the bushes.  Perhaps I will quietly close the door and take a nap.