grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Hairy Words

By

I have crazy psycho dreams. This, I’ve already confessed in prior posts.  Lately, my dreams have involved writing. Because.I’m.Obsessed. Possessed?

In my dreams, thoughts gush from the tip of my favorite pen, flowing and filling blank pages. In my dreams, I type fluently with fingertips on home keys, tap-tap-tap, as automatic as blinking. In my dreams, I edit, slash, replace, rack my brain for precise words that combine to form a magical sentence. Prose that flows likes a favorite melody. Words that sing.

In my most recent dream, I gazed into my mother’s magical magnifying mirror, the mirror she drags on every road trip. (The mirror that weighs fifteen pounds.) I discovered my eyebrows were unruly, in desperate need of plucking. A few wild stray hairs grew here and there, undetected by blurred fifty-year-old vision. Undetected without help from the hulking amplifier.

As I studied these shapeless brows, I noticed each hair was not a hair at all. Each hair was a word. A teeny-weeny minuscule group of letters. Why had I never noticed?

As I carefully tugged microscopic words from between my eyebrows, I wondered, did other people realized these hairs were adjectives and adverbs?
With my tweezers, I plucked…
very
          suddenly
      the
 small
                  important
           was
 just
               seem
   awesome…

Growing off to the side, I removed…
          interesting. 
Stray hairs. Stray words. 
When I finished, I admired my clean, evenly shaped eyebrows.
I’ve been writing word by word, bird by bird, bean by bean, hair by hair… I’ve been editing word by word, bird by bird, you get the picture.
Today, I shall take a break and go outside to play.
talya

Musical Pairing:

I Can See Clearly Now, Johnny Nash

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” 
― Dr. Seuss

Goodbye Gilligan’s Island

By

Gilligan's Island

After school snack of peanut butter
 crackers, watching Gilligan’s
 Island 

at the 
lake
drive was long–I read Alice in Wonderland the entire
trip(s)
to the library while Momma was at Lucille’s Beauty
Shop(ping)
at Sterlings, the smell of
 popcorn
at
 Nana’s

drawing crazy ducks at
church

revival on hot, summer
days
 spent flat on our backs, naming the shapeof
clouds 
and cold, days spent playing jacks inside—too cold for
recess
spent upside down on the playground bars like a
Monkey
Island at the Memphis
Zoo
picnics, with homemade chicken, deep
fried
potatoes every
night(s)
spent telling ghost stories
become
memories
become
us.

These are a few of my random childhood memories layered like tree rings. Flashes, mere seconds in my life, vividly remembered years later. Each comes with a smell or a sound or a taste. Peel them back to find my thoughts, attitudes, opinions. Peel them back to find me.We have no control over what we remember. What sticks and what doesn’t?

Not all of my memories are strawberry-cupcake-filled. There were not-so-perfect memories too, those that sometimes kept me up at night. And regular run-of-the-mill life moments, easily forgotten. The sum of my life experiences furnished me with a love for reading and nature and cooking and family and home.

Now imagine….

What if instead of coming home from school to peanut butter crackers and Gilligan’s Island, I played Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Every day for years…

What if instead of attending church revival on hot summer days, I spent weeks holed up in my dark bedroom playing Hitman?

What if instead of checking out Nancy Drew books at the library, I checked out Splatterhouse?Would I be the same person?

The gun control debate has turned nasty. We can blame guns and mental health while calling for more control or taking up arms to fight for our rights. I don’t know what the magic answer is, but the problem stems from a complete breakdown of society including family and morals.
I grew up around guns yet never once considered shooting anyone on the school bus, even though my purse was ransacked and my lunch money was stolen nearly every day. And as bad as that was, the worst bully never considered pulling out a gun to steal my lunch money.
There were consequences—home, school, police, higher power.
When does virtual become reality? Shouldn’t Hollywood shoulder partial responsibility? Shouldn’t parents accept responsibility for not parenting?
How could we not be affected by something we are exposed to day in and day out, whether positive or negative?
If we smoke one cigarette, no harm done. Smoke cigarettes for five hours every day for years and see what happens.

talya

Grace Grits and Gardening

Musical Pairing:

In This World We Created, Queen

“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.” ― Oscar Wilde

Winter: Birds Bathing

By

The following poem by Pat Laster won first place in the POETS’ CHOICE category of Missouri State Poetry Society’s Winter contest. The poem is written in cinquain (sin-kane) sequence. 

Cinquain is a syllabic poetry form of 5 lines. The syllable count is 2-4-6-8-2. Some cinquains use iambic pentameter.

A sight
for sleepy eyes:
a pair of cardinals
fly to the birdbath. While she bathes,
he whets
his beak
on a nearby
limb of beautyberry.
When she’s finished, she flies away.
His turn.
Facing
toward me (behind
the window), he
dips and flutters, spreading
his tail feathers in a fan, stands,
surveys
the scene.
I don’t count
the repetitions, but
soon enough, a speckle-breasted
thrasher
flies up
wanting a dip.
“Red” moves to the near branch
where the wind ruffles and dries his
feathers.
Cleaning
his bill once more,
he flies home, while the long,
brown bird follows the same bathing
routine.
On this
Martin Luther
King Monday, what a treat
for one who’d just arisen from
a dream.
                            by Pat Laster

Me, Pat Laster, Dorothy Johnson
Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, Oct ’12
Wine-Thirty

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!