family · fiction · Uncategorized

Family Olympics

Sally3 Comments

Flash Fiction February, Day 2: Today’s prompt is to write about a parent and child.

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“We’re bored,” groaned Timmy. Jimmy nodded in agreement.

Their mother looked at the two boys and said, “Perfect! Today is the day of the Family Olympics.”

“What’s that?” Jimmy asked.

“It’s a competition. We’ll have a pentathlon today — that means five events. I’ll keep track of who wins each one.”

“What’s the prize?” asked Jimmy.

“Cookies,” she replied, and the boys could see the mixer and cookie sheets already out. “First event is called Strip-the-Bed. It’s a race for who can strip all the sheets off their bed and get them to the laundry room first. On your mark, get set, go!”

Both boys raced out of the room. She could hear them upstairs and hoped the bedroom wouldn’t be too much of disaster. She met them in the laundry room. Timmy was just ahead of Jimmy and declared the winner.

“Next event is the Sock-Matching Race,” she said, and showed them the laundry basket with an assortment of unmatched socks. “You get one point for every you match. Ready? Go!”

They dumped the basket and set to work, fighting over socks, fighting with socks, and ultimately matching a bunch of socks. Timmy was the winner again.

“This next event isn’t about speed,” Mom said. “It will be judged on neatness, thoughtfulness, and word choice. It’s called Write-a-thank-you-note. Think of someone you should thank — Gramma, Auntie Lisa, Uncle Scott, or anyone — and write them a note.”

It was an hour later when the boys returned. The cookies were cooling on the racks and smelled amazing.

“While I read these,” Mom said, “you can do the next event: Gather-the-water-cups. There’s one or more in each bathroom, and each person has one beside their bed. I want to wash them all. Ready? Go!”

Jimmy had strategically headed for the bathrooms and came back with four, while Timmy only had three.

“Timmy – two points, Jimmy – one,” said Mom. “I still haven’t had a chance to read your thank you notes, so I’ll give you the next competition. It’s the Make-the-Bed competition. The sheets are in the dryer. You’ll have to get them out, divide them up, and go make your beds. I will inspect and deduct points for sloppiness and untucked sheets and blankets. Ready, set, GO!”

This task took a little longer, but when the boys had finished, they raced back to their mother in a dead tie. She was sitting at the table crying.

“C’mon boys,” she said, as she wiped her eyes. “Let’s go see how you did.”

Timmy’s bed was made, but it was a mess. Jimmy’s was much neater, with everything tucked it.

“Jimmy gets this point,” Mom said.

“Who won the thank you note competition?” Timmy asked.

Mom’s eyes welled up again with tears. “You both did,” she said. “You both wrote notes that began ‘Dear Mom’. You both made me cry in the very best way. Thank you.” She hugged them both tightly. “Now let’s go eat some cookies.”

fiction

Just One More

Sally2 Comments

She pushed the stroller. In it, her three year old son was singing loudly, “Baby Shark!”

The twins, wobbling on their bikes ahead of her, dutifully shouted, “Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo!”

All three children sang together after that, laughing, shouting, enjoying the walk through town. “Mommy shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo.” The toddler in the backpack tugged at her hair in rhythm with the words.

“You have your hands full,” said more than one passerby, who could not help but notice the singing entourage.

She just smiled and nodded.

When no one was looking, she rubbed her growing abdomen.

This is my first time participating in the February Flash Fiction Challenge: Today’s prompt is to write about having just one more of something.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — having a large family is one of the most fun things ever. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Life

Cinnamon Rolls

Sally3 Comments

I started cooking again in the last year.

In order to do that, I had to stop cooking several years ago.

Life’s twists and turns had taken the desire to cook right out me. Occasionally, when I did cook something, digging out an old tried and true recipe, it didn’t necessarily turn out right.

I think it was around last Thanksgiving when one of my children mentioned cinnamon rolls. I used to make cinnamon rolls for almost every holiday. Sometimes for birthdays. Sometimes just because. But I had stopped making them.

So I pulled out the recipe and tried it again. The cinnamon rolls turned out meh. Just meh.

I made them again.

And again.

Something about kneading dough is therapeutic. I’d say that it scratches an itch — but that doesn’t really describe it. It’s the rhythm of push-pull-fold-turn. It’s the warmth of the dough and the way you can feel life starting to happen. It’s such a good feeling.

Then, when that lump of dough rises to double in size, it always feels like a miracle. Little things thrill me — and that’s one that does.

Rolling out the dough, spreading the cinnamon sugar filling, rolling it up again and cutting the neat rolls — well, that’s all fun too.

The dough rises again.

The rolls bake and smell amazing while doing so.

A little frosting goes on top when they come out of the oven, so the frosting melts a little right into the roll.

They are so good.

Last weekend, I made a batch of cinnamon rolls. The big snow was coming. While they were still warm, I brought some to the maintenance shed where I work, where the guys who plow the parking lots and driveways for the facility go inside to get warm.

My co-worker looked puzzled when he saw me at the door there. “I made cinnamon rolls,” I told him. “They’re still warm. I think it’s going to be a long couple of days for you guys.”

His face broke into a huge smile. “I just came inside to get warm,” he told me. “These will be great!”

I laughed and told him to be sure to save some for the other guys.

Then I took about a dozen cinnamon rolls to the county highway department. I told them the same thing I had told the guy at my workplace. They were so appreciative.

It’s a win-win for me. I love making them and I love sharing them.

I’m glad I started baking again.

This post is in response to the last two JusJoJan prompts. Yesterday’s was “cinnamon” and I ran out of time. Today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt was “scratch an itch” — and I thought I could make it work for what I had been thinking about for cinnamon.

I should have taken pictures of the cinnamon rolls last weekend. They turned out perfect!

poetry

True Story

Sally10 Comments

Warm
My lap
Come sit here
Let me stroke you
Let me run my fingers all over you
You nibble on my fingers while I do
Yes, you want more
I feel it
My dear
Cat

This is my response to the W3 prompt and to the JusJoJan prompt which is prompt.

This week’s prompt for W3 is to write a Double Tetractys — a 10-line poem with a fixed syllable pattern.

Theme: something spicy or a little naughty. Keep it suggestive rather than explicit. Let tension, humor, and implication do the work.

A Double Tetractys is made of two Tetractys poems joined together:

  • The first five lines build up
  • The next five lines mirror them in reverse

Syllable pattern (per line):

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 10 / 10 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1

Yes, I have a friend with a cat that can’t get enough of me. She sits beside me, on me, nibbling at me. It’s love.

Life

Interdependence

Sally2 Comments

The fond fantasy of the elderly is to remain independent. Yet networks of interdependence sustain human usefulness and purpose.

~~ William Willimon, Aging: Growing Old in Church

Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.

~~ Malcolm Forbes

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

~~ Mahatma Gandhi

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

~~Peter Senge

Life · poetry

Life’s Labyrinth

Sally1 Comment

In this labyrinth maze called age
I walk with care
The twists and turns engage? enrage?
No stage seems fair

If I am young I may be strong
In old age wise
Will my next choice be right or wrong?
I agonize

To quickly choose or take my time
Hingeing on what?
Whether I’m young or in my prime
Life’s not clear-cut

This is my response to today JusJoJan prompt: labyrinth. It’s an Irish poetic for called a deachnadh cummaisc:

  • Four-line stanzas.
  • Eight syllables in the first and third lines.
  • Four syllables in the second and fourth lines, which both end rhyme.
  • The final word of line three rhymes with the middle of line four. (<—- I didn’t do this one well)

The photo is my brother walking a labyrinth in Bayeux.

Travel

My Dream Scottish Vacation

Sally1 Comment

It’s going to sound rather silly, but my dream Scottish vacation would be to go spend anywhere from a week to a month in some small town on the coast of Scotland.

The two things that I want to do are:

  1. Skip stones in the North Sea, or the Sea of the Hebrides, or the Irish Sea — whichever body of water is there. I would also gather a few stones smoothed by the sea as keepsakes.
  2. Eat dinner at the same pub every night. I would eavesdrop on the conversations around me as I savor the speakers’ Scottish accents.

May someday, right?

This post is brought to you by the JusJoJan prompt of the day: eavesdropper.

Life

I don’t understand

Sally4 Comments

The prompt for today is transmission. I groaned.

Even though I grew up in a science-y medical family, where my first thought should have been disease transmission or something like that, I thought of a car.

I don’t understand cars, specifically car engines.

When I was in high school, I found out I could miss classes one afternoon by taking the ASVAB (Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. It was for kids who were looking to go into the military. I wasn’t looking to go into the military, but I was looking to miss a few classes.

I’ve always been a good test-taker – very logical brain and all that. I was good in English, had taken a year of French, and was taking Latin. I had always been placed in advanced math classes. However, the ASVAB had questions that were so puzzling to me that I was flat-out guessing on.

The question I remember best is “What is the function of a carburetor?” I had no idea.

After the test, I asked one of the boys in my class about carburetors. He immediately answered — because he knew — but I was no better informed on carburetors than I was before the question or the test for that matter.

Over the years, I’ve told that story and asked many people what a carburetor does.

I know the answer, but I really don’t. The answer that I could now correctly choose in a multiple guess situation on a test is that the carburetor mixes air with fuel. The fuel needs air to burn.

To be clear, those are just words that I’m saying. I don’t know what they mean.

When I coached swimming, I would get in the water before giving the swimmers a new drill to do so that I knew what the drill felt. I knew from my own experience what their arm should feel like or how their legs should be kicking.

Carburetors? I don’t know.

Transmissions? I don’t know.

I asked a friend what a car transmission does. He said it changes the gears, or changes the car from park to drive, something like that.

“So it’s like the stick-shift when I had a standard?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “that’s a gear box.”

Clear as mud.

I’m a deep-diver. I want to understand. Something in my brain has to click so it’s more than words I’m saying. I want it to be something I really know.

This is why I watch the god-awful videos of the shootings.

Sometimes the words people say don’t line up with what I’m seeing.

So I watch another video.

And another.

I listen to the explanations from one side.

And then from the other.

I may never understand carburetors or transmissions, but I feel very confident in saying that the victims in Minneapolis are not the Border Patrol agents (as Gregory Bovino says), but are the people who are trying to help their neighbors and are ending up dead.

I really don’t understand how we came to this place as a country. That’s even more of a mystery to me than a carburetor.

poetry

First Loves in Poetry

Sally14 Comments

The fog comes on little cat feet
Highwayman comes riding
First loves
In poetry become heartbeat
This love is abiding
Because

The moon’s tossed upon cloudy seas
And meanwhile the wild geese
Fly home
i thank you God, for rhymes like trees
That become gentle breeze
Poem

This week’s W3 challenge is to write a Memento — a poetic form created by Emily Romano. A memento poem captures a holiday, anniversary, or meaningful moment held in memory.

The poem is written in two stanzas. Each of the two stanzas follows this syllabic pattern:

  • Line 1: 8 beats
  • Line 2: 6 beats
  • Line 3: 2 beats

This pattern is repeated once per stanza, for a total rhyme scheme of a / b / c / a / b / c in each stanza.

True story: I wrote a Memento poem about what I thought was the first poem that I ever wrote. My mother had saved the paper witten in my blocky large first grade printing. She told me that it was the first poem I wrote. I always thought it was a pretty darn good poem for a six year old.

Then I fact-checked my mother this morning. I did NOT compose that poem. Oh, I wrote it on a piece of paper and got a gold star from my teacher, but it was not my original words. [sad face]

So, I tried to remember when my love affair with poetry began.

It was probably One Fish, Two Fish by Dr. Seuss. He still influences my writing.

But Carl Sandburg’s poem Fog is the first stand-alone, non-nursery rhyme, non-Dr. Seuss poem that I remember loving.

I memorized The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes a few years later. That was the beginning of my love affair with story poems. We had a book of story poems that included Casey at the Bat and The Cremation of Sam McGee, but I loved the melodrama of The Highwayman.

I found that story-poem book in a box recently. It was in sad shape. Such is the fate of much-loved books.

So what was the first poem I ever wrote? I have no idea.

Writing

Football

Sally3 Comments

Just to be clear, this post has nothing to do with altruism.

Altruism is the prompt for JusJoJan.

True story: I don’t follow American football. Not even a little. Honestly, I’ve never really understood the game. It looks like one people-pile after another. They talk about downs, which are different from people-piles, although it sure does look like a lot of people go down in a people-pile. Then there’s the whole scoring thing: some things earn 6 points, other things earn 3, and still others earn 1, or is it 2. I don’t know.

I coached swimming. The first person to touch the wall won.

My kids played soccer. If they kicked the ball in the goal, they got one point.

Easy and straight-forward, right?

I knew my son and his family were watching some Buffalo Bills game on Saturday night, so I half-watched about 5 minutes of it. Some guy caught the ball, but another guy ripped the ball right out of his arms. The whole thing didn’t look fair. I later told my brother about it, saying (again) that I really don’t understand football and wondered why people watch it.

“You need to watch this,” he said, and he directed me to a video of a guy running back-back-back, pushed by a bunch of guys from the other team, and he throws the ball — a long long pass to a guy waiting in the endzone and they scored.

Running backwards AND throwing accurately impresses me.

All this goes to show that an impressive bit of athleticism impresses me.

Is it altruistic?

No. The fact that I can’t easily find a video that shows this shows how UNaltruistic American sports are.

It’s all about the money, right?

These things happen in a vacuum accesible only to those who sell their souls to something.

I did. I watched some inane advertisement to see that video.

So now the fact remains that I am NOT a football fan, and it has nothing to do with understanding the sport. It has more to do with the $$-wall around the whole thing.