family · Grief · poetry

Ode to a Plastic Box

Sally2 Comments

My brother’s ashes
(I only really looked at them once
So my memory may not be accurate)
Were in a plastic bag
In a plastic box.

The bag was held shut
With a twist-tie.
I like to think it was green,
The color of life.

The rectangular box —
Neither orange
Nor brown
More the color of a dead autumn leaf —
Snapped shut
Like a pocket watch
Safely holding time inside.

It stood upright on the mantle
For at least year.

I whispered to it sometimes,
I miss you, Stewart. 
But he didn’t answer.
He smiled placidly at me
From the photograph
Beside the box.

We placed it in the Columbarium —
It seems like only yesterday —
But it was rainy
And spring
Not frosty
And fall

Tomorrow
The man will bring a new plastic box
Because my mother wouldn’t have wanted an urn
Jim joked about Cool-Whip containers
My mother would have liked that reuse
But I suppose it’s undignified
So she’ll have the box
That comes free
With cremation

She always appreciated a bargain.

This piece was originally written 11/18/2015 — two weeks after my mother died. I guess I never posted it because I found it in my draft folder while I was searching the word “miss” — Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt.

Yes, miss is there — “I miss you, Stewart.”

I had looked at Linda’s prompt last night thinking maybe it would simmer during the night, like my mother’s soups used to on the woodstove. She made the best soup. She really did.

In the wee hours of the morning, the only miss I was thinking on was how I was missing sleep. I suppose I could have written a post on that.

Instead, I decided to give myself a hand by searching drafts. I have over 300 of them! This one hit home because I just had a conversation with a good friend (and this is the Stream of Consciousness part of the post.) It went something like this:

Friend: I suppose I should check on (insert person’s name). Her husband’s dying. He’s probably gone.

Me: You should definitely do that. Especially if you want to go the funeral.

[Note: he had served in Vietnam with the man who was dying.]

Friend: I don’t go to funerals.

Me: Even for someone you’ve known so long?

Friend: I don’t go to funerals. I only go to Celebrations.

I confess. I was judgy after that conversation, but reading this piece about the plastic boxes, I was reminded that grief is so individual.

We, as Americans, don’t have just one way to deal with death. Some have elaborate affairs and big funerals. Some celebrate the life. Some cremate. Some bury.

It seems to be a mix of honoring the person who died, and those left behind saying good-bye. I feel like my family did both with funerals.

And it’s Father’s Day on Sunday.

I miss my father.

family · Life · poetry

Coat of Many Colors

Sally4 Comments

Middle son put three batteries
Down bathroom sink drain (C size fit)
Then squeezed toothpaste, added water —
A disaster! I laughed at it

Then there was the time when some sons
Dammed the creek, flooded the backyard
Learning experience, thought I
As I squished through lawn water-scarred

Mud-smeared faces, markered-up arms
Colored on walls even have their charms
We moms take many things in stride
Rather than sound childhood alarms

One daughter cut her bangs real short
Before a family wedding
I shook my head, bemoaned a bit
Not seeing where this was heading

Scissors wielded by this girl
Led me to rethink and relook
’cause next she cut her dresses up
After reading one picture book

Dolly’s Coat of Many Colors
A lovely heart-warming story
Of a patchwork coat made with love
Became more than allegory

My child wanted to experience
To become one with that sweet tale
Seeing all those cut-up dresses
Is the one time I wanted to wail

This is my response to this week W3 prompt. PoW Nancy challenged us to “think about a moment in your life when something truly mattered. Perhaps it was a great success, a hard-earned accomplishment, or a memorable disaster that taught you something important. Maybe you organized a major event, won a competition, survived a family vacation gone wrong, or confidently attempted a home-improvement project that ended in chaos.“

Write about an occasion when you soared, stumbled, or did a little of both.

Guidelines:

  • Use one or more 4-line stanzas;
  • Keep each line to 8 syllables;
  • Maximum length: 20 lines; (Sorry!)
  • Humor, reflection, triumph, embarrassment, and self-deprecation are all welcome.

As always, have fun and make the memory come alive for your readers.

The joys of being a mother

poetry

Imagine

Sally8 Comments

what is it that music is trying to say
amid all the nonsense that’s happening today
amid words in all-caps, cage-fights, and tarps
imagine instead the sound of one harp

loudspeakers blare drumbeat and rage
fighters flex and spit before entering the cage
mercenary warriors with no noble cause
imagine instead one long silent pause

earsplitting raucous deafening noise
trash-talking nonsense like schoolyard boys
primal grunts, explosive, while delivering a strike
imagine instead gentle music, birdlike

music can stir us, music can calm
make us laugh, make us cry, act as a balm
instead of a claw, instaed of a fight
imagine sweet music to help us unite

This is my response to this week’s W3 prompt. Poet of the Week Artie Camenzind challenged us to use Mary Oliver’s poem Drifting as inspiration. He specified two lines we could use as a starting point.

  • “my delicious walk in the rain”
  • “what it is that music is trying to say”

The news this week has been a cacophony. More than once I’ve intentionally put on happy music to shift my thinking.

Faith · family · Life

Growing Pains

Sally1 Comment

The RDP prompt for today is kindness. I searched my draft folder and found this incomplete post that had been written in October 2011.

When I read it this morning, I remembered some of the difficult circumstances of that time. It was years before my brother died, years before I was helping care for my mother, years and years before my father died.

Just because I wasn’t dealing with death, it doesn’t mean life was easy. I had my hands full in other ways. My children at that point ranged in age from 7 to 26. I was homeschooling two, had one in public school, some in college, some working, one married.

Without further ado, here is the unnamed post which I will call “Growing Pains.” If it feels incomplete, maybe it is.

One of the most profound things I heard Andrew Peterson say was not at Hutchmoot, but at a concert in Cortland.  He was talking about his books, the Wingfeather Saga. (Note: he was still in the process of writing the series. The final book wasn’t published until 2014.)  I didn’t write this down or record it so it may not be verbatim, but I think it’s fairly close.  He said,

The main character in these stories is a boy named Janner.  When I started writing, I saw the man he would become, but I knew that he would have to go through many trials and difficult situations to become that man.  I knew that he would have to suffer some terrible things…

I have been thinking about some of the difficulties my own children have had to endure.  They are rather small in comparison to Janner’s battles with Fangs and Gnag the Nameless, but they shape my children nonetheless.

And then I started thinking about that whole idea conversely.  If my children didn’t suffer anything, how would they turn out?

For instance, in order to develop perseverance, they need to stick with difficult situations and work them out.  If I allow them to quit every time the going was hard or not fun or required something of them, they would become the kind of adults who always take the easy path, who quit, who are unreliable.

In order for them to develop compassion, they need experience some hard times and also experience unwarranted kindness to them.  I imagine that the guy in the Good Samaritan story who had been attacked by robbers didn’t later cross to the other side of the road to avoid helping someone who was different from him, although without his experience, he may very well have looked the other way instead of helping.

To develop patience, they need some annoyances.

To develop peace, they need some turmoil.

Music

Sunny M’s

Sally2 Comments

Someone somewhere has compiled a list of daily prompts. Please raise your hand if you have.

Or, send me a post that lists them all.

I know, I know — the list changes all the time.

One of my favorites, The Unicorn Challenge, stopped last year and I wanted to cry. I had a rhythm to my week that included that, W3 (The Skeptics Kaddish), and Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Once The Unicorn Challenge ended, I felt like I had tripped while marching and couldn’t get back in step.

I’m trying hard to find a rhythm again. I search my reader looking for something to write about. That’s how I’ve stumbled — more than once — on posts that involve sharing music. I think it’s MMMM — Monday’s Music Moves Me. (I found it on John Holton’s The Sound of One Hand Typing.)

Here’s what I can piece together. The prompt is put out on Sunday (or Monday) and runs for a week. The hosts are: Marie, Cathy, Alana, and Stacy. This week’s prompt is to share music about long sunny days.

I’m an early morning person so sunrises are my thing. “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles was the first song that came to my mind:

The second was the first movement (Sunrise) of Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite. You actually hear the sunrise. No lie.

The third was not a sunrise song but a homesick Scottish song about heartbreak, resilience, strength, and hope. Scottish skies are famously gray, so sunshine breaking through represents optimism.

Hopefully I did this M&M thing right.

family · Grief · Life

Terrible

Sally6 Comments

The RDP prompt for today is twelve. I searched my draft folder and found this incomplete post that had last been edited in February 2016. My mother died in November 2015. I wrote so many posts following her death. I think it was my way of untangling the knot—and it helped.

This post was never completed. When I read it this morning, a flood of memories engulfed me.

Here’s the post which I called “Terrible.” At the end, I’ll try to complete it — though the 10 intervening years surely have changed where I was going with the original.

THE ORIGINAL

The one nurse said, “Well, I guess you’ve never seen a dying person before.”

She was matter-of-fact. Tart. A little smug. Definitely too cheerful.

The other nurse was different. Compassionate. Caring. Gentle.

“Can I do anything for you?” she asked every time she checked on my mother. “Can I get you anything?”

With twelve hour shifts for the nurses, we mostly saw only these two.

When I would ask the first nurse

THE 2026 COMPLETION

When I would ask the first nurse for anything, she did her job, but with so little compassion that I ended up avoiding her. Truth be told, today I can’t even picture her.

Forgettable — that’s what she was. I’m glad I didn’t spend time dwelling on her.

What I remember about my mother’s final hospital stay are definitely the kindnesses:

The other nurse bringing food in for us.

The doctor who called a family meeting. She began with these words, “Mom is very sick, and she isn’t going to get better.” She went on to talk about the fact that modern medicine could keep her alive, but we should think about what was best for her. One of my brothers still refers to her as “the doctor that told us to kill Mom.” It’s that dark famiy sense of humor that we have. I have no doubt in my mind that it was the right decision.

A group of women from the church came to the hospital room and sang to my mother. They had all been in the choir with her, and now they sang for her. It still brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. Out-of-tune warbly voices of older women joined in some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard.

My siblings and I gathered around the bed, each telling my mother that we loved her. My youngest brother told my mother that it was okay for her to go. I had heard that it can be important to say that, and he said it, all the while rubbing her foot as he stood at that end of the bed.

I feel pity for that nurse whom I had labeled “Terrible.” Her words, I guess you’ve never seen a dying person before, are so hollow.

I don’t know what prompted them, but today, I would take her hands in mine, and say, “I hope that some day, you can gather with your family around the bed of someone you love very much, and you can be with them when they pass. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Terrible vs. beautiful. I’ll remember the beautiful.

Life

Coincidence or Providence

Sally1 Comment

I have a friend who can list off coincidence after coincidence in his life. He tells me stories of stopping at a gas station in Nowhere New Mexico and meeting a grade school classmate that he grew up with in New Jersey.

Or the time he was hiking in New Zealand and ran into someone he had worked with on Mt. Rainier in Washington state.

Or of running into a woman he first met in Germany on an exchange program in his teens. Running into her twenty years later. In America. By chance.

It seems to happen to him. Former students, former co-workers, former teachers, distance relatives all seem to show up in faraway at unplanned times.

I think he has a memory for people, plus he is very outgoing.

So is it coincidence? Or is it good memory and a lack of fear?

Plus he would never credit God’s hand as playing a role in any of it.

For me, I just read the other morning something Augustine said about looking at chicken tracks in the mud of the hen yard, and how it looks like chaos, but if you look at those criss-crossed nonsensical paths through the eyes of faith, you can see Providence.

Is the fact that one hen gets a slew of tasty bugs scratching in the hen yard, while another hen seems to miss all the good ones in the same hen yard a matter of skill, or coincidence, or Providence, or sheer luck?

Life is such a mystery.

This is my response to Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt: coincidence.

Life

Sewing With Burlap

Sally1 Comment

The good thing about burlap is that it is inexpensive.

The bad thing about burlap is — oh, where to begin?!

Burlap wears its flaws on its proverbial shirtsleeve, although I shudder to think how uncomfortable a burlap shirt would be.

It is coarse and crotchety, like an old man who has worked hard his whole life and never been been appreciated for a single thing he has done.

It frays easily and often.

It does not like to be straightened.  Lesson #1 in 4-H sewing decades ago included straightening the fabric.  Burlap is just ornery enough to say no.  It sort of looks like it is willing to comply, and then, BAM, an in-your-face refusal when the cutting begins.

Despite all that, burlap is quite lovable — especially if you’re partial to cantankerous types.

I’m sitting here, staring at various burlaps, trying to think how I can get along with them.  How can I coax this rough piece of fabric into something beautiful?

IMG_4499[1]

In my first attempt, I lined it with a cheery cotton print.  The burlap lost its burlap-ness.  It was like taking a hobo and dressing him in a business suit.  What makes a hobo appealing is his relatively carefree life, hopping trains, bumming food, answering to no one, but a businessman has to present himself just so, and answer to all sorts of people.

No, I was glad the lined burlap cone was nixed. It was too incongruous.

DSC02204

My next attempt was a simple burlap sack.  Simple. Hah!  To make a casing for a ribbon to go through was nearly impossible. And then, I didn’t cut a long enough piece of ribbon.  And then I kept wondering if jute would be better than ribbon.  And then I just got mad at the whole darn thing because it refused to look like what I had pictured in my head.

I had an idea for my next attempt.  I would work with the fray-happy fabric. I saw it on Pinterest.

Except… I’m pretty sure all those wonderful Pinterest ideas require fingers, and, as it turns out, I’m only equipped with thumbs. Ugh.

The more I fuddled around with the burlap, the more I saw this as life.  Things don’t always turn out the way we hope.  Plan A becomes Plan B becomes Plan C.

And still we remain hopeful. Still we try again.

[I decided to started searching the Ragtag Daily Prompt word in my draft folder so I could relook at some of the things written years ago. Today’s word was HOPEFUL — and this post came up. This post was originally written in August 2014 as we were getting ready for son #2’s wedding.]

aging · poetry

Hickory Dickory

Sally16 Comments

Hickory dickory dock
Time is a melting clock
The hourglass sand
Slips through my hand
Hickory dickory dock

Hickory dickory dock
The windows need new caulk
Body falling apart!
When did this start?!
Hickory dickory dock

Hickory dickory dock
It’s getting harder to walk
No pep in these steps
Need some vodka and Schweppes
Hickory dickory dock

Hickory dickory dock
Did somebody just knock?
Dark spectre with sickle
Well, this is a pickle!
Hickory

dickory

dock


This is my response to this week’s W3 Prompt: write a poem inspired by a nursery rhyme.

I had so many ideas — Georgy-Porgy being taken down by the Me-Too movement. Mary being served a delicious lamb dinner and later finding out why her lamb had stopped following her to school. Three blind mice — what kind of mischief could they blindly cause? I settled, however, on Hickory dickory dock.

The picture was created by moi using ChatGPT