Home Repair

April 4, 2022April 5, 20221 Comment

How many times
Can a body be cut open?
How many times
Can that body bounce back?
What is the limit—six times? Seven, eight?

A body is so much more than just a body—
It’s a home.
It can grow other bodies,
Shelter them from harm,
Sustain them.
A body is a temple,
Made sacred by the presence of a soul.

But a body cannot be
Continuously sliced, sampled,
Diced, drilled into.
There is always pain attendant.
A body can only withstand so much.

Some pain never goes entirely away.

Sleep Away

April 3, 2022April 5, 20221 Comment

Sleepytime buds. 🙂

It’s a beautiful day to be curled
Up beneath a cozy blanket with a
Good book in hand
And a mug of tea at my side.

But it’s been the same
Every day this week,
And I am so very tired.

I slip so easily into
Morpheus’ arms,
Regardless of hour,
Regardless of obligations,
And I linger much longer
Than I ought.

I cannot help it.
No matter how long I sleep,
It’s never enough.
Morpheus is impossible to resist,
And I would prefer not to most of the time.

Time to Change

April 2, 2022April 5, 20221 Comment

March might feel more like
Spring if it didn’t cram four
Seasons into one.

I miss the April
Showers of my youth, but not
The more recent floods.

Will these new April
Showers bring Mayflowers? Or
Will they bring more mud?

I long to witness
Springtime fieldwork once again.
Impossible now.

The Zephyr

April 1, 2022April 5, 2022Leave a comment

Well, it sure has been a while, hasn’t it? I can’t believe I’ve taken this long a break from blogging, but it feels like I’ve had so much on my plate lately, whether or not I actually have. Pero, así es la vida, cariño.

So in order to help me get my blogging habit back on track, I’m going to start NaPoWriMo off right with a free verse poem on one of my favorite topics: Iowa’s crazy weather. I hope you like it!

Dying evergreens stand
Tall in the gale outside
My windows, but
Their remaining needles
Pay the price
For decades of fortitude.

Will I have the strength
To withstand the coming storms?
Or will I,
Like my home’s failing windbreak,
One day bow to the Zephyr,
Exhausted and broken-backed
From my struggle?

It’s the climb

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021Leave a comment

Well, November sure was a blur, wasn’t it? I think this is the first year I’ve failed at NaBloPoMo. Well, the first year I’ve signed up to do it and failed – the college years don’t count. 😉😄

It bothers me to start things and then not finish them, but I think I just needed to focus on other things in November, like catching up on the sleep I haven’t been getting. Not that focusing on my sleep deprivation improved things any. It probably made them worse. On the bright side, I’ve been doing a lot of writing… 🙃

I used to love the holidays, but it seems like the older I get, the harder it is to find that Christmas spirit. This year, for whatever reason, it’s been unusually difficult. Maybe it’s because this whole year has been unusually difficult, maybe it’s because I’m once again in the midst of a writerly crisis of confidence – I don’t know.

I do know that I’ve had “The Christmas Waltz” stuck in my head most of the day and I am super sick of it. Maybe that’ll be the next Christmas song I parody…

My post editor has assured me that the last time I edited this post was at 11:40 p.m. on December 7 (“a date which will live in infamy”), 2020. Clearly, not finishing things I’ve started bothers me less than I want to admit, or I’d have posted this already.

Can I just blame it on 2020? I think I’ll just blame it on 2020.

😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁

At any rate, 2021 hasn’t seemed a whole lot better yet, but I’m holding out hope. I mean, things HAVE to get better, right?

Of course they do.

Anyway, I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to watching this video of Amanda Gorman reading “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration last week, and it gave me chills. This is the sort of writing I aspire to produce: writing that speaks to people, that says something important about who we are and who we want to be. If you haven’t yet seen this reading, do yourself a favor and check it out.

And now, because it’s my birthday and I have the house to myself, I’m going to go and read more poems (and maybe revise a few of my own). Here’s to accomplishing more goals in 2021!

G.O.A.T.

November 11, 20202 Comments

So because I’m chronically behind when it comes to watching TV, I just finished watching the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time special tonight. If you haven’t seen it yet (even though it aired in January), I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that I was pleased with who won.

But watching this particular special just days after hearing of Alex Trebek’s passing was particularly bittersweet for me. I grew up watching Jeopardy!, and Alex Trebek is synonymous with it for me (and millions of others, I’m sure). While I’m sure his replacement, whoever that may be, will do a fine job…

Magic nostalgia time

November 10, 2020Leave a comment

I’ve been working on a poem lately about how different this summer was compared to summers past. And as I was pondering exactly what I was trying to get at with my poem, this came to me:

Summer is a magic time, full of nostalgia for the bygone days of my youth. But as summer fades inevitably into fall, I find myself growing wistful, for summer lasts but a short time, and it seems to grow shorter with each passing year.

Covid time has transformed ordinary seasonal longing for carefree summer fun into a yearning of the acutest kind; I crave a true return to normal life, the kind that will not be possible for some time. With fall fading fast into winter and case counts rapidly rising, it’s hard to hang onto hope.

I wish I could cast all my doubts and fears aside as easily as if I were tossing an anchor over the starboard bow; I wish I could pluck hope from the lake as easily as master anglers pull fish from the deep; I wish I could read the world’s future in my cards.

But since I can’t do any of that, I’ll keep writing about it all instead.

Books!

November 9, 2020November 10, 20204 Comments

I saw this on Facebook over the weekend and was intrigued:

Once I’d deciphered as many of these titles as I could (and it wasn’t all of them), naturally I had to quiz my husband. I figured out one of the ones I’d missed as I was reading it to him, and he figured out one of the ones I’d had trouble with. And while I haven’t read number 15 yet, this alternate title (and Seymour’s guess) made me laugh.

How about you – can you name them all?

Writer’s life

November 8, 2020November 10, 20202 Comments

I’ve been working on revising a novel lately, and these made me laugh:

I relate to that first one so, so much, and I’m pretty sure this entire series falls squarely into category 3 (aka a bit feral still). But I also kinda relate to the second one, because I enjoy handwriting my drafts (and usually, my revisions), and I write mainly in cursive. While I have enough practice at cursive (and handwriting things in general) that I can write both quickly and legibly in both cursive and print, sometimes it’s easy to mistake one letter for another when glancing quickly at something. 🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Then again, I haven’t summoned lemons when I meant to summon demons, so there’s that… 😂

Hibernation station

November 7, 2020November 8, 20201 Comment

Like frozen rivers,
I am alive underneath
My own icy shell.

I feel like I’ve been hibernating for the past three years. Or maybe not hibernating – maybe hibernating is what I need to do now after the craziness that was the past three years.

I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here.

I’ve been cleaning things up lately, trying to get organized. You wouldn’t know it if you peeked in my room, or if you peeked in my office. I’ve been organizing my music, most of which is stored on my computer. But because I’m old-school, I also have about a thousand CDs (which is probably a conservative estimate). I have so many duplicate songs as a result that it’s not good if my iPod malfunctions and just starts playing every song on it in order.

I don’t know what its beef with my car is, but it needs to get over its pretentious self.

I’m also cleaning out my email. I’m a bit of an email hoarder, but mostly I think my current lack of Gmail storage has more to do with the ridiculous number of pictures I have stored in my Drive than the equally ridiculous number of emails I don’t want to delete.

I’d love to just stop moving, to hibernate, to let my everything rest. But instead, here I am – calm on the surface and paddling like hell underneath.

I’m not sure if any of this makes any sense because I’m really tired, but maybe the making-sense part is less important than the having-written part. Since I’ve done at least one of those things, I’m going to call this a win.