Always "on"...

larry

oooo -- not lately my friend, but at least dreaming a little.  and lavonne, i don't know why i dreamed yarns when lately i've been cutting up fabrics/yardage and old clothes into strips and crocheting them into bowls to hold peanuts and chips . . . maybe my subconscious wants me to put away my scissors and go back to yarn?

Good morning,
     and a very fine morning it is, having been up since four by my own choosing without illness. . . but then, it’s been so very long since I bothered to write, I see I have two 'since' without 'sense' jumbled in pollywog.
     I, too, wish you the best of the season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and throughout each and every year.  May every day - be the lighting of candles (scented or not, as preference should not be required) 
     So very droll I think, “required” I mean . . . it reminds me of shoes, shirts, and choking a Windsor knot serving idiots.  Wandered off I did, all those years tending bar . . . and on a personal note - it makes me shiver with detoxification as I’ve all but given it up this past year or so.  You see, when they removed the tumor, I felt they might have taken enough brain cells without any more sauce, so I deadpanned it out. lmao!
     I’ve all but closed the summer house, the fields are empty and harvest stored, so we’re back to winter in town.  Outskirts of course, you know how I am about closed-up. . . I simply can’t breathe. . .
     but I was thinking of you this morning over my “cough-fee” recalling a bit of nonsense once penned and smiled.  I’ll leave you with the following, another excerpt from a piece “you” inspired- I've had some dreaming myself lately along with crochet, but then, I only have yarn and no scissors. I've never been that creative. lol.
   
"If I but had
a thumbnail full,
a clipping of sorts
to light my path-

WELL…
that would be
you…
no matches
required."
    
 . . . . alll my love to you and yours . . always, N  

*the absolute spark - 2005
  

And a merry march of moons to you, Nora.

milner

I come to add some thoughts to my month of Jane and find such warmth and goodness from you, Nora, and wonder How in the world I failed to read them earlier or send you [as milner has] "a merry march of moons" ... Now Christmas is two arm-lengths away.  I can put my finger on the day if I stand and reach my arm out and press my prints into the center of that square with 25.  But I don't.  It's enough to see that patch of holiday; I needn't touch it. 

Same goes for the llama I bought yesterday.  And the beehive.  And the flock of chicks.  The seedlings for the trees, the suckling pig.  That pretty much wraps up my shopping for the family.  If the teen grandkids are less than excited with the card informing them a pig's been given in their name . . . I'll knit them happy socks and wrap them each a navel orange in colored foil for their mantel stockings.  I know Riggs will love the bees, even on a card; at 7 any winged thing, all crawly many-legged things will do; oh, and Pokeman.  [He'll get over the fact that the card has bees on it and no game points or hidden skills.]  Riley will, at 4, probably sound out the writing on her card--she is so bright, so smart; I hope she smiles at the chicks and understands a little.  The llama is for Nick.  And the trees are for the parents of these grandkids of mine. 

www.heifer.org/catalog is the store where i shopped this year.

I’ve been looking at photos taken at Grand Central Station, lens angled up
to try (with a tool hardly the size of a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s) to capture
the scope of just how grand Grand Central is.  What I managed doesn’t make
the place big so much as it makes passers-by small.

I wonder if I’m caught by other people, if I hold digital space in equally inconsequential ways, without dimension, near invisible, even at the moment of lens entrapment, as if in walking across those cavernous floors we made no sound and sighs did not sigh in any audible way, and all that was marble wasn’t marble, wasn’t even glossy paper, but cyber-digits—pixels, not real.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, scrutinizing the stride of some stranger on their way to somewhere other than where they were.  Africa comes to mind and old B&W movies where the natives did not cotton to having their pictures taken.  Or was that the Old West and Cheyenne People that feared their spirits stolen via portraiture?  Or aboriginal Australians?  Does it matter what continent?  Maybe.  I can blame every photo ever taken that contains an image of me for my lack of spirit. 

I’ve been robbed.  Systematically diminished by tools I barely know how to use.

Here's a little poem for Nick.
I was crazy about A A Milne when I was a little kid.
Needs a lot of tweaking, fixing the syllables, meter, etc. as well as a few more verses but here it is anyway:

Adventure on a carpet sea

Five mice set off in a leather shoe
with a hankie for a sail.
Adventure, they said, was dead ahead
but they did take a thimble to bail.

(Shoes are notoriously leaky, you know.)

Their rudder was a butter knife
fastened with a lace.
With hat pin swords in case of war
they'd administer the coup de grace

 (They might be chased by the cat.)

They rowed all day on the nursery floor
till the littlest began to cry.
The Captain, who was the oldest,
began to harrumph and sigh.

(After all, they were hungry for their tea.)

The captain ordered the sail hauled down
from the no 2 pencil mast.
They pushed the shoe back under the bed
just as Nanny hurried past.

(Pencils and hankies do not belong on the floor.)

Over buttered scone crumbs they giggled and laughed
of their adventure on the carpet sea
Except, of course, the little one
who fell asleep at tea.

(There are NO naps on the high seas!)

Very cute
but make that clotted cream scones.

e

yum!

What a fun treat!  I'll share this one with my daughter so she can share it with nick.  I wrote some juvenile poems a few years ago, thought I'd get a bunch put together for my grandbabies then, never happened though.  This is one.

Hear the Moon Coo-Coo

Gramma!  Gramma! Where’ve you been?

To the moon and back again!

How’d you get there?  Can we go?

Climbed a ladder, don’t you know!

Can we, Gramma?  Can we, please,
climb with you and taste the cheese?

Taste the cheese?  You silly loves,
no cheese up there, just snow-white doves.
Listen . . . can you hear them now?
Coo-coo, coo-cooing to the cow?

Gramma?  Can you bring one back?

What?  And let the moon go black?
Old moon, she needs them every one
to hold her high for Brother Sun
and mirror back her feathered grace
on nights like this for our home space.

Listen, Riggs, and Riley, too . . . hear them now?

Coo-coo, coo-coo!

You silly, Gramma, that’s just you!

Lynn, This is extraordinary. I read it aloud to Sandi and she's made me print it to take to school. You need to put these together. The market for children is huge. I know that sounds commercial, but this is exceptional...

Yes, exceptional! I'd love to read more!

oh my.

What you should really do first is record them for the kids then publish them for everyone else!

I'd forgotten all about the recording thing -- audacity, wasn't it?  seems like I finally figured out how to do it, with some success, and then I left for Santa Barbara again and forgot everything I'd learned.  Will have to check into that again . . .

The one that follows is something I wrote for one of my daughter's friends -- she had three wonderful high-spirited girls under the age of six when I sent this to her a few years back.  The only thing I can say for sure is that these were written in fun and most likely need a lot of work. 

The Tumble Sisters

The Tumble sisters' most favorite thing
Is jumping jacks on Saturn's ring

Except for Mondays of mid-July
When they like to gobble-eat pies in the sky

Or January Tuesdays when they open their clinic
And fix the broken friends found there in it

Like Erica Wee-Flea's tiny broken leg
Or Claudia Canary's too-soon cracking egg

Or the itty-bitty motor for the spinning mechanisms
Charlotte needs to weave nets for dew-drop prisms

But May Wednesday's are pretty special, too
When the busy Tumbles help Bumble honey-up his stew

And Thursdays, every Thursday, through October's glow
The sisters giggle through the wiggle of leaves letting go

How they tickle them color, blush them oranges and reds
And drift them down to join others in fine-mulched beds

Two Fridays of December they keep for sewing flakes
The other two (as girls will do) are specially for their skates

They circle-eight and pirouette out on the frozen pond
To the songs of bull-frogs in ear muffs they have donned

Still, September's Saturdays, the firsts and thirds at least
Will find the Tumble Sisters wishing for a grumpy beast

A beast with mangled, tangled hair, any beast at all
Who needs a comb run through new lengths of fur for Fall

But the favorite Any-Day-Thing of these Tumble wish-ters
Is jumping jacks on Saturn's ring and simply being sisters