Awakened from a dead sleep by thunder and lightning displays. Clearing sky, now, and bright moonlight. Looking forward to rain showers and more thunderstorms, later today (Sunday). Quiet, now. Wondering if I can get back to sleep, tonight.
Inspiration for today’s poem: For some reason, all of our cocker spaniels, beginning with Ladd, have hunted down May beetles/June bugs, thinking them to be some sort of toys. Forever having to rescue the poor things from the backsteps lights and being batted about by puppy paws. Ladd also liked to catch crickets in his mouth and wonder at their bouncing around on his tongue; at least he let them go…or lost them, when he spit them out to stare at them.
There was a girl I hung around with during our junior high school years. Her name was Carol Brown. According to our senior year class notes, she also enjoyed reading. I remember her face and name distinctly, but the time frame was middle school. Her face among our HS senior portraits looks only vaguely familiar. None of them are well-known to me, but a nagging voice says that this was one I should have remembered. Continued to spend time with. Shared books and thoughts, triumphs and defeats. Consolations. Somewhere I left those memories…those years between have vanished. When did I quit being who I was? When did I become who I now am, instead? Or was it they who changed…left me behind?
photos on the page
names and two-line high school quips
one picture stands out
Every night, my husband wishes me “Sweet Dreams!” To which I occasionally respond with the wished-for contents of my night’s dreaming. And so, tonight …
“Sweet Dreams of Caterpillars”
My caterpillars are green and smooth and sport a little horn in back that curls forward. As they saunter out, left feet, right feet, then left again, their horns sway up and down, and back and forth, marching to the different beats of all too many drummers.
Remembering my mother and father, who also inspired this poem, written for them in 1987:
“Born of Love”
written for my parents
You taught me how to stand apart,
to understand and be myself.
You gave me the courage to walk alone
when none would join me.
You showed me how to look through words
into the worlds that others live in.
You taught me how to listen
with my heart and dare to make
no judgments
but those born of love.
I find it interesting, how different the topics are for my online journal from the paper journal that I have returned to since the first of 2018. Things that I would only post, if at all, on my Patchwork Prose site, which still suffers little to no traffic in any given month. (I have not brought myself to write there much.)
I suspect that I am more secretive than I’d thought. Or, more accurately, how much a “private person” I’ve turned out to be, simply because I do not talk much about externals. Because I don’t live in the externals.
Often, a “thing” or “experience” seems not objectively real until I write it down somewhere. Or relive it to myself in words so that it will stick. I have found it interesting that I can go back through memory and reimage, should other events overtake me, and so file a happening in words in my mind or on paper afterwards. Not always, but sometimes. Enough.
When I look back through the written journals before I shred them (I have journaled since my high school years), I find that a lot of what I have puzzled over/pondered, surprises me. Looks unfamiliar. The same is true of my online journals. Excepting, perhaps, the poems that I write.
We have a lot of rabbits in our yard and the surrounding neighborhood, which we appreciate, since they provide a lot of exercise for our dogs. First thing in the morning, they are eager to go outside and check for rabbits who’ve stayed out eating past the softer light of sunrise. They have such fun! Especially when the rabbits run off in different directions…or taunt the dogs by making an extra detour around the garden shed before slipping out through the fence.
Quilted Poetry 