Life Stories

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“Have You Ever Put a Worm on a Hook?”

Tonight, in my almost nightly conversation with my former Alabama neighbor “Dear Hellen” (aka Miss Hellen!), we went from topic to topic as we often do. She tells me about her day and I decide what to tell her about mine…tonight…she mentioned the new neighbors now have ten chickens that free range and go in and out of the coop I built. That makes me do a happy dance! For many reasons. I wish I could write funny stories about...

Spontaneous Decisions to Clean Things Up

As I brushed my teeth tonight I glanced around my bathroom and for some reason, my eyes and thoughts turned to a bar of soap that I’ve had for nearly twenty-five years. It’s a beautiful bar of soap. It still smells like soap. It somehow moved and followed me from Webb Road to Alexandria Drive to Nottingham Road to Modaus Road to County Road 460 and now resides in my bathroom on Davidburg Road. Many years ago, my young family...

A Bride’s “Flowers of Joy”

(This piece is X-posted from my studio newsletter blog as it also contains an amount of personal contemplations…) __________ The saving of a bride’s bouquet is nothing new and there are a number of ways to do that, depending on desired result, the type of flowers and especially, cost. When I was first married on June 1, 1985 in a very simple wedding (like many young couples then and now, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together, so-to-speak) someone...

Standing Up For KAREN

I was in 7th grade, and a mousy white girl. I was in some type of elective where me and six other girls, seven in total, were sent out of a classroom into a communal area to work on/practice some type of play we were to create. Our group consisted of two black girls and five white girls. Our names/demographics in alphabetical order were: Ann (white)Bonita (black)Eileen (white)Jenny (white)Rosie (white)Sandy (black)Valerie (white) Not that this matters, per se. But these...

Dreamscapes

I’ve always been fascinated by some of the dreams I awake from, going on back to high school days, and one dream I had in first grade that I still recall, in part. Most of my dreamlife (when I remember) is filled with intricate plots, imagery, twists and turns, people, places, patterns, symbolic metaphor scenes (at times). In my dreams over the years I have flown by flapping my arms, swam with ease in deep water (I cannot swim), and...

She Made Her Own Shroud

Mary Dalton (Williams) would be my maternal great great great grandmother. I’ve been reading through various family history in connection with some of my writings here. I was contemplating that one of the things my great grandmother (Margaret Jane Kennedy Carter) most recalled when she gave contributions to this extensive collection of genealogy and stories, was that her grandmother made her own shroud. Out of curiosity I did a quick search on making your own shroud to see if it...