Promise

A vow

the dead of a cold sky

above still silence

fades from memory as

small buds of

fecund greenery burst

toward the

citrine in blue

until

All fades away

Gone once more



Yeah, that's all I got in the lobby of Carmax, while my son kept trying to climb into the display models.  

This weekend's prompt is to write 33 words exactly inspired by the following photo project by Eirik Solheim.  Each slice of the photo compilation is a different day of the year, taken from the same location.

Here's the still shot:

Darkness in the Forest

Source: trifectawritingchallenge.com via Tina on Pinterest

Here are some photos to inspire you.  Choose one and give us a metaphor or simile to help describe what you see.  Make your analogy 33 words or less, and make it clever or witty or unusual enough to grab our attention.  You are free to use these images on your own blogs, if you like.

The enormous, ancient tree loomed over me, Cthulhu rising from the depths of hell, my horrific sins laid bare to the blackness of its maw, greedy tentacles already grasping at my forsaken soul.



Too much?  I've been in an odd mood lately.  Sorry.

WOE: The Secret Tree

Write On Edge prompt: A little Robert Frost:

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

Source: neverlandfound.blogspot.com via Tina on Pinterest

Secrets poison the soul.  A secret will crawl into a person, before they are even aware that it is there.  It will curl around the heart, and let nothing else in.  Secrets, if they are big enough, build walls between people, separating them from each other.  Too many secrets isolate a person and keep them from their loved ones.  Humans were never meant to keep secrets.

Yet the world is full of secrets. No matter who or how high in the world, there is likely  a secret inside.  Maybe a small secret, like a brownie filched from an untended plate.  Maybe a big secret, like stolen money.  Some have only a single secret, hidden away in the darkness.  Others have many, many secrets, festering in the endless recesses that exist in the human heart. 

Those secrets bring people to me, pulling them inexorably to stand underneath my canopy before they reach the end of their lives.  They wait, staring up into the branches, wondering if they have the courage to give up what they have held so close for so long.  It can take days to unfurl every tentacle of a secret, but it must be done.  Secrets poison the soul, their walls hindering the passage to the afterlife.  No soul can enter the Heavenly Presence stained, and those who cannot give up their secrets remain outside the doors until they come to me. 

So the people come, and they whisper to me, as if we were familiar confidants.   Some place their cheek on my bark, and hug my strength to them as they let go of what has kept them apart from the Creator. Once spoken, their secrets rise above them, floating into the air, pulled in among the leaves and branches.  I take those secrets and weave them into new buds, tendrils of new growth.   When I have reached the end of my span, when my leaves have fallen to dust and my branches turned black with the rot of the dead, all of the secrets will be absorbed into the earth, and a new sapling will emerge, to take my place.

Secrets poison the soul, but they also give the earth new life. 

Brighter Days

This is a crape myrtle in my back yard.  It's a pretty bright color, isn't it?  With a little rain, these particular trees tend to go crazy with blooms.  This is one of the trees my dad gave us when we moved into the house, and it's been pretty hardy.  The other trees in the yard have had various ailments, such as shiny evil insects, or a fungus or two, but this tree, and its twin, have been impervious.  I find this interesting because these two trees are also planted the furthest away from the house, where the soil is least accommodating.  They hardly ever get watered, because the hose takes forever to stretch out to their corner.  Essentially, they only get a good soaking when it rains.

Yet they have thrived.  They tower over me, as green as they can be, with these bright blooms.  What does that tell me?  It tells me that even when all hope seems to be lost, when what gives us joy seems to have dried up, we must hang on.  We must at least try.  Survival--not just our physical survival, but our spiritual survival--requires that we at least try.  Why?  I don't know the answer to that, not every time.  I do know that when I have been able to hang on for just a little longer, brighter days do come to me.

Wordless Wednesday: The View of the Acorn's World

I have laryngitis from coughing up those lungs last weekend, and I need to rest up. So I bring you a picture I took at the corn maze outside of Hondo, Texas.




This is what a 150 year old Live Oak tree looks like, if you're an acorn that has fallen on the ground. I hope that you enjoy it


Oh, and don't forget about the nationwide test of the emergency broadcasting system tomorrow at 2pm Eastern time. They want to check the system just in case there's a real emergency, like a zombie apocalypse.

My Friend Kimberly is a Freakin' GENIUS!!!

We've had issues with Zane's behavior. He's a three year old with plans for world domination, and we are his parents. We would be happy if he picked up his toys. Or went to bed without a fight. Or brushed his teeth. We were using a sticker chart for these behaviors, but the boy started gaming the system. Then he got bored with the whole sticker concept. Particularly at bedtime.

Zane is very adept at the delay tactic when it comes to bedtimes. We get him upstairs and he has to get his pillow, which he took downstairs that morning.

Then he has to have his blanket. Next it's juice.

Then it's the Toy Du Jour, which must be found.

Then we must read How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?

Then Zane announces that he has to go to the bathroom.

When we finally get him into bed, he must be completely covered with the blanket. Then he must be completely uncovered. On and on and on.

One evening, in the middle of a particularly frustrating battle over bedtime, I told Zane that if he didn't get into bed this minute, Santa wasn't going to bring him a present. Zane heard his very favoritest word, 'present', and he jumped right into bed and was out five minutes later. Eureka, I thought. I told my husband what had happened. He was as shocked and amazed as I was, but skeptical.

"Santa Claus?" Larry said. "That sounds weird. I hope that you are not blogging about this. People will point and laugh when they see us."

"They point and laugh at us now," I responded. "Do you have a better idea, Brightest Star in the Sky?" When I start using elaborate endearments like this, Larry is smart enough to detect that I am being sarcastic. Since he couldn't come up with a better idea, we added Santa and his present to our evening routine. After Zane was asleep, we would go and get a small toy and put it under his pillow for him to find the next morning. If Zane did not go to sleep within a reasonable time, no Santa.

Then my friend Kimberly, who is over at The Only Child Chronicles shared on Facebook that her son Lex would do a lot of things for a poker chip.

A poker chip? I had an idea rolling around in the back of my head about using Chuck E Cheese coins to 'pay' Zane for doing his chores, but some jerk broke into our car and stole all the CC coins out of the glove box. And that was that.

A poker chip. How can we make a poker chip something that Zane would be interested in? I talked to Larry about this.

"What if we put stickers of super heroes on the poker chips?" Larry said.

"Brilliant!" I yelled, which you probably shouldn't do in church. We found some poker chips at Walmart and some sticker paper. Larry found some pictures of superheroes on the interwebs. He printed them out and we painstakingly cut the stickers out and applied them to the coins. We also printed out some stickers with the letter Z on them. Z-coins, we call them.

We told Zane that Santa had decided to start giving Zane these Z-coins because he couldn't always get here on time. He bought it. We started handing out the poker chips very liberally at first.

Zane LOVES it. He will do anything for a poker chip. Kimberly was right!

After an adjustment period, we started telling him that he could use his chips to "buy' toys. Yay us, for getting it.