my father is right
so I must be wrong again
the right of age
Another verse from my “Written-and-Forgotten” file.
Category: Reflections
Domestic Storm
sudden thunder
dad’s anger a dark cloud
lightning sears my ear
My Dad was from the old school, such as you read of in Oliver Twist, where boxing a child’s ears was meant to improve hearing and slapping them on the head would “smarten them up” or “knock some sense into them.” And you didn’t always get any forewarning, either. First the smack, then the explanation of why.
My mom-in-law talked of one of her brothers who suffered lifelong hearing damage because teachers regularly boxed pupils’ ears. I don’t think children should go undisciplined, but I’m glad those days are gone.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning: LIGHTNING
I’ll confess, I’ve often spelled the LIGHTNING that zips across the sky like the LIGHTENING that the sky does at dawn. Which isn’t so far wrong, because lightning does lighten the sky. But now I’ve looked it up and I see that one definition of lighten is to give out flashes of lightning. So I’m not too far out.
Searching through my Dropbox to see what I might have as a response to today’s prompt, I came across a file of a dozen or so need-to-be-polished haiku verses, including the one above. So I’ll polish and post a few more.
Memo from Kitty
The Kitten Cuddling in my bosom, purring like a jet plane, Kitty cracks my shirt buttons in his sharp little teeth. The communiqué is clear: "I'm bored. Get up once! Leave that fiddly stuff; come play with me." If I miss the message, ever eager to clarify his next step will be cleaning off my desk.
At Twelve per Hour
Yesterday my husband and I started doing a jigsaw puzzle, one given to us sometime in the past six months by I forget who. This is a Cobble Hill puzzle, one brand we always enjoy doing, where every puzzle piece is a different shape. Looking at their site, I see they have some really beautiful puzzles listed. 🙂
With each piece being a unique shape, the putting-together should be easy-peasy, right? Nope. Not this one, because it’s such a collage of vines and leaves, fruits and butterflies. In fact it’s call Fruits & Flutterbies.
Pretty? Yes. Easy? No. Click Here if you want to see the picture we’re trying to put together.
My hubby worked at it for an hour before dinner and put in twelve pieces. Then he calculated: 1000 pieces at 12 per hour, with each of us putting in a couple of hours every day, should take us clear through til spring. Somewhat like retyping WAR & PEACE.
However, with the outside temp hovering around -30 C we may as well occupy ourselves with something appealing indoors. It’s a sunny day and with sunbeams making all the snowbanks glisten, a person could almost go snow-blind. I imagine this country when settlers first came, not a tree or anything to break the view for twenty miles. And then sunshine on snowy fields!
One early arrival, coming from Wales, commented that “Back home I always like to face the road ahead so I could see what was coming up. But when I’m travelling here on the flat prairie it doesn’t matter what direction I face because the view’s the same whichever way you look.”
Befuddled
The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is MUDDLE
I could write about all the neurons misfiring in my brain these days, but instead I’ll respond with this newly minted limerick:
The players grouped round in a huddle
but soon found themselves in a muddle.
Some shouted “Defensive!”
and others “Offensive!”
But the babble just served to befuddle.
Appealing
The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is APPEALING
Have you heard that new singer, McLeod?
He’s able to draw quite a crowd
with his lyrics appealing
infused with such feeling
He soon has his audience wowed.
And on a quite different vein, in her last letter my penpal from England feels sympathy for the birds at their feeder when she writes: “…by the end of January the UK will be affected by an icy blast from Siberia, which will send our temperatures plummeting to -5̊ C.”
I watch our local birds fluttering around the feeder this morning – English sparrows, I might add – all puffed up, bravely facing our chilly -33̊C. However, our predicted high today is a more appealing -24. I guess our sparrows have had over a century and many generations to adapt to our climate, though.
