Time for Play

Play date: March, 2022

In the game of Hide and Seek, there are always places to hide. Even if one if “too big to hide”! This was my quandary yesterday. I had been told: “You’re too big to hide!” Our game was limited to only a few rooms, but I fooled this four year old! I found two places - one was a pretty tight squeeze. The next problem was the little sister - just shy of two years old, she always found each of us first and very helpfully told the seeker! Wonderful fun, I have regrouped and recovered today with great memories of smiling faces and happy times.

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

A Long Walk Through Time

February 23, 1912 - September 18, 1995

 

I may not have known that handsome young man, but the man in the field, still handsome, dusty and tanned, who had walked many miles, I did know ~ As much as a daughter can ever know her father. Good, kind, fallible, and always present. 

February 23, 1912 - September 18, 1995

“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.”

~ Jim Valvano

On an Afternoon Walk ~ Walking with Memories

February 22, 1916 - December 16,1971

Striding out with purpose ~ bareheaded, my toque left behind, winter jacket open to the breeze, gloves dropped carelessly in my shopping bag. I avoided silty puddles blessed by sun and slushy shivering ice patches in shade.

Carrying my mom’s memory with me,

I felt the strength of life and limb

in the joy of being in the sun.

“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”

~ Emily Dickinson

Chocolate Dreams

The oldest recipe I have: Brownie Pudding Yum!!!!

I’ve had many dreams, most of them too bizarre for words. Occasionally some of them humorous, some frightening. But never one about chocolate cake. However, my dream was creative and compelling, I measured, mixed and tried desperately to remember the recipe for chocolate cake. Keeping on, one measurement at a time, I was coming close but never got it into an oven. I woke up and smiled. 

Always trying to divine my dreams, I thought my recent struggles with my writing project had been translated into a dream. Did I want to write something sweet, something well put together but didn’t know how? Or did I just want the chocolate cake I’d been craving for the last week? Trying to decide was taking far too much time.

The solution: make a Brownie Pudding and try not to eat it all at once. The chocolate sauce is beneath the brownie cake filled with cashews with just a hint of cayenne: both are dark and delicious. Only two pieces have disappeared.

“You just need a little perspective. Warmed chocolate can give you that.”

~ Giada De Laurentiis

Lost and Found

The lost has been found. Just a small notebook with scribblings and numbers, wanderings, doodles and lists of books to be read, movies to see, dates of phone calls received. Everything to be lost to the dustbin of time and memory. But, darn it! I expect it to be in a certain place when I want it. There were still several blank pages left in it. What if even one of those things was important?! 

A phone call to the last place I saw it. Reaching out to one more person. And then ~ a last look in my carry all. All the pockets. The little notebook slid into my hand like it was expecting me. A sigh of relief and phone calls returned. And so my day began.

“and what is lost that can’t be found.”

~ Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

Winter's Sun

November, 2021

Time drags by unnoticed

but the Winter sun!

A grand flamboyant Star, innocently brilliant and as the season turns, it traces shadows on lands and lakes when dirty, grey cotton batten clouds have flown.

“Sunshine is a welcome thing. It brings a lot of brightness.”

~ Jimmie Davis (1899 - 2000)

A Newborn

Despite turmoil around the globe, 

A new baby is a window on Mother Earth

“Every child begins the world again.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

Author's note:  Violet Grace

                         Grand-niece born February 15, 2024