Category Archives: Beloved

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Austere choice

What could be more austere than rock?

Taken in Echo Canyon in the Colorado National Monument, Thanksgiving, 2024.

Austere choice

Why do I still feel sad when I think
that I am best off with my cat
and that I should eschew dating.
Why do I feel like I am rejecting love?
I don’t have that sort of love.
It’s not like I am rejecting anything.
I am rejecting looking for it.
I am rejecting active interest in a partner
other than my cat.
What is wrong with that?

I do not ever want to reject hope.
I am not trying to reject wanting.
Hope and want are the deep and terrible ache
for the Beloved. I do not reject that.
I am still open, Beloved, to what you send,
though getting more particular in middle age.
A writer says that he uses a pencil and a pad,
because no better tool has been invented.
I take the same approach to wanting love.
If the relationship is more work than my cat,
for less love, why bother? It seems silly
and until I go home to the Beloved,
so far, I am best off with my cat.

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The first thing Sol Duc does when we go out for a walk, is roll on the sun warmed dusty sidewalk. The house faces south.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: austere.

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Surreal failure

I am still thinking about Friday’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: failure. Now that I am middle aged (by my clinic definition, which put over 90 as older), I think the biggest failure of my generation is a peaceful world. For me, a peaceful extended family. I am good friends with my father’s family and my ex-husband’s family. But the maternal family, well. I have thought about that for the last two days: could I have changed that?

Yes, but at what cost? My sister followed the “family rules” on that side. She is dead from cancer. My mother also followed the rules and died younger than me from cancer. I can’t say that the rules cause cancer. But doesn’t our culture say over and over, be yourself? To fit in the family diaspora, I would have to play the triangulation game and gossip about others as they have gossiped about me. No, thank you, no. I don’t want to. They seem to need a family member to hate and have chosen me and labelled me and call me angry. I think they are silly and emotionally immature. At the very least, I would have had to keep my mouth shut and accept them gossiping about me.

The family failure and untrue gossip, with no one ever asking for my viewpoint, mirrors the US culture. Split and needing someone to hate. At this rate, we’ll need the hippies back, with flowers and joy and counter culture and dropping out. Someone fun, at least until the drugs wear off. Someone to say, we need joy back, we need friends, we need love.

It’s not just my failure though. The family failed. They make cruel choices and target people. It happened in my generation, my mother’s, my grandparents. I wonder if it is happening in my adult children’s generation. Who is the next target? Who will refuse to counter-gossip and fight with each source? My adult children are not part of it at all, because I had less and less interest in spending time with mean gossips and I did not want to expose my children.

Lies and drama and meanness and gossip. I hope my adult children’s generation does better. We went to Wicked on Thursday. I did not like it much. Too much drama. Why do we want drama? The world seems more and more surreal. Give me the lovely hike we did on Friday instead, Echo Canyon.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: failure and surreal.

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Wait

I came close but no cigar
I want a mind that I can love
hand holding mine in the car
I send a quiet prayer above
Love of nature, kind to friends
not afraid of their own dark
Lust to learn until their end
willing to risk to build an ark
Curious but not controlling
Not addicted to booze or drugs
Intense at times and others strolling
Opinions, laughter and lots of hugs
My heart open yet I don’t faint
I think I am waiting for a saint

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I wrote the poem yesterday, but I have used up my memory in wordpress and now I need to go through and delete things. Any advice, Martha? I know you did it. It seems that I have to delete the post and the photograph, or is that not true? Advice welcomed.

I search my photographs for gloves and it comes up with two: foxgloves! Well, strictly speaking, that is a form of glove, right?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: glove.

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Chorus again

Rainshadow Chorale sang the Rachmaninovff All Night Vigil yesterday and we get to sing it again today! It is so gorgeous. Exhausting too. The rhythms are unfamiliar, the measures are all different lengths, the time changes all over the place and it’s in the formal Church Slavonic language from 1915.

I still loved singing it and will enjoy it today. Here is the 12th of 15 movements.

My daughter took the photograph in March, 2020, before lockdown.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: chorus.

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Return again

Return again to friends and home and stumble
My house wraps around me familiar then grief
There is so much grief here: death makes us humble
Mother, marriage, sister, father, time a thief
Has stolen them and more to come, a long lived life
Means loss on loss. Memory wells up, deeps swells
We thought we would be different, wise, no strife
Yet the world burns, children bombed in warring hells
Our children know our failure and our malice
We thought we’d be adults and show the way
Our intentions of a wired on-line palace
Yet anger and greed now rule the day
As a child adults are drunk confusing fools
Now my adult children wonder why we are such rigid tools

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: rigid.

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Sesame Street Soup

We did not have a television until I was nine and my little sister was the excuse for watching Sesame Street. We watched this sequence and asked my mother if we could make Sesame Street Soup. We wrote down the recipe and it was delicious.

The soup in my picture is not Sesame Street Soup. It is a Thai influenced soup, with lemon grass and coconut milk and fresh basil and fresh corn, from September 2023.

Sesame Street Soup is here.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: soup.

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If I were your child

Living in a town of 9000, now 10,000, I did not feel that my children needed cell phones. They could walk home from school. It is reasonably safe, though I knew too much about local use of heroin and methamphetamines to believe that anywhere is completely safe.

I spoke to a friend from high school in the early 2000s. He asked me to text him my address.

“I’ve never texted.” I said.

“NEVER?” he said.

“Nope.”

“Haven’t your kids taught you how?”

“My kids don’t have cell phones.”

Long silence. Then: “If I were your child, I would run away.”

I laughed. My son got a cell phone when he headed for college and my daughter got a track phone, ten dollars a month, in high school. Calls and no texting. My son ran away the same way I did, as an exchange student. He went to Thailand at age 16 and was on the Maylay Peninsula, two years after the tsunami hit. His first comment calling home was, “Mom, the world is a really scary place.” Going off to be an exchange student is a fabulous way to run away, because you learn tons and come home.

My daughter had one friend who she would go to sleep over in her teens.

“I don’t want to sleep over any more.” she said after one night.

“Why?” I asked.

“She is up texting and by midnight she and friends are having arguments by phone and she cries. I want to sleep.”

Don’t leave the phone in the kids’ rooms, parents. And don’t have the phone in your bedroom either!!!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: texting. With music: https://youtu.be/hkmZGh9DQZ4.

The photograph is Studt’s Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maze again.

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Black cat

Sol Duc is pretty happy to be home, even though we do not have a cat door. The yard does not have a secure fence, the road is fast and busy for here, and anyhow, birds.

A black cat for the season, lit with purple, to go with the pumpkins and orange haired nightmare goblins and completely insane speeches and advertisements. Eeeeee, much of it is way more horrific and terrifying than any costume, not just black on the outside, but charred all the way through.

In the photograph, Sol Duc is in the radiant sauna. She approves of it. I am cold here, not because it’s much colder than Grand Junction, but I’m not used to the wet any more. We moved here arriving on New Year’s Eve 2000 and that first winter just felt awfully cold, dampness through to my bone marrow. We were used to it by the second winter.

My pump is ordered and should be fixed next Wednesday. I have two friends who offered their washing machines in the interim, but it was the towels that cleaned up the mild flooding that I had to wash. I went to the laundromat with those.

Now, what shall I be for Halloween? I am invited to a costume party with prizes. The only thing that has occurred to me so far is to dress up as a mesa. I suppose the most horrifying costume I could choose is a political advertisement, ick.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: pumpkin.