small fool

For the Daily Prompt: fool.

Happy April Fool’s! I don’t think this little bushtit is a fool. The expression is foolish or distracted but the bird is not foolish. It is wisely having a delicious breakfast in my yard.

Anyone can be captured with a foolish expression or in a foolish moment. Me, too! I love being silly and foolish with my kids and dear friends. My daughter says she can tell when I will be goofy before I say anything, just by my expression.

coot

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: jet.

I am going to use the meaning of the color jet: jet black. The color is from jet, lignite used in jewelry. Lignite is a precurser to coal. I have a necklace of jet beads from my great aunt.

This coot is jet black in the sun and against the water. Coots look self-contained to me, shyer than the ducks. They look down in the water and make noises to them selves, not like the insistent mallards. They move a little bit robotically. The neurological wiring seems more primitive than the ducks.

tracery

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tracery.

This is the dream that wakes me this morning. Before I went to sleep last night I asked for a dream. It’s when I am writing the dream out this morning that I realize that it’s my sister’s birthday. She died of cancer in 2012. Memory and dreams as tracery.

I am in a group of people on a platform. It is dark around us. It reminds me of a platform from a ropes course. In the ropes course we had to balance it. A rectangular platform on a log roller, held somewhat at the corners to keep it from dumping us entirely. A group version of a balance board. The trick is really that everyone has to stand still and only one person moves, very small amounts, until it is balanced.

But we are dancing in the dream. We are dancing, but people are uncomfortable. I am not sure why. Perhaps because we were dancing all together but individually and now there is a couple dancing. I realize that people are halting, worried.

I want them to be comfortable. I gesture to an older man. He comes towards me. His wife is there. He and I start dancing but I realize right away that this doesn’t make people more comfortable. They are less comfortable and even the other couple dancing stops. We are lit from above with darkness all around. No spot light follows us, so we move in and out of the light.

As soon as I realize that nearly everyone is uncomfortable, I stop my partner. He is an excellent dancer but that is not what is important here. I move with him back towards his wife and I sit on the platform. They sit as well. The other people around us relax. That is what they want, to sit, to talk quietly, to listen. That is what will make everyone comfortable. The others are settling around us, relieved.

I wake up.