FOTD challenge

Thanks to FOTD challenge page for helping us welcome Spring!

Frozen

The pond was just down the hill from our house in 1976, long before Thinsulate thermal technologies. I ventured there with my sister’s white skates and the mittens my grandmother knitted. A cold wind blew that I envisioned flowing through my spinning hair. I walked to shore, sat in the snow and pulled off my hush puppies. My toe socks slid into the first skate but lacing was difficult. Frigid hands made the second skate even harder. I didn’t lace all the way up and put my yarn mittens back on before my fingers fell off. Shaking from the cold, a loose skate and my lack of skill, I managed to skate to the far corner. I could see my shoes in the snow on the opposite shore. I was thrilled to have made it so far all by myself. However, I was colder than I ever thought I could be and still needed to get all the way back home. My icicle toes were inside stiff leather and the homemade mittens were crusted with snow and stuck to my fingers. I took a deep breath under my orange puffy jacket, focused and skated to my shoes in the white tundra. I dared not take my mittens off to unlace my skates, nor did I expose my feet to the air again. I did what I had to do. I staggered all the way up the snowy hill in ice skates; their name had a whole new meaning to me when I got back home. My whole body was extremely numb but I was proud of my 10-year-old independence; the thoughts are frozen into my memory.

Thanks to Carrot Ranch for the daily prompt; I exceeded word count but enjoyed memory lane. I haven’t thought about this in a long time; lucky for me that water was FROZEN!

Creases and Curves

We found a hand-written envelope amongst the bills and junk mail today. Checking the inked return address, I saw the note was from my sister’s house in Ohio. The writing was not my sister’s signature scrawl though. I thought perhaps the correspondence was from her husband or the kids. Maybe there was an upcoming shower for one of the daughters? Perhaps the family was throwing my sister a secret surprise party?

I didn’t know the related circumstance until I unfolded the creases to the letter. The correspondence was signed by my sister but without the traditional curves to her P’s or L’s. I looked at the third grade cursive and finally remembered what her mail represented.

The sister among us that has written stories and poems, drawn refrigerator cartoons and charcoal portraits, journaled and essayed her entire life, is now in a place where she wants to master traditional penmanship? The note card she sent to me was part of a recent quest to write a cursive letter each day, to practice the grade school scripted alphabet.

I refolded the creases of my sister’s letter and put it back in the envelope. Her words were short and sweet; the curves of her words just training, a personal goal. That part of my sister I did recognize.

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Thanks to Putting My Feet In The Dirt for the March writing prompt!

Crowe’s nesting

I blow him a kiss,

he pulls on my love handles;

spring bird flips from hand.

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Thanks to Ronovan Writes for the weekly Haiku prompt!

Penny for your thoughts

Growing up on the edge of a strawberry field, I thought I had a pretty happy and safe existence. Living was easy. I wanted my childhood to last forever.

As I grew older, it was hard to know my true identity and purpose though. I didn’t want to hang around the same bunch and area my whole life. My parents had also passed, which made it difficult to understand if I was part of something bigger.

Always hanging around with absolutely no purpose, a woman with a love for baskets and cooking finally took me into her home. Glad to belong to someone again, I thought I could build a better life away from the strawberrry field. After only a few hours in her kitchen, it was clear, that was not going to happen. The grass is never greener. She and her husband started torturing me with boiling water.

In time I was set aside, wounding my psyche even more and preserving only my helplessness. Daily life was almost what I would call sweet once the boilings stopped but I was cloistered, and could not even breathe easily in their environment. I always feared what unexpected events would come into my life next.

It seemed hopeless for me, so I wished for someone else’s happiness. I begged to myself; make sure this wasted life matters. Use your misery to make someone else happy. My life, I thought, had meaning when the jobless, widower neighbor came to visit.

I inhaled deeply, listening to him with bated breathe. How could I help? “Be careful what you wish for” was my next thought, when his accomplice appeared and the neighbor drew a knife.

The scene happened quickly, with the knife coming down on my head like sliced butter. He continued to cut through me, with a huge grin on his face, staring through me like an old lost friend. The old man spread sections of me all over his smooth brown accomplice.

This grown man took great joy consuming all of me. Ultimately the peanut butter and I did not survive but my life had mattered. Our neighbor was no longer hungry.

He took me down. Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung about. Strawberry fields forever.

Writing prompt – Tell me about the last time you were in a jam

Drip

Such a weak and ineffectual person, he shed small drops of liquid onto his cheeks.

Thanks to Daily Addiction for the writing challenge.

Photo Shop Reality

Despite her fit body, beautiful hair and long legs, she was still a quack.

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Photo prompt, from and to, our baby girl

Madness makes us what we are

If you kill a pint of ice cream, the number of fat calories in this world stays the same.

– Ms Toy Whisperer

Over It

Holding back,

despite promise.

Looking forward to shining

once again.

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– Photo challenge

Patterned Response

She struggled between staying to die a little bit every day, and walking away to live unapologetically as herself, for the rest of her life. Conflicted no more, Caroline tossed clothes next to her polkadot suitcase and realized the colorful future she longed for was right in front of her. It was time to run, not walk.

She stared at her few favorite outfits. Random patterns of her life. The flowers made her dream of a picket fence with flowers along the walk to the front door, not an alley of God knows what on the way to the deadbolt. She needed to bolt and leave behind her dead end boyfriend, job and shithole apartment. Now was her time to transform the telling pile into a new life.

Caroline’s previous willingness to join a psychedelic haze and the sexual revolution had only created her empty shell. The community colllege night classes made her want a day job. Her bellbottoms would ring her in at the top. This was her time to join the social revolution. She didn’t need a man. She’d gotten this far. She threw the few clothes she had into her suitcase, grabbed her keys to freedom and sped away in a red VW on her way to a rainbow filled new life.