Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
Walk with me
Into nature
Where the fresh air
Flows through.
Walk with me
As we shelter
Under skies
Me, and you.
Walk with me
Hand in hand
Muddy boots
Flowers, too.
Let us breathe
And connect
With everything
That is true.
For the Tuesday photo challenge: Connect
It would be the last place anyone would look, and the first thing everyone would see.
It made it perfect.
She always gravitated toward hiding in plain sight. There was equity in the blinding effect of what people learned to not see or did not know could be there in the first place.
How long would it take, she wondered, for her cover to be blown?
The longest had been almost four weeks. The closest call had her discovered before the first patch of paint dried. She’d almost lost everything that day, and the consequences were brutal, but she’d learned from it. As she had from every challenge and obstacle. Even those that were not meant to be instructive.
That was how she rolled. How she wrest back some control.
For now, this box of aqua perched on sand, seasonally emptied of its contents, was home.
The surf a lullaby.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Small and humble,
It fills bellies,
When there’s no
Choice of grain.
The green leaves,
The tiny fruit,
Pantry for
Times of pain.
For the Sunday Still’s challenge: #Close and #Green
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
In the big scale
Of things
Where watershed moments
Froth and fall in
Flush forward,
Each of us but a dot
Drenched in mist
Hoping life
Flows without
A fast-forward.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Scale
Photo prompt: Roger Bultot
“She keeps the shelves half-empty.”
I turned at the voice. A gnarled hand leaned heavily on a carved stick. The man’s chest was almost parallel to the stained cement floor.
I crouched so I could make eye-contact yet spare him the strain of lifting his head. He smiled. For such an ossified body, his expression was remarkably lively.
“My wife,” he raised an eyebrow at the display. “I’d space the boxes, but she says that what people think we ain’t got much of, reminds them of the empty spaces in their own pantries and how there’s always room for more.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Inbar Asif
There’s a hole in that kettle …
I don’t care, don’t throw it.
There’s a hole it that kettle —
This junk won’t make tea.
I don’t care if it’s holey
That pretty, red kettle,
I don’t care if it’s holey
It’s perfect for me! …
(Yeah, if you noted a bit of reverberation, this is very loosely based on “There’s a hole in the bucket” children’s folk song … ;))
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Junk
Photo: Sue Vincent
Finally, the light was right, the water mirrored what it ought, the sky spread silk above her head. Even the dotted white of sheep lent the necessary movement to what might otherwise feel a specter of a time too soon or too late.
It was perfect.
Stella pressed the sole of one foot against the trunk and leaned into the tree behind her, balancing the rest of her weight on the other leg. All through her childhood, this preferred pose of hers had driven her mother to distraction.
Though long passed, the memory of a particular exchange about it was yet to fade.
“God gave you two feet to stand on. Use them!” Her mother had demanded.
Stella must have been six or seven years old then. “I am,” she had countered, exasperated with the constant admonitions of what felt to her a perfectly reasonable way to stand. “God also gave me a knee that bends. I’m using that, too.”
Her mother had made her “use her bending knees” to kneel on dried peas for most of that evening, punishment for using God’s name in impertinence. Apparently God also gave children the gift of parents they were not supposed to talk back to.
Stella had carried the bruises of that evening for weeks thereafter, and the ache for longer. She learned to keep quiet when reprimanded, and to adjust her posture and compose her face and straighten her back and never slouch or run or climb or get mud on her skirts or expose her legs. But she still found ways for small rebellions. And whenever she was out of her mother’s line of sight, Stella never did stop planting one sole against a tree or wall when standing. Not even when her brother, whose maleness allowed him liberties that would not be tolerated in a girl, gave her secret away by calling her “Stella Stork.”
And a kind of stork I indeed am, she thought to herself, and pressed her foot into the tree in a sigh of freed determination.
Midwifery did not quite pay the bills. Nor did her artistry through painting. However, between the two callings she had found a certain kind of balance. Granted, she often got paid for the former in apples and hens’ eggs, and while those filled her belly they did not translate into peat or cloth or rent. However, the commissioned illustrations for “Country Ladies” magazine did compensate in some coin, and she had recently been asked to provide a “pastoral series.”
Stella gazed at the scene, adjusted her easel, lifted her brush, and leaned further into the trunk behind her. The past receded. The future waited. The present moment lingered, perfect, as the hours rolled.
Photo: Xinhua County, China (Wikipedia)
It was the busiest time.
His loneliest.
He sought good fortune in small things. Mostly because it was absent from the big ones. There was always some disaster to contend with: illness, sorrow, loss.
He was born unlucky. His mother pushed by the side of the road because he’d come so quickly. He was blamed for his rash emergence. For her illness. For her early death. Blamed in the not-so-subtle ways that used words like blades.
“You always were impatient,” his grandmother would say. “Show too-little respect.”
He knew his grandmother resented his emerging like a peasant in the dirt when she had clawed her way out of the rice-fields. He had no response.
“Be grateful that you have enough to eat,” she’d frown. “Unlucky boy.”
Xinhua offered work. He fled.
The letter said that his grandmother had died.
New Year approached. His good fortune was to spend it alone.
For What Pegman Saw: Xinhua, China
She never did like thready business.
Yet there she was, darning holes, patching elbows, sewing up dangling hems and chasing runs on stockings.
How did it ever come to that?
She squinted and held the needle to the light.
The story of her life, it was. That squeezing through the eye of the needle. Barely, barely making do. Struggling to fit another stitch before the end of her rope.
It was all wrong.
She tied the knot.
It slipped.
She tied another, hoping it would hold. Hoping that the hidden stitches she put in will keep things covered long enough to soothe the chill that ever lurked, awaiting exposed places.
Existing really should not be so threadbare.
The thin wrap of life, knit together moment by moment in complicated patterns of dropped stitches and messy mistakes.
Will it come together at the end?
She did not know, but she hoped.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge #63
They were going to have to move.
Her health. His job.
They were going to miss so many things.
The beach. Their yard. The hours spent outdoors.
He laid in bed at night, awake. Her breath gentle at his side.
She would not complain. Even if she could still speak, he knew she wouldn’t put that burden on him. It broke his heart.
He put the shards into action. Poured his mind into design.
He’d build a bubble. An Eden in the forbidding landlocked wintry ground. A lush oasis where they could both breathe in the memories of better times.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
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