Celebrating Special Times

              I celebrate each Saturday with Ruth Ayres at Discover Play Build and the rest of the wonderful community that celebrates together. Come join us!          Tweet at #CelebrateLu
              Unlike others, I like the change in times, enjoy the wintery cold and dark, feel cozy and glad to be inside. I know that some have to work outside and sympathize with that work that is harder in winter dark, but still, I like it. This was the week to feel as if I was sleeping in, but wondering why I was so tired earlier in the evening than usual. And this week means we're closer to the holidays!. 

           Yesterday I shared a poem that has a line about these shorter days. I celebrate poetry that fills me up most every day. I take pleasure in the words. On The Shortest Days by Joyce Sutphen has this line: "Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp/in every window and nests of stars on the rooftops." You can find all the poem here.
            There were a lot of good moments this week:

            Earlier in the week I went to Tattered Cover, our local wonderful Indie store, to see Elizabeth 
George, a mystery writer that I love. 

Celebrating The People In My Life

              I celebrate each Saturday with Ruth Ayres at Discover Play Build - It's a close community that celebrates together. Come join us!          Tweet at #CelebrateLu

        I didn't post last week because my brother, sister-in-law and niece were in town to help celebrate my birthday, but so many other wonderful things have happened along with celebrating that day. Living a long way from them is hard. We all wish we lived so much closer. This is the family Sarah, her two daughters, and my grandson Carter (my son's son) travel to visit each summer. We are close, but we want the kids to know them and be close, too!

Celebrating Travel

            Thanks To Ruth Ayres, we have Celebration Saturday! Tweet at #CelebrateLu  and today at #AllWrite14
         Link up here!  

 At All-Write-literary conference in Warsaw, Indiana. What a marvelous time filled with verbs! Yes, VERBS (most important part of speech): talking, learning, laughing, yearning, thinking, listening, sharing, sitting, smiling, introducing, greeting, eating, writing, applauding, photographing, story-telling, hugging, commiserating, questioning, watching, walking, driving, discovering, snacking, reading, and, of course, CELEBRATING!

        Thanks to Ruth Ayres and Mary Helen for their warm, hosting welcome!  More next week when home with the laptop.

Finding The Right Word for All Write!

          The Slice of Life on Tuesday is hosted by Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz at their blog, Two Writing Teachers!  Thanks to these creative women, there is a community of writers who write so we may read and savor.  Join us!
      And tweet at #slice2013

          I flew to Indiana last week to attend the All-Write conference.  People who asked where I was from were surprised that I had come all the way from Colorado.  How could I not do this?  And I was excited to go.  It was, it was (I have to find the right word!) comfortable.  Have you bought a chair or sofa lately?  How many pairs of shoes do you try on before selecting the one pair that feels like it’s already been a favorite for a while? Have you gone to dinner with friends, and begun the talking before you’ve even been seated?  Have you created an old and favorite recipe?  Do you ever re-read favorite books, or keep poems that feel so right?   A few weeks ago, I spent a day with a long-time friend who lives far away.  We are fortunate if we get to see one another once a year, and sometimes it’s more like five years.  Yet when we are together, we fall into our own old friend language, that one that takes years to understand, the perfect ‘ear’ for each other. 

         I hope now you realize what I feel about the All-Write Conference where everyone was simply—and wonderfully—comfortable.  I was welcomed with hugs from the minute I pulled my luggage up to the check-in counter at the Wyndham Hotel.  Here they all were:  Ruth, Mary Helen, Betsy, Christy, Ramona, Elsie, Deb Gaby, Robin, Nancy, Bonnie.  How can those I’ve known for such a short while feel comfortable?  Because of our words over these past years, the words we’ve shared through our blog posts and through twitter (although I don’t do as much tweeting as I’d like).  And later, at dinner, there were more I knew (see Ruth Ayres’ post about the dinner here.)  Also, in the sessions, it seemed like old friends, again from posts and books and articles-words I valued, words I believed in.  Will you imagine what sharing words within a classroom can mean to that community?  

A Golden Time

       The Slices of Life are hosted each Tuesday by Ruth and Stacey at their marvelous blog, Two Writing Teachers.  Come join us!  

Make new friends but keep the old;

one is silver and the other gold.

         When a chance of something good comes along, one must drop everything and take it!  I had that chance tonight, and it needs to last in my memory a while.  A friend I’ve known since we raised our babies together came into town yesterday to help her daughter (my son’s age) organize a household for movers.  I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this old friend several times in the past two years while her daughter lived here, and now she’ll be gone again.  We live far apart and just don’t have the opportunity to see each other often, although we call and e-mail often. 

Sunday Was A Tasty Slice of Pie

The Tuesday Slice of Life is hosted by Ruth and Stacey at Two Writing Teachers.  It's a good place to be on Tuesday, sharing something of our lives.  Come visit!

          Don't forget Banned Book Week-this week!

I had a wonderful gift given to me by friends on Sunday.  They took me to the mountains for an adventure.  Not far from Denver is a little mountain town called Silver Plume.  It isn't Aspen or Vale, but a sweet town in a mining area, with mining history, not very rich now, but with good people making their way.  They live surrounded by beauty and cook for others or sell antiques. That's about it.  We ate in the Silver Plume Tea Room, an old building with rafters showing, decorated with the antiques that are for sale.  The food was delicious, but I didn't think to take a photo.  I had a yummy piece of sour cream pecan pie, my friends chose the cherry pie a la mode.  The lunches we had were wonderful too, but the dessert-divine!  We ate, walked, talked, and then talked some more.  
       We also traveled down the mountains a bit to the larger, more touristy Georgetown.  It has some history; as you will see a picture of a hotel built there long ago by a French settler.  We walked again, and visited a few favorite shops, spent the most time in the rock shop, full of amazing rocks, shark's teeth, fossils, and pieces of comet fallen to earth.  It's a geology lesson just to visit.