Poetry Friday - Traveling

Catherine at Reading To The Core is hosting Poetry Friday today, and has a special guest, Irene Latham, talking about her new book coming Monday, and about her writing. It's a lovely post. 

          I'd like to share something I learned this last week with you. Perhaps you know about this, but I didn't, and now I want to visit. Some of you may know I've started volunteering at a used bookstore, a coop that's been in business for a long time in a nearby neighborhood in Denver. A customer last week bought a book of poems by Carl Sandburg and we began a conversation about poetry and favorite poems/poets, etc. This man said he has just returned from visiting family in North Carolina, and while he was there, he visited the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site, one of the homes preserved where Sandburg lived. He said he loved the visit, that everyone should try to see it. 

the main home

Travel Words, Lists and Plans - Sort of

      Time for our Tuesday Slice of Life Sharing at the Two Writing Teachers blog. Thanks to all who share, and to those who host the community. 

       I've traveled quite a bit in my life, with my parents of course, with my husband, with the rest of the family, with friends, with my students, and on. This year I've traveled four times since the middle of May, only one road trip. Coming Saturday will be the next air trip, to Captiva Island with both my son's and my daughter's families. My nephew and his partner live in the Ft. Myers area and we will see them too, with a few other extended family members coming in for at least a day or two. My SLICES of life today have to do with the preparation, the planning, the insistent voice in my head that asks endless questions before time to go.  

It looks like this:

photo credit: carrie227 via photopin cc

Nature's Fireworks

              Heidi Mordhorst has the poetry fireworks at My Juicy Little Universe.

           I haven't posted since the beginning of June, traveling here and traveling there! The latest trip with family, including my three grandchildren, brought us to Missouri humidity, and the best of all besides more family was FIREFLIES. It seems fitting to celebrate our Independence Day with poems about those magical insects, nature's fireworks. The two youngest grandchildren, three and five year old girls, had never seen fireflies, and so with their older cousin's help, danced around the lawn trying their best to catch a few, and a jarful was caught. They were released later, but loved the doing and the real sight of something we just don't have in Colorado. In early evening, the best thing to do is to sit on the porch and watch. Then watch a little more, and when the evening deepens, the fireflies rise. They live in the ground, come out at night to attract mates and prey. If you want to know more, there's a good article here!

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.

A Different Kind of Lullaby for Poetry Friday

Poetry Friday is hanging out today with Jim at Hey, Jim Hill.

My father-in-law and son, a long time ago, final run!

        My husband’s father was a railroad engineer for Union Pacific in the last years of his long railroad career.  We now have a number of different train memorabilia in our home because of him.  My husband talks of many trips his family took on the trains.  It sounds like such fun and I am also nostalgic about train trips after reading Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express and watching old movies where love and intrigue reside on the rails.  I grew up with others taking those trips and took one myself, with my Girl Scout troop, to Washington D.C.  Imagine the hours of giggling, hardly sleeping there and back!  I am grateful to our leaders who sacrificed their time and maybe sanity by taking us.

It’s a delight when I find prose and poetry about train travel, I read the words, and sometimes find them memorable enough to read to my husband.  Lately, on a website called The Daily Poem, a particular poem appeared with such rhythm and sweetness that I wanted to share it with you, and of course I shared it first with my husband. 

       I also found a little about Alicia Stallings, who is still writing and has published several books of poetry.  She is known as a classical poet, has translated from the Greek and lives with her husband and son in Athens, Greece.  More poems and a short bio can be found at The Poetry Foundation.

Lullaby Near The Railroad Tracks 

                         by Alicia E. Stallings

Go back to sleep.  The hour is small.

         A freight train between stations

Shook you out of sleep with all

         Its lonely ululations.

                        The rest can be found here.

Connections If You Look!

Tuesday Slice of Life is at Two Writing Teachers!

      I thought at first I would only write about my visit to see my son and daughter-in-law and grandson, but there happened to be more connections in this trip than just seeing them.  We had a wonderful long weekend and I had lots of time with my grandson, even played a little pitch and catch football with him as we've done since he was very young.  We saw many things that were both fun and interesting.   
       Perhaps it happens to lots of us, but the terrific thing that happened were the connections I made because I read your blogs.  So-thought I'd write a little poem about it all, and add in the photos, too.  


       I wonder how many connections students can make if we ask them to start looking?




Making connections serendipitously
is always a pleasure -
to me.


We traveled to Lubbock
first time on this plain, to
that Red Raider city of so little rain.

We visited my son and his wife and their boy
that grandson I speak of
so often with joy.


Now finally, at last, we are really here,
and seeing them in their new home
was simply great to be near.

Soccer games for my son
were cheered long ago.
Now it's football and kicking and whistles-great fun!


I ran to take this photo most
as this hydrant caught my eye,
recalling a student blogger's post. 

Tam's post about windmills
was great fun to read.
They were here too; wind is the feed.

We drove out of town to look for and find
fields and fields of cotton growing;
Elsie's post came to mind.

Write your stories and then you share them;
the connections sometimes grow.
Our visit held more than I imagined!

Trip Snapshots

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Snapshots of Our Trip’s Tradition

      When we’ve taken trips with our grandson, we have often developed a routine, usually according to a place we’re visiting, and what’s available nearby for the evening activities.  For example, last year, on the Oregon beach, we were near only one small town, so ended up visiting a variety of small towns in the area, eating the catch of the day for lunch, and spending quite a bit of time watching boats at the docks.  It was a prime interest for an eight year old to see what the sailors were up to.  There were other daily things, like finding each town’s best ice cream cone, and building a fire in the cabin fireplace each night, & having s-mores.  (It’s cold in Oregon, even in July!)

            This year of course, we flew the other way, to the Gulf in Florida, and shared different experiences, always close to our place on Sanibel Island.  As I wrote in the two previous posts, most of this time was spent watching animals and playing in or by the ocean.  We chose outdoor activities like visiting a nearby refuge, learning about an animal rehab hospital, and taking a sunset cruise on a bay – hoping to see dolphins and manatees, and we did!  This trip’s tradition ended as a simple, but grand one, one we looked forward to every day after the first evening.  We ended each day down on the beach to swim one more time, to play a little more in the sand, to look for one last good shell, and to watch and photograph the sunset.  This was the time of day we saw more people than any other time.  There were never many people, but more were there in the evenings to see this spectacular vision of the sun.  It was like being at a fireworks display on Independence Day, lots of ohs and ahs.   Each night the sky offered a particular different look to the sun, and we began to try to describe what was happening, as in ‘the clouds above are shading it enough that it looks hazy’ or ‘the wind earlier cleared the air, so it’s pure sun tonight’.  It became like little poems and I now wish I had written them down.  However, I did manage a good photo each night.

          One definition of the word ‘serendipity’ is “The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”   I love how our trips seem to fall around us, delighting us with the usual because we are really noticing this time; and holding us in the particular place, a little group of three experiencing a small part of our world.

New Adventures - Poetically

Sunday, June 26, 2011


         In a Friday Poetry post, April Halprin Wayland showed a new poetry form called a trimeric.  Click on trimeric to see the post.  I thought it might be fun to capture parts of our trip with our grandson in a different way.  

                         I Watched My Grandson


      “We’re off to new adventures”, I shouted, and

     my husband and my grandson said,

     ‘We’re in!”

     So we flew to Florida, depositing ourselves on an island.

     My husband and my grandson said,

     “Let’s try out those new boogie boards.”

     Then, well-covered with sunscreen, we splashed and laughed ourselves silly.

     “We’re in!”  came the words for cruising Tarpon Bay.

     Amazing birds flew around us at sunset, while within our view

     swam dolphins and manatees.  It’s for precious moments

     that we flew to Florida, depositing ourselves on an island.

     I watched my grandson, already growing

     tall enough to meet my eye.

Beginning of our trip

Friday, June 24, 2011

On Our Way

Up with the sunshine,

Pack, eat, last minute check, drive,

Whew! On way to airport;

love waiting to fly!

Leaving Home – Looking Ahead

Too many lists, too much to do,

Now it’s time for a break

just to be with you.

The ocean swells into my heart,

I love looking outward

until we must depart.

We had a marvelous time in the past week on our trip to Sanibel Island with our grandson.   Exactly what we anticipated happened:  we spent hours on and in the ocean, we looked for and found some special shells, and we saw some animals in the wild more than once.   We tried hard to be part of this unique environment, looking at plants, watching seabirds, and talking with those who lived there year-round.  This is the fifth trip we’ve taken with our grandson, and each time we’ve developed a rhythm to it, yet not always the same one.  We found a grocery and shopped for our favorite foods as well as some special ones.  We planned to eat out whenever a restaurant strikes us as interesting, so the grocery cart is not very full, but full enough with the basics and those few special items.  We stop at a visitor’s center or just look at the wire advertising kiosks outside the store to grab a few local tourist magazines.  The first night, we plan the next day, list what we don’t want to miss during the trip, take a long walk by the ocean, already finding beautiful shells, and walking with a group of ibises, looking for last minute snacks.  We dip our feet in only, kind of like tasting a new recipe before serving.  We know the next full day of our trip will be such an adventure, and it’s been a long day of travel, so this day, it’s early to bed.  The rest of the trip awaits!