Tag Archives: Wordpress writing prompt

Sew and Sew

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The challenge today is to depict a “connection.” With this photograph, I’m showing you how crocheted edgings are being connected to pillowcases. On the occasion of my mother’s funeral, Dad told us five sisters to go through some of Mom’s things to pick out something we’d like. We went through the drawers in the buffet where she kept her large tablecloths and found these edgings which her mom, my grandmother, crocheted. I’m guessing they were done some time in the 60s. She died late in that decade.

I took the crochet work home and cleaned them up because after all that time, they’d yellowed. Now, after connecting the edgings to the pillowcases, each of my siblings and their spouses are going to get a little bit of Grandma after all these years.

They’ll also have a connection to Grandma they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make.

lace on pillowcases

 

Ode To A Wintry Day

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I offered this post earlier this year when WordPress prompted us to write an ode to someone or something we love. (Extra points if it was poetry!) I happen to love the way snow falls and lies like a blanket on open fields. I’ve seen snow fall so heavily it seems to be sugar-coating the rows and rows of pines in that open field.

So here’s the poem I wrote years ago to describe what I saw. It seems especially appropriate since today is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.

Snow Man
By Paula Geister

Step by step, a monstrous form
All arms and legs and head,
Takes his silent walk to the woods
To rest a bit, to find a bed.

The hulk takes giant steps tonightSnow covered forest of pine trees
On creaking snow like Styrofoam.
His breath is frozen in his beard,
But he presses on toward home.

Winter’s king all alone, he takes
The gloom from shrouded nights.
Stepping into the woods, he makes
The trees absorb his light.

An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse

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Susan, the manager at our local library branch knows my book tastes. Through our many conversations, she even knows a lot of the books I’ve read. So when she told me about the release of a book about Harper Lee , I told her to put it on hold for me as soon as it became available.

It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee” by Marja Mills, reveals just about everything we want to know about the author who took her Pulitzer and seemingly disappeared. Over the years, I’d heard her called a recluse. Many asked why, if she was so talented, she didn’t write another novel. People also commented that “If your first novel won such a prestigious award, why bother to write another?”

Deciding to not be out in the limelight was probably just a part of Lee’s personality. Maybe going to cocktail parties and having to answer the same questions repeatedly became wearying to her.

Mills’ book about Nelle (Harper is Lee’s middle name) explains a lot of what people wanted to know. But in her opinionated and straightforward way, Nelle said her life hadn’t really been one of seclusion at all. She began to stay in her New York City home less frequently and eventually moved back home to Monroeville, Alabama with her sister, Alice. She knew the people well in the town where they grew up. Life there seemed to make her content.

Now, exciting news for fans says that another book written by Harper Lee will be released in July. “Go Set a Watchman,” a sequel to  Mockingbird, is creating just as much of a stir as when Lee left the public eye following publication of her prize-winning novel. And the stir doesn’t seem to be all positive.

It seems no one has ever been nor will ever be happy with whatever happens.

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning novel published in 1960 is my favorite story. There are many which rank right up there with it, but I’ve read this story three times and I can’t even remember how many times I’ve watched the movie.

For my part, if Harper Lee wrote another book about Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout, I’m not going to question it. I just hope my friend Susan asks if I’d like to be put on hold for it. How could I say “no”?

It’s an offer I can’t refuse.