Quill #75 - Halloween Memories #1

There are always houses you don't visit.

Houses with no porch lights are generally avoided on Halloween night. You expect fun tricks from well-lit domiciles, but nothing mean or nasty.

When I was eight or nine, I went trick-or-treating to a well-lit house. Halfway up the jumblied sidewalk, the porch lights went out. In the sudden darkness, I fell. Sharp pain lanced my palms and I found myself picking thumb tacks from my hands. Crying, I went back to the car and showed my mother. We left and never returned to that house.

I won an award!

This is my first, possibly only ever, award, thanks to Tress at Jumble Mash.


The award is for being a versatile blogger. Who knew I was versatile? I'm absolutely thrilled. I don't care if I'm being silly. I feel like I won the lottery. Yay! Thank you very much, Tress!


There are, however, rules to these things, as follows:

1) Thank and link back to the person who gave me this award.
2) Tell everyone 7 things about myself
3) Pass this award to 15 other bloggers
4) Contact the bloggers that I've picked and tell them about the award

Seven things about myself:

1. I love poetry more than any other form of writing, especially haiku, because each poem is a puzzle that must be solved to be understood.
2. As a child, I abhorred assignments from teachers that utilized my name. I knew more about robins than any child should ever have to learn, unwillingly.
3. My favorite movie is "The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao" with Tony Randall and Barbara Eden. Even as a child, the philosophy of the story resonated in my soul. I was entranced by Merlin's magic far more than anyone in the story.
4. I know how to fish, from baiting the hook to gutting and cleaning the fish. I've been fishing since I was old enough to hold a bamboo pole, thanks to my dad, and I carry a pocket fisherman in my vehicle, just in case the opportunity arises.
5. I was a good shot. Whether it came to target practice with guns, bows, or basketballs, I was pretty darn accurate. I couldn't dribble worth beans, but there was only one location on a half-court that gave me much trouble - directly under the basket.
6. I've been running AD&D games since 1980. My personal universe and system is so heavily modified from 1st edition that the main resemblance is names of spells.
7. I'm part of a theatre teaching troupe called Catwalk Muse. We put together theatre workshops for all ages, intended to teach every part of the stage experience from building sets, makeup, warmups, stagecraft, and more.

Alright, on to the next part - choosing 15 award recipients. I'm somewhat new to blogging and have been all over the map looking at other people's work. Hopefully, I'll choose well and some new bloggers will join this ever-expanding ring of fun.

I choose:

1. Aux DemiLunes
2. Barefoot in Portland
3. Cat in the Bag
4. Chow Down Right
5. Coffee With the Hermit
6. I Can Has Catboy?
7. I Make Soap
8. Luke, I Am Your Father
9. Plus Size Barbie
10. RockinJer
11. Sixbears in the Woods
12. The Day Flew By So Fast It Was a Blur
13. The View From Treesong's
14. Vagabond Creations
15. Wandering Amylessly

There were others I could have chosen. One of the criteria I used to make my choice easier was current activity. I could easily have 15 more honorable mentions.

Off to write all the winners, next.

Thank you, again, Tress!

Quill #74 - Solipsism, Or Reverse? (2010)

When my husband sleeps
His body drifts away.
I can turn over in bed
And pound the mattress on his side.
I strike nothing.
I can stand and look for him,
Even moving the covers,
And he doesn't exist.
When his work calls for him,
Because he hasn't yet arrived there,
I can honestly say he must have
Already left because
He is not in bed.
But the moment I call his name,
He wakes, reappears, and answers,
From the very spot I was hitting,
Under the covers I moved to seek him.
And he's frustrated now
Because he must hurry,
Speed everything up,
Or the boss will not believe us again,
The next time he disappears.

Quill #73 - Chip Off the Old Block

One night, a few winters ago, I was kept awake particularly late, chatting with a friend through our computers. I heard a loud crash and investigated. On my bed, right where I would have laid my head, was a very large, heavy chunk of plaster from the ceiling of my bedroom. It was part of a much larger section, not only what landed on the bed. The piece missing from the ceiling, including the pumpkin-sized chunk that could have killed me if I'd been sleeping when this happened, was exactly - exactly - the size and shape of a child's coffin.

Quill #72 - Spectre (2010)

A woman in a lacy white dress
Sat at a spinning wheel.
When I walked into my playroom

She nodded to me.
I was shy and ignored her,
Choosing some toys from my chest
To play on the braided rag rug.

She watched me as she worked.
After a while I drew some courage.
"Are you a friend of my mother's?"
I asked.
The lady smiled and stopped work.
"Lela knows me," she said.

I stood and walked to her,
Almost brushing the wheel.

Up close, her dress was like sheer curtains,
Sunlight shone through, making no shadows.
I put out my hand to touch
Nothing and saw nobody but momentary glare
From the windows behind me.

Perhaps I was lucky she disappeared
In the aurora of the day,
Before a shadow that meant me no harm
Could prick my finger.

I was not ready, then,
For the hundred year sleep.

Quill #71 - Soap Dish #3

I realize that no house today would be built without one or a dozen showers in it but there was a time when an indoor bathtub was the bee's knees. I grew up in a house built around 1910, with 47 bedrooms, plenty of extra closet space, and one teeny-weeny little bathroom with a tub. There was also a drain in the floor of the storm cellar if the men were desperate and didn't mind fending off spiders, snakes, coyotes and rabid bunnies.

I took baths until I left home. The occasional exscursion to relatives, or even rarer motel stays, acquainted me with the workings of indoor showers, but they were the makings of fairy land and required large amounts of an absinthe-colored paper that was seldom found in our household. My parents finally installed a shower the year after I graduated and went to college. I really have to wonder at the timing of some events.

Anyway, I was finally away from home. I was at college. I didn't have to use Zest green bars as my sole brand of soap anymore. I could explore a little on shampoo and deodorant brands. The world was my oyster shell! I went power crazy, to be honest. I bought Irish Spring green soap and shampoos that cost more than $1.29! I showered and scrubbed all over myself every day and I thought I was CLEAN! And I smelled GOOD! And I walked around campus like I owned the joint because I was a free and independant WOMAN.

And then, one day, the boys in my dorm decided all the girls needed to be showered. Nobody paid attention to me, so I knew I was safe. I sat in the common room snickering about all the girls being carried, fully clothed, into their... Hey! Wait! Not me!

Yes, I was given the treatment not once, not twice, but three times. I even hid in my dorm closet with the doors shut to avoid the third time, but my roommate ratted me out, the incipient chemical engineer loser that she was. Only, by this time, I was pretty damp already. This time, when the guys picked me up by my bare arms, the dead skin just rolled along the length of my upper arm, completely shaming me. I turned bright red, took a deep breath and nodded, then told them to give me that shower.

And when they were done fooling around with all the females on floor, I took a real shower, and scrubbed hard, and tried to understand why I hadn't been the clean and independent woman I had thought I was.

Turns out, I have skin that really does have to soak a while. Zest was the only soap that would actually get that dead skin off me. My grandma and I talked about it and it was true for her, too. I know this is not true for everyone and many people - well, I don't talk to THAT many people about my... about... never mind - don't believe that someone can scrub hard with a rough washcloth and not get clean, regardless of the cleaning agent used for the battle against dirty bodies.

But, when I switched back to Zest, back to the cheap harsh shampoo my mother used, and the cheap deodorant she'd always bought for me, I actually was a lot cleaner than before. This isn't an ad for Zest. In fact, that brand has changed formulations often enough that I'm just about ready to learn how to make lye soap.

-----

My parents loved to go camping and fishing. There are home movies on 8MM film of my aunt and me wearing bikinis, standing in a Colorado mountain stream, with her bouncing and dangling her... niece's little six month piggies into frigid water, hanging onto the sheer cliffside by the tips of her toes and willpower alone! Actually, the camera was turned sideways to get a better shot; we only look like we're walking straight up a cliff. But, that wasn't my first camping trip. By then, I was already experienced. Every summer, like the turn of the seasons or something, we were on the lake or in the woods, tramping and fishing and whittling and whistling, except I couldn't whistle, and doing whatever Dad thought would elevate our childhood souls. If he caught an eight-pound trout or two along the way, so much the better.

Well, when you're a kid, you shower when your parents tell you to shower and not a moment before, by God! Not only did we not really like campground public communal shower facilities, it just would have plain been weird for a ten-year-old to pop up with, "Hey, Mom and Dad, how about we hit the showers tonight?"

So, one night, around that age, I was laying in bed in my grandparents's camper and I was itching all over my body. I rubbed at one of the spots on my neck and dirt rolled away. That spot didn't itch as much anymore. I decided to rub more away. It worked! I was getting less itchy, and I spent the next half hour or so trying to remove dirt, until my grandmother hissed at me in fourteen decibels of pain to go to sleep.

Next day, Mom came to me and asked me why I'd spent the night before touching myself all over. At first, I didn't even know what she meant, but light finally dawned, and I said I was dirty. My mother gave me the strangest look for about a full minute. It was a very suspicious and calculating evil eye and, back then, I hadn't seen it enough to evaluate its meaning. At that moment in time, I just knew I'd done something horrible. I didn't know why rubbing my skin to get clean was such a big deal. If Grandma was really upset about dirt on her sheets, I'd probably be doing the laundry, anyway.

After a good long scrutiny, Mom finally asked me what I'd meant about being a dirty girl. I swear to you, it took me a number of years before I finally put together what they THOUGHT I was doing that night. Every time I found out my parents and grandparents had minds that strayed to gutters, it was a shock to me. Once I explained a little more, I was exonerated and told to quit rubbing myself, which wasn't a problem because she also ordered nightly showers. And, though showers taken while wearing a bathing suit didn't get a person truly clean, they did take care of the itching problem.

Quill #70 - Moore on my Mind (2010)

(with apologies to Christopher Moore)

"I keep telling you, Babd,"
She whined resignedly,
"It's just not as good as ham."
She sighed again, barely able to remember.
"And New Meat was mostly gone
By the time we got back to him."
Babd chewed thoughtfully.
The sisters grimly pulled another
Bone from the mostly bare corpse,
Cracked it open for marrow,
And slurped the essence companionably.
Even sewer harpies didn't have to fight,
Constantly.
Ham or not, New Meat was better than rat.
"Next time," Babd wheedled,
Conceding one point,
"No Bummer!"
All three ravens nodded.