Category Archives: Fun

Reckoning (21)

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Pucker up and kiss me. Delight me. I laugh at myself in the mirror. No demon on my shoulder today telling me what is wrong with me, why I don’t fit. Only the better angels who wonder if maybe I have just found myself in the wrong places with people who are so poised I feel less than, alien. I am so not poised, I think, laughing again at my reflection, loving this familiar face I see. “You have other strengths,” the not-demon whispers in my ear, and my face softens. Yes, I think. Yes. I have other strengths.

[Another piece from our spontaneous writing group. The words drawn for us to use were: alien, demon and pucker.]

Unexpected Guests (9)

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Happy house finch chatter
louder than usual
wakes me in my work
I peek around the doorway
to see a dozen of them
sitting on the open louvers
enjoying the cooler air
alive and dear and
charming beyond belief.

Waggish Mind (3)

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I lean over, rub lotion into my calves, my shins. I am behind on my sleep, tight from too many hours on my laptop. I dangle from my waist in the small bathroom, feel my spine lengthen. My body is stiff, foreign. I abandoned my yoga in January, maybe even before I got sick, and I have yet to return to it. As I come to standing, I think, I’ll have to plan to do my yoga through the next pandemic. (As if I have to wait until the next one to begin again. As if I can’t begin today or tomorrow. As if the idea of the next one is an everyday thought. As if anyone but me would think this is funny.) I look at myself in the mirror and grin.

We don’t care. We don’t have to. (2)

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I yell into the phone. “I hate you!” This is my fourth try today with AT&T’s torturous automated system. I’ve walked through this untold times in recent weeks. My mother’s phone keeps going out because of the rain, old cables they don’t plan to replace. Today, the delightful system keeps routing me to a customer service queue and then tells me they’re closed. After I hang up, I stomp down the hallway muttering. “You are so Lily Tomlin’s phone company,” I say, and a half-smile works its way up inside me.

Bird with Feather (59)

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I’m just getting up, sitting up in the middle of my bed. There’s a small bird perched on the top of the wooden fence outside my sliding glass door. His back is to me, and his stance looks awkward, as if he is a bit off kilter. It looks like there’s something in his mouth. He repositions his feet on the rough wood, turns himself around. I see he is a house sparrow, a big grey and white mourning dove feather held in his beak with a firm grip. It’s so surprising I almost laugh out loud. He looks like that notecard I bought online from Pomegranate, the one I love so much I bought a second box, a colorful illustration of a bird with a feather as big as he is. I’ve never seen a bird carrying such a big feather, not in real life. I sit here grinning at him. He fidgets a little more, repositioning his feet again on the fence. Then he flies off across the courtyard and disappears with his treasure.

Late Night Work (55)

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The heater shuts off
and the quiet dark world
wraps around me.
Finally after a frenzied day
and an evening nap
I accomplish something
concrete for my colleagues.
Time now
for a late-night snack
Jerusalem artichokes
pinenuts
a dried persimmon
and the good book
waiting for me
beside my bed.

Desert Winter (45)

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The desert is funny, you know, the way it is summer in late winter, not desert summer thank goodness but ordinary summer like in normal places, so we can leave the doors open and feel the warm air in the early dark and really what can be better than warm nights, completely delightful, not hot nights of course, not like summer nights here which are dreadful, awful, so sometimes even on these silky nights in late winter it is a bit troubling really, thinking of the summer nights when it can be 111 degrees at 10:30 at night and so then it can be hard to truly relish these early warm nights because I just want it to be cool as long as it can be knowing what is coming and staying and living here those six brutal months of summer.

[This is a bit of the piece I wrote for my class. I’m imitating Gertrude Stein from a selection of her letters in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thorton Wilder.]