Circling Through This Life

In a few days it will be the 100th anniversary of my grandmother’s birth.  She was a writer: a poet.  I remember when I was 10 and she gave me one of those Mead Spiral notebooks.  She told me I should write it in it everyday.  She encouraged me to write poems and short stories.  Many of her poems were stories: memories shared and treasured.  Today I was working on more cleaning and de-cluttering from the Great Bedroom Swap of 2012 and I came across this poem.   It doesn’t have a date but I know it would have been written after September 2003.  I suspect that it was written for my daughter’s 8th birthday, which would have been in 2005. My Granddaughter [Turtlegirl], age 8, is my [great] granddaughter. She lives so far away She came to visit me one summer. In the creek and on 4 wheeler she climbed the mountain She liked this way to play 2 Me and my 3 sisters and 2 cousins In the creek we did play Mama said when she was little at grandpa and...

I love poetry.  I think I was in the 4th grade  (or maybe it was the 5th)when I began to love poetry.  I had a teacher who required us to write a poem.  She worked with us and helped us to polish our little poems.  My poem was published!  I actually got paid $5 from one newspaper and $5 from another newspaper and it was part of the district wide poetry book.  My grandmother even got it published in her town paper. That summer my grandmother gave me a spiral bound notebook and told me to write.  Her advice was to write daily.   Somewhere, buried under this and that, I think I still have that notebook.  What silly little things I wrote but oh the memories of showing my work to Grandma. In 9th grade, I had a teacher who loved literature and she taught me how to love literature.  She introduced me to Shakespeare and Dickens and the poetry of Robert Frost.   I would *never* have admitted to *any* of my classmates just ho...

I've gone and done it now. I've entered a whole new world. I thought this first post should be a musing about the title. I once wrote a poem that had the line: we go round and round, circling through this life, some people life their life in a dream. The poem was about people who spent so much time "dreaming" that they missed out on the wonders of life happening in the here and now. I don't remember all of the poem and I don't remember if I even have a copy of it anymore but as I pondered what to name this blog I kept coming back to "and we go round and round circling through this life". I make no promises as to the frequency of posts.