10 August 2023 (the way)

the way some

childhood memories stick

burdocks

24 March 2023 (still listening)

still listening

to music from my childhood

spring rain

12 December 2022 (childhood)

childhood memories

coated with powdered sugar

marzipan stollen

26 May 2022 (child’s guide)

a child’s guide

to constellations

first starflowers

26 February 2020 (cribbage)

Another senryu from a series about games I played as a kid:

cribbage

the binary nature

of relationships

24 February 2020 (cards)

From an ongoing series that I’ve just started working on, on the theme of childhood games.

war

our games as kids

more physical

January 12: Stump Pass Beach State Park

Finding sharks' teeth

among the shells--

childhood memory revived.

Here's my grandfather and I collecting sharks' teeth in 1980 at nearby Englewood Beach

Here's my mom collecting sharks' teeth today

December 23: Rainbows

When I was a kid, a shop in downtown Camden sold little cut-glass prisms in different shapes--snowflake, teardrop, crescent moon, star--and whenever I got my allowance I'd head there to buy a new one. I tacked them up in a row, hanging them off fishline in my bedroom window so they'd catch sunlight and scatter little rainbows across my wall. This was back in the 70s, when rainbows were cool (along with Smurfs and the Bee Gees). I had rainbow stickers and window decals, but preferred the "real" rainbows made by my sun-catching prisms.

I'd forgotten the pleasure I would get from those spinning bits of rainbow until I unwittingly replicated the experience. A friend recently sent me a giant "diamond" of cut glass, which I've kept on my desk as a pretty paperweight. While reading on the couch this sunny day, I was surprised to see little patches on rainbow dancing on the wall. After figuring out that they weren't related to anything on the Christmas tree, I realized that winter sunlight coming through the bare branches in the backyard was being "caught" by my diamond paperweight and strewn across the house in rainbows.

Winter sunlight
fractured by cut glass:
living rainbows.

October 10: Toast

Home alone, making toast for dinner. Sometimes just a little thing will send me back to childhood...

My grandmother used to
cut my buttered toast
into "soldiers."

July 28: Katydid

We left the porch light on when we went out last night, and upon our return, discovered dozens of  moths, flies, and other winged creatures flitting around our front door. Among them, clinging to the screen, was one leaf-green katydid, a beautiful, graceful insect. We tried to catch it so that I could get a closer look, but it jumped away into the jungle of lilies alongside the porch. The voice of the katydid is a familiar part of the summer twilight insect chorus--I've definitely heard many more than I've seen. 

Here's a katydid that looks very similar to last night's visitor, albeit a species from India pretending to be a leaf:

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (Vishalsh521)

I remember feeling quite envious when my best friend Katy, who lived across the street from me when I was five, told me that there was an insect named after her--the katydid--which even sang her name. But then I realized it was OK because one of my mother's childhood nicknames for me was Cricket, so I had an "insect name" too. Now I learn, while looking for a photo of a katydid, that katydids, though they look a lot like grasshoppers, are most closely related to crickets and are called bush crickets in Great Britain. If only I'd known that at age five; it might have sparked a career in entomology. (I also learned that katydid species as a group are referred to as tettigoniids. Try to use that word in a sentence today!)

Under the porch light

green katydid shines brightly

amid dusty moths.

July 7: Old mill

My husband and I have a new writing room: a rented office/studio space in the renovated Knox Woolen Mill building in the heart of downtown Camden. Our windows are directly over one of the dams that used to be part of the millworks. In fact, the controls to the dam itself are located in a corner of our studio, with a little sign indicating how long it takes to raise or lower the dam. Since we've gotten a lot of rain, the river is still running high. The drop over the dam is substantial, creating a vigorously churning waterfall that will serve us effectively as a white noise machine when we're hard at work.

The big windows of our third floor studio frame an interesting view. On the other side of the river sits the part of the old mill that was converted to condominiums, several of which boast nice decks. A mature oak tree grows up through a hole cut into one deck, its leafy branches blocking a view of Mount Battie which we will undoubtedly enjoy come winter. If you lean out the window, the mill's smokestack rises high into blue sky above the mill buildings and the fast-moving river. On the mill pond of calm water behind the dam, a family of geese hangs out amid the reeds. And on Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the Camden Farmers' Market is visible through the trees in the mill parking lot.

When I was five, we lived for a while with my great-grandmother in her apartment across the street from the mill. It was still very much a working mill then, and I remember hearing the daily whistles for lunchtimes and shift changes, as well as the machinery clacking away day and night. I had to walk past the mill to get to kindergarten, and I always hurried over the dark, turbulent river as it flowed beneath the mill and under the street on its way to the harbor. Thanks to my great-grandmother's vivid warnings, I could imagine all too well what would happen to me if I fell in. Now my studio overlooks that very stretch of river. Hopefully it will once again spark my imagination.

White water: white noise.
I lose my thoughts in the falls,
river of childhood.

View of the old mill buildings from a neighboring office