Words

Cooking and gardening are the creative passions that consume most of my free time; they are messy but rewarding hobbies that let me get my hands dirty and balance out the sterility of the office environment where I spend my waking hours during the week.

But the launch of this blog in 2015 unleashed another old passion: writing.  Stories, essays, remembrances, poems and little haikus have been popping out of me at random and unpredictable frequencies since I was about 3. I didn’t realize that this love of writing was a sleeping giant within me, until it awoke!

Are you interested? Below are links to a few examples, or you can peruse my increasingly prolific portfolio of ponderings via Stories and Poems in the menu bar above.

Stories

How Far is Heaven? Remembering Kim-n-Steve

My brother and I used to joke that if we wrote a book together, its title would be Surviving the Perfect Childhood. Its theme would be dealing with the real world after emerging from the tranquil, untroubled, near-paradise of our early lives. This little memoir is a brief look at our wonderful childhood journey and how he reached out to me after death to share a beautiful song, Heaven.  Read the story here.

A Hurricane Rita Story:  No One Understands a Mom Like Another Mom

It has been ten years since the stark horrors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans influenced thousands of Southeast Texas residents to flee the oncoming Hurricane Rita just a few weeks later. This is a true story, a quiet little reminiscence, of two moms who evacuated together with young sons and learned a little bit about life and friendship along the way.  Read the story here.

More memoir-based stories are here. And it seems that grief is a particularly strong muse for me and inspires some of my best work…I’m not sure what to think about that…but anyway, here’s a collection of writings that attempt to deal with grief and, more importantly, express the underlying joy of the relationships that are the reason for the grief.

Poetry

my days by the water

This rough little poem came spilling out of me as I thought of those halcyon sand-ridden childhood days and so many memories flooded in. Everything seemed so safe, so permanent, so lively-lovely in our tiny town of 600, Gilchrist, Texas. Read it here.

Celebrating Ruth

There was a large gathering for my grandmother’s 90th birthday in 2010, and I wrote a poem at that time to celebrate her life.

Read the poem here, along with its original introduction, an amusing look at how the world has changed since she entered it in 1920.

Now You Know

A short poem honoring my brother’s memory on his 49th birthday.

Click here to read it.

Haiku

So much to write haiku about – so little time!  Actually, there’s plenty of time…writing haiku is what gets me through long waits in longer lines, traffic snarls and unpleasant medical procedures.  It also helps me put my smile back on in other annoying situations, like when there is only one ripe avocado left on a holiday weekend – and a barely-clothed girl-child snatches it.

Haiku for July 4 at the Grocery Store

Chic in Daisy Dukes
Bends, grabs last avocado
O’ say can you see!?

More haiku is here.

The Grill-Meister’s Writing

The Glover Gardens Grill-Meister is an author and a renaissance man.  Click here to view the books page on his author site.  Note:  it’s Sci-fi that is palatable to people who don’t like Sci-fi.  Kinda like his smoked salmon is revered by people who don’t like fish.  Go figure…