The Pothole

 

Well once again it was that time of the year when the ice and dirty remnants of snow finally melted away to reveal the street pavement below. This is the time when the streets turn into a rough wilderness ride, not unlike a bouncy trip through the Baja of Mexico, or a joyous jaunt through remote regions of Patagonia. This corrosive destruction happened during winter when the streets are primed and washed in a briny solution followed by a generous sprinkling of rock salt before 17 ¼ ton sanitation trucks bulldoze their way through the ice and snow and tear up the asphalt like a wedge of Parmesan cheese ripping through a cheese- grater. It is the type of ride when you ride along an unrecognizable surface that is new and previously unseen, with an original topography and you nervously brace yourself for impact, ready to fall into a hole that will jar your teeth, loosen your fillings and rattle your skeleton right down to your very inner core, while you curse yourself for not having read the small print on your newest auto insurance policy!

On my next pass down the same street one pothole had reached a certain level of prominence and notoriety, in fact it had been presented with a sort of pothole “Tony Award” or possibly an “Oscar, for Best New Abyss” in the category of potholes. The pothole was surrounded by 6 men in construction gear holding hot cups of coffee and staring into the hole. The ceremony had already been completed as a fluorescent orange cone had been placed inside the hole although only half of the cone was visible at ground level. The pothole had already consumed the bottom half of the cone, and it still had a ravenous appetite for asphalt. Personally, I prefer creamy ice-cream cones. I recalled the previous Fall when the street had recently been repaved and was smooth and silky as the cars glided along its unblemished surface before the terrible winter came and tortured the road, raucously ripping out its very soul.

In the past I had seen and walked on the Appian Way or Via Apia in Italy, built in 312 BCE to improve the efficiency of troop and war supply movements for the Roman Army. This road was in pristine condition, and it was over 2300 years old! I asked an Italian who spoke English if he had ever seen potholes in the Appian Way? “Sir if I may ask, have you ever seen deep holes in the Appian Way after bad weather?” The man seemed insulted and horrified at this thought and said” NO!” With a look of shock that such an event would be a terrible embarrassment to the memory of the builders of the road and the very thought of such a thing was inconceivable!

Back home again I was driving down that same street and noticed that the pothole had unceremoniously been paved over. Just like that, the neighborhood’s newest topographical land feature, which had become infamous, was gone, tossed away, snuffed out like a political coverup, and its orange trophy removed like Lance Armstrong’s Yellow Jerseys!

Now the pothole crew would need to move on to another pothole to inspect, discuss, and evaluate it, over steaming cups of hot coffee, before submitting their findings in a report to the City Council in triplicate for consideration and further instructions on future action. The collateral damage would entail the local auto- mechanics seeing a drop off in repairs for new tires and wheel alignments, although insurance companies would breathe a sigh of relief as new claims plummeted in number. There would be a downturn in emergency visits to our local dentists, much to their chagrin. The Appian Way had survived 2,313 years so far. Would our newly paved pothole survive 2,313 hours?

JIM-JULY 25’

Cursive

 

 What happens when I pen with care,

Shape each letter, inscribe each word,

Invite the thoughts to form

                and move and

                flow down and

                mingle and spread in

                rivulets that soak into the page?

 

Something stirs.

A question that lies sleeping 

                begins to dream.

It existed before words.

It has never seen its own reflection.

 

The question is dreaming of a river

flowing, gurgling, glistening

                like wet ink.

Shelia

Jade Mixup

 

“Come on. It’s time to get up and get ready for school,” my mother shouted up the stairs. Usually, I would hug my pillow tight and wrap my blanket around my body like a cocoon but not this morning! I threw my pillow on the floor, flung my blanket on the bed and jumped up like a waffle popping out of a toaster.

For the past four weeks prior to today, I nagged my mother so much that she agreed to let me get my ears pierced at only ten years old. All the other girls I was friends with were doing it. My mother said she would allow my best friend’s older sister who is sixteen to use ice and a needle with thread to make the piercings. Four weeks had passed and today, my ears were ready for real earrings.

When I got up for school, I knew my mother brought a pair of earrings for me at work. After I finished getting ready for school, my mother put the earrings in my hands. They were beautiful! They were made of real jade with a little gold swirl in them. I felt so happy! I couldn’t wait to try them on when I got home from school.

School was finally finished for the day. I ran all the way home and flew through the front door. My mother wasn’t there. I saw the jade earrings on the living room chair, and they were all chewed up. Skippy, one of our dogs, had spied the earrings, thought they were a toy, and proceeded to chew them up.

All I could do was let out a long, loud scream. I threw myself on the floor and started crying so hard my lungs burned and my throat was on fire. I was inconsolable. My mother tried to hug me and give me a tissue, but I wouldn’t let her because I was so mad at her for not watching the earrings. I was having a meltdown!

My mother tried to console me by saying, “Stop crying or you’ll make yourself sick.” I thought, “It gets worse than this?” Then she said, “I’ll get you another pair of earrings, but it will take two weeks. If you can stop crying till then, you’ll be wearing them. We’ll buy Skippy a chew toy so he knows what he can and cannot chew up.”

Well, I started to feel better. I took the tissue and wiped my tears away. Two weeks seemed like a long time from now, but I knew I could do it if I counted one day at a time. In no time, the two weeks passed by, and my earrings looked beautiful in my ears. My mother was able to come through like she always did.

Ellen

A Sign in the Clouds

 

Clouds are amazing, wondrous large white puffs of cotton floating in the sky. Growing up, whenever my friends and I needed a rest from playing running games, we would lie down on our backs in the grass and look up at the clouds. We would take turns shouting out what we thought a cloud looked like. “I see a lion,” Dino would say. “No, it’s a bear,” Joannie would say. “It’s a big bouncy ball,” Joannie’s little sister would chime in.

As we got older, many other things in life took the place of cloud gazing. I never really gave it any thought until my sister Jeanne and I took a weekend road trip to the Poconos. This part of the Poconos had many mountains and around these mountains were all shapes and sizes of clouds.

Our reason for this weekend of bonding between my sister and me was our brother had passed recently, and we needed some time of closeness with each other. It was good to be together although we were both concerned about my son, Anthony, who was taking the loss of his uncle especially hard. He had been extremely close to him. Trying to ease our sadness, my sister and I decided to take a trolley ride through the mountains. My sister loved trolleys.

We were about halfway through the ride. We looked up in the sky above the mountains and saw a cloud that looked just like a ram’s head, We both agreed on what the cloud looked like, and I even took a picture of it. Here we were, my sister and I sad about our brother and worried about Anthony when what a coincidence! Anthony’s zodiac sign is Aires the Ram, and that was the exact shape of the cloud.

My sister and I believe in signs. Spiritually, we believed that the ram cloud was sent as a sign by our brother, letting us know that Anthony and he were both going to be alright. As the trolley ride came to an end, I turned and said to my sister, “How far we have come from lying in the grass and cloud gazing as kids.”

Ellen

Strings of Consolation

 

The only person I had known for over fifty-five years who wasn’t a blood relative passed away recently.
His name was Tony. I had known him since I was a teenager. He taught me how to play guitar and sing. He was a calming influence on me — though neither of us realized it at the time.

Our lives sometimes overlapped on purpose, and sometimes drifted apart. We always got along well, and for decades we exchanged Christmas cards. Tony would always send the gift of music — a jazz CD, or something nostalgic, or a reminder of holidays long ago with his parents and sister.

Time passes so quickly, and we hardly notice.

Tony’s niece texted me to say her uncle had passed away, and that the funeral would be in a few days. For some reason, memories of our times together — and of all the time we missed — came flooding back and overwhelmed me. At first, I couldn’t cry. I don’t know why. But eventually the tears came, in little bursts.

It was the memories that struck me most. Memories I hadn’t thought of in years: how Tony was such an excellent musician and singer, with a voice like velvet. He was personable, likable, generous with his knowledge and time.

At the funeral, his sister had heartbreaking outbursts of grief. Along with others, I tried to console her. She was so distraught she nearly fainted. She truly loved her brother.

The priest gave his usual comforting words and added that Tony would now be playing music with the angels. It sounded… delightful.

Everyone in attendance was weeping, upset. We all needed consoling.

After the service, I walked home. The funeral home wasn’t far.
It struck me as a stark reminder: we must cultivate our lives, and strive to be happy and whole while we can.

About a week later, Tony’s sister called and said he’d left behind a few guitars — and she wanted me to have one. I was thrilled. It’s an acoustic Epiphone guitar.

She dropped it off, and the moment I held it, I fell in love with music all over again. I haven’t played in years, but now I’ll buy new strings, a case, some picks, and a book of children’s songs to play for my grandson.

Tony has consoled me with this gift. From his heavenly perch, my dear friend has given me an unexpected inheritance: a beautiful guitar.

As the strings hum, and so does his memory in my heart.

Georgia

Clouds

 

I had a big imagination when I was seven years old. Watching and observing were my ways of discovering the world.

Clouds felt intensely wild to me. I’d notice shapes that looked like bunnies, cats, and dragons. One time I even saw a ship and an angel. “Wow,” I would mutter so no one could hear me. I wanted the silence, so I could feel like part of the sky.

I didn’t have the words at the time, but my whole body was filled with a sense of wonder and wildness. In a strange way, it was peaceful and whole.

As I got older, I learned that fog is actually a cloud that forms very close to the earth. No wonder its density is perfect for Dracula, cemetery beasts, and ghosts.

I am still a skywatcher. I still feel the vastness of the sky and the mystery of fog. I still spot animals, people, and the occasional monster hiding in ordinary, fair-weather cumulus clouds.

This is my private show, belonging only to me—clandestine, hidden, exclusive from the noisy world.

Georgia

AN ICY SUMMER’S DAY IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS

 

A giant ice-cold pitcher of icy water, that is what it felt like after diving into the deepest fishing hole in my mountain stream in Calvin Coolidge State Park. We had been camping at a remote lean-to in the Green Mountains of Vermont for three days, and a bath was in order. Although it was afternoon in early August the stream roiled and rolled down the mountain as it had rained heavily the night before. The white water sprinted to the finish line, cold and crisp and numbing to the fingers and toes. This was an area of Vermont chock-full of white marble with a quarry nearby. The bed of the stream was full of large chunks of marble. The curious fish that had come to see what all the commotion was, did not realize how grand their stream was as they swam enrobed in a pool of white Vermont marble. True it was not the same quality as the Italian Marble quarries that Michelangelo had trudged through in Italy, shopping for trapped figures that he envisioned, but Vermont marble had been used for a number of important government buildings in Washington DC, including the Jefferson Memorial in the United States Supreme Court. Between the supplies of Vermont marble, the services of Calvin Coolidge our 30th president born two miles away, and the Green Mountain Boys that took Fort Ticonderoga from the British in the Revolutionary War, Vermont had done its part for the new country. My teeth were chattering now so I made a speedy exit from my refreshing, fluvial marble bath.

Jim - July 25’

The Birth of the Quince

 

A mad hornet once met a sweet humble bee.

They made love. They made honey.

They swirled through the orchards

And danced on the flowers.

The apple and pear trees grew drowsy

From their blissful buzzing and

Scrambling soft feet.

The blossoms grew drunk

From their own wild nectar.

The orchard rejoiced in the hornet-mad honey.

Shelia

Fireflies

 

When I was a very young girl, maybe four or five years old, I was spending a very hot and humid night inside my mother's friend's car. Why were we sitting inside a car in front of my house with no destination in mind? We could not afford air conditioning in our house with eight brothers and sisters to feed and a mortgage to pay so we sat in the car with the air conditioner on to get cooled off. I don’t remember where my brothers and sisters were, but I always tagged along with my mother. The air conditioning felt so good!

My mother and her friend were talking on and on and the smoke from their cigarettes was irritating my throat. It seemed to get later and later. Eventually, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. When I reopened them, there, flying all around the car were the most beautiful fireflies. The amazing thing was they were all different colors, blue, pink, green, orange and yellow, and all shades of these colors in-between. I was in awe of this beautiful light show given by the fireflies. Their colors sparkled, shimmered, and shone brightly a rainbow of blinking color in the night’s hot, humid night air.

Bursting with excitement, I jumped to the front seat of the car and asked my mother, “Did you just see them? All those different colored fireflies?” She answered,” No my dear little one. I didn't see them and if I did they would only light up yellow. Fireflies don't light up in any other colors.” “You were probably dreaming,” she explained.

I didn't believe her because the “dream” if it was a dream was so real. I didn't believe I had had a dream at all. For many summers, I waited for the multicolored fireflies but only the yellow ones showed up. After a long time of growing up, I had to convince myself it must have been a dream. Yet it never ever felt like it was a dream, not even when I think about it now.

Ellen

Cat Hands

The night was oppressively dark as the man frantically hurried home, each step an urgent plea against the suffocating gloom. The air, heavy with some unseen dread, pressed in around him.

Then, to his left, at the crumbling wall of a forgotten well, he saw it. Not a normal cat, but a feline monstrosity with unmistakably human hands. They glistened with fresh blood, evidence of a freshly torn mouse lying mangled beside it.

The man froze, locked in a trance. He could only stare, paralyzed, as the creature—its head tilting with an unsettling grace, otherwise perfectly normal—began to chew with a chilling precision.

A feral, ancient flicker in the cat's eyes was oddly hypnotizing, compelling the man forward. He felt an irresistible, horrifying curiosity, a sudden, desperate urge to possess this creature, human hands and all.

The cat remained utterly still, a predator patiently waiting. As the man reached out, intending to touch those impossible human hands, his own hand never made it.

In a blur, the cat's human hands shot out, locking around the man's throat. They squeezed, crushing his cries, stealing every last breath. The night suddenly grew colder, darker, as the cat, with its chillingly human hands, began to consume the man, its new, very large meal.

Georgia

A Moment in Time Before Oblivion

 

It happened on a Sunday at 10 o’clock am mass. The eight grade students were all in attendance celebrating their graduation. I turned my head to give a look and one of the boys, when I saw his face, jolted a memory. His long blonde hair, small nose, fair skin and slender body reminded me of my best friend forever when I was in grammar school. I am guessing I was eight and he was 10.

I really loved him like a brother and maybe I even had a young crush on him, too. He always stood up for me when the other kids on the block were making fun of me. He was my protector and wouldn’t let anyone bully me. We’d play all kinds of games on the street with the other kids, and he would always pick me.

We played Ringolevio which consisted of two teams. One team would run away and hide, and the other team would head out to find them and put them in “jail.” When all the opposing team members were in “jail,” the other team would win.

We also played stickball. It was played like baseball except you would use a long wooden stick, like an old broom stick and a pinsey pink ball because they bounced the highest. Two teams would play against each other and the team with the most runs would win.

Marbles were always a popular game and was set up on somebody’s grass. A bunch of kids would dig a hole about five feet away from where they were standing. The kid that got the most marbles in the hole by rolling them across the grass won.

Everyone played flashlight tag! The excitement of it was that you played after dark. One team hid and the other team searched for those hiding with a flashlight. When the entire team was found the game was began again with new teams members.

I played all of these games and more and with the help of my best friend forever, I always got picked first.

My best ever friend was also very funny and always made me laugh.

When I was growing up, my father would always come up with something he needed from the store on a Sunday. He would insist that I go to the deli for him. There was only one, shabby, run down deli that was opened illegally on Sundays. The owner was a bent over little man who had a voice that sounded like gravel was stuck in his throat when he talked. He also had an accent so he was hard to understand and he was extra mean to kids. I dreaded going there but I dreaded my father more.

To make my Sunday visits to the deli more bearable, my best friend, my protector, would always perform these hysterically funny skits about the scary deli man. They were so funny they made me laugh until my stomach hurt. My friend could even make his voice sound like the deli man’s and he would walk around all hunched over. My friend was a master at imitating grown-ups or kids that bothered me or hurt my feelings.

As we moved up through different schools, we lost touch with each other. I remember how much I missed him when I didn’t see him anymore. I was lucky to have a friend like him.

Ellen

Writing Exercises (June 2025)

 

Example of a Polyptoton -- one that is my personal belief:

Never say never because you never know what will happen.  

Example of Hyperbole: She is always on her phone.

Two Listening Exercises:

Try to write your thoughts and feelings after hearing this piece of music: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:\

I listened and, in my mind, entered church. Quiet, peaceful, hopeful, in the arms of the Lord.  

Listening to music from Disney’s film Fantasia:

I have listened to and watched the 84 years old Disney movie Fantasia music at least once a year for 30 years. This is somewhat of a tradition and a slip back in time to a lighter, simpler way of life. My kids were small then and we would gather around the TV and place the tape in the tape machine with popcorn and iced tea. Tape machines don't exist anymore.

The pieces played in the movie were written by a composite of classical composers and were carefully selected and performed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

1. This music makes me feel young, safe, happy, encouraged and hopeful. I will remember and listen again and again.

From Georgia