A Beautiful Christmas, Decorations Everywhere, Festive Garlands Hanging, Inspiring Joyous Kinder Laughter, Moving Non-believers On-toward Peace, Quieting Restive Souls, Tempering Unrest.
                                                                          Very Worry-free Xmas, 
                                                                                             Your Zitherists  
If you haven’t already noticed, there are 26 words, written in grammatical sentences, each beginning with successive letters of the alphabet, starting with A and ending with Z. Pat Boran, an Irish poet, gets the credit for this exercise our group is doing over the holidays. It’s in his book, “The Portable Creative [ ... ]

                        Marion’s Garden of Hope
                   Last year’s garden was bleak,
                  A few annuals were all she could do,
                  Mammograms and Lumpectomies,  Radiation and Reconstruction
                  They took up most of her time.
 
                 This year’s sun is stronger and brighter,
                 She’s planting perennials now.
                 Gaillardia and Primula, Rudbeckia and Hosta,
                 Perennials for all those years to come!
 
I wrote that poem in 2007. It was written about my wife’s battle with Breast Cancer. Her mental strength through life’s tests, not just dealing with her Cancer, is what keeps me going. Death of an [ ... ]

Deep, deep inside us, are words, words just waiting and hoping to be released. They might not be about your Cancer, but they wait just the same.
This poem, written for last week’s meeting, dwells on a distant memory. But it reads as though it just happened.
 
 
Mom’s Heart Attack
 
My dad’s call came at night.
“No need to rush up here;
She’ll be all right.”
 
I left home with fears and hopes.
Orange and yellow woods lined the highway–
She was in the autumn of her [ ... ]

Joanne was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Dec. of 2007, received chemo treatments from Jan.-April in 2008 and had some maintenance treatments after that. She has been in our WFW group for several years. She can, and does, write about her “Cancer time” as though it happened yesterday. But, happily, she can also write beautiful essays like this one that attest to her healing spirit.
The Clothes Line
Why does the new white retractable cord that runs from the [ ... ]

    Our latest  home prompt really brought back memories:
Were you ever in a contest or competition? What prompted you to participate? What made the experience meaningful to you? 
    In 1983 I ran the Boston Marathon.
    It all started in 1977. I was 48 years old, one year shy of the age of my father when he died of a heart attack. Frightened because he and both of his sisters all died before 50 of heart problems, I started jogging, [ ... ]