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 [ ... ]

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 [ ... ]

Responses to writing prompts can be so unpredictable. Our primary goal in WFW at the Cancer Support Community-Delmarva is to heal the spiritual wounds caused by Cancer. Usually the responses are serious, very serious. But, sometimes, they’re not, and that’s what can make them so unpredictable, and so much fun. In a recent meeting I asked for a story that contained one or more of the following words:
       Cancer                              dog or cat                         gun or knife
        very distant relative          banjo                                abusive [ ... ]

         Robin’s Smile
 She can’t clap with just one hand,
She can’t click her heels with just one leg,
But Oh, how she can smile!
 
Picture yourself meditating,
Calmed, refreshed.
Then you hear that tiny bell,
 
That’s Robin’s smile.
This is not specifically about Cancer; it’s about overcoming any adversity, overcoming it with grace. My wife and I were attending a 6 week workshop on living with a chronic condition. In the class was a young lady living with a condition which requires daily home dialysis, a condition [ ... ]