Today’s prompt was to pick one grouping of people in Seurat’s painting, ” Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte” and describe their fictional conversation regarding a discussion of Cancer. This was one of the stories:
The two women were together at the water’s edge of La Grande Jatte. one standing and one sitting. Marie, sitting on the grass, said, “I don’t know what to do, I can’t get Jacques to get a colonoscopy. He complains about rectal pain, but he does [ ... ]

                    BIOPSY
With every Biopsy, a part of me dies,
A part of my body, a part of my spirit,
Like a rock beaten down by the constant drip-drip of water,
Slowly, surely, wearing, gnawing..
Variable is the location,
Constant is the anger, the worry, the despair.
A needleful of my Prostate, a snip of my skin, a scrape of my mouth..
Death of tissue, death of psyche.
 
The bliss of benignity, or the malice of malignancy,
Which will it be?
Push the pause button on your life,
Don’t start anything new!
When, [ ... ]

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 [ ... ]