Blue

Here's a poem that sums up the last few weeks:

BLUE

This is one of those days when everything just seems to have an edge of blue around it.
Nothing out of the ordinary has happened, but I can’t shake the slight sadness that is hanging around.
I guess you could put it off to “hormones” or “emotions” or whatever you want to call it, but I don’t really think it has much to do with any of that.
No, it’s just that cloud of free-floating unhappy that strikes all of us sometimes and today is my day.
Boohoo.


I seem to have hit a small plateau, no wieght lost in the last few days.

Red

Sylvie has asked me several times in her life, “What’s your favorite color?” and in recent years has answered her own question with, “Red, right?” and I can tell her with all honesty that, “Yes, red is my favorite color.” When she asks why, I always say, “It’s always been my favorite", but I have put my finger on the why. It’s not so hard.
What is red that makes it my favorite? Well, let’s see, red is: clown shoes and noses, my favorite childhood swimming suit, the sun on a summer night that looks like it takes up half the sky, the moon on a stormy morning that foretells trouble and lights the clouds. Red is baby cheeks and glamorous lipstick and painted fingernails. It’s valentines and poppies and the color of love. Its sweet summer cherries and crisp fall apples and that weird cake called velvet. Red is a shirt I got for Christmas with my first real pair of jeans when I was six. It’s the color of hair I always wish I had. It’s that rind around real bologna that you have to peel off before you eat it. Gouda cheese has a red rind too. I like that. It’s the color of the sand on one of the beaches in the town where I grew up and of the roads on Prince Edward Island where we took a great vacation. It’s the color of my first bike. My Grandpa rebuilt it and my Dad taught me to ride it when there was still snow on the ground.
I don’t know if the color of so many of my favorite things makes them special, or if they have made red special. It really doesn’t matter. Red to me is so many things that I love. It will always be my favorite. I will enjoy finding many more things in my life that are rosy, ruddy, ruby, and beautiful. I love it and thank God for it. Red, to me, is happiness. Anne

What Can I Give My Children

Sometimes I see my children, and I feel a little sad,
to know the things so dear to me that they may never have:
To lay out in their own backyard and gaze up at the stars,
to see the yellow Venus, or the bright red-orange of Mars.
To wade for blocks in a crystal crick or reap lilacs that are free to pick,
in fields that lay unclaimed.
To recognize the folks in town, black or white, red or brown,
and often know their names.
To cherish movie theaters on a summer afternoon, the coolness there was rare,
to travel miles on your bike, or train most anywhere.
Games and shows that you invent,
then play out with your friends.
The hot sunshine of late July,
you thought would never end.
To feel the joy of doing nothing, your time not crammed with strife,
to simply learn to be, to know, to live your life.
To walk in woods, trespassers not, to see with more than eyes,
to spend an August evening catching flashing fireflies.
If I could give them some of this, then happy I would be,
for then I know my children could know more than "Mom",
and maybe understand...me.

I chose this for my first post because it sums up my childhood and the fear that seems pervasive in our society. The fear that keeps our kids from some of the experiences we had. I wrote this last year for the local library's poetry slam.