28 May 2024 (deep in a dream)

deep in a dream

of my childhood home . . .

blue damselflies

10 August 2023 (the way)

the way some

childhood memories stick

burdocks

24 March 2023 (still listening)

still listening

to music from my childhood

spring rain

12 December 2022 (childhood)

childhood memories

coated with powdered sugar

marzipan stollen

26 May 2022 (child’s guide)

a child’s guide

to constellations

first starflowers

26 February 2020 (cribbage)

Another senryu from a series about games I played as a kid:

cribbage

the binary nature

of relationships

24 February 2020 (cards)

From an ongoing series that I’ve just started working on, on the theme of childhood games.

war

our games as kids

more physical

January 12: Stump Pass Beach State Park

Finding sharks' teeth

among the shells--

childhood memory revived.

Here's my grandfather and I collecting sharks' teeth in 1980 at nearby Englewood Beach

Here's my mom collecting sharks' teeth today

December 23: Rainbows

When I was a kid, a shop in downtown Camden sold little cut-glass prisms in different shapes--snowflake, teardrop, crescent moon, star--and whenever I got my allowance I'd head there to buy a new one. I tacked them up in a row, hanging them off fishline in my bedroom window so they'd catch sunlight and scatter little rainbows across my wall. This was back in the 70s, when rainbows were cool (along with Smurfs and the Bee Gees). I had rainbow stickers and window decals, but preferred the "real" rainbows made by my sun-catching prisms.

I'd forgotten the pleasure I would get from those spinning bits of rainbow until I unwittingly replicated the experience. A friend recently sent me a giant "diamond" of cut glass, which I've kept on my desk as a pretty paperweight. While reading on the couch this sunny day, I was surprised to see little patches on rainbow dancing on the wall. After figuring out that they weren't related to anything on the Christmas tree, I realized that winter sunlight coming through the bare branches in the backyard was being "caught" by my diamond paperweight and strewn across the house in rainbows.

Winter sunlight
fractured by cut glass:
living rainbows.

October 10: Toast

Home alone, making toast for dinner. Sometimes just a little thing will send me back to childhood...

My grandmother used to
cut my buttered toast
into "soldiers."

July 28: Katydid

We left the porch light on when we went out last night, and upon our return, discovered dozens of  moths, flies, and other winged creatures flitting around our front door. Among them, clinging to the screen, was one leaf-green katydid, a beautiful, graceful insect. We tried to catch it so that I could get a closer look, but it jumped away into the jungle of lilies alongside the porch. The voice of the katydid is a familiar part of the summer twilight insect chorus--I've definitely heard many more than I've seen. 

Here's a katydid that looks very similar to last night's visitor, albeit a species from India pretending to be a leaf:

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (Vishalsh521)

I remember feeling quite envious when my best friend Katy, who lived across the street from me when I was five, told me that there was an insect named after her--the katydid--which even sang her name. But then I realized it was OK because one of my mother's childhood nicknames for me was Cricket, so I had an "insect name" too. Now I learn, while looking for a photo of a katydid, that katydids, though they look a lot like grasshoppers, are most closely related to crickets and are called bush crickets in Great Britain. If only I'd known that at age five; it might have sparked a career in entomology. (I also learned that katydid species as a group are referred to as tettigoniids. Try to use that word in a sentence today!)

Under the porch light

green katydid shines brightly

amid dusty moths.