Category: Sharing Our Stories Magic

Sharing our Stories Magic – No. 63: regroup

Denise Krebs3 Comments
Sharing our Stories Magic #sosmagic

This regroup prompt came out from The Sharing our Stories Magic just after I pressed submit on my very last step in earning a TESOL Advanced Practitioner Certificate. Earning that certificate was a process that should have taken six months, but took me two-and-a-half years thanks to the pandemic and changes in my teaching status. I feel quite free today, and ready to regroup and think about the next big thing. Here is a post I wrote just two weeks ago with my summer to-do items (along with some to-feel items).

Instead of writing about the next big thing, though, I was reminded of a big thing that happened in my childhood. In reading Glenda Funk’s Slice of Life from last Tuesday, I was reminded of my brother-in-law, who helped me regroup after the death of my father when I was seven. Though my father was not very involved in my life, his death was quite a blow to a family of seven, five of them still at home. I wrote a decima, a Spanish poetry form, created by Spanish writer and musician Vicente Espinel. It has 10 lines of 8 syllables each with a rhyme scheme of ABBAACCDDC. It was the Ethical ELA poetry prompt today, hosted by Mo Daley.

Superlative Supporter

Would I have ever played the game?
What would I do after Dad’s death?
Wait for adults to take a breath…
And then: “Let’s play catch,” you exclaimed.
Soon-to-be brother, fanned the flame
My passion for softball began
Every game…you, my greatest fan
Ardent and lavish cheers ensued
While the shells of the seeds you chewed
Piled, like pictures, at your feet

Pictures of playing in the street
Your eager “Yes, let’s!” on repeat.
Giving me the glove of your youth
Did not make me catch like Babe Ruth,
No matter what you said. Upbeat
always in your belief in me,
Credibly, not hyperbole,
You were there to help save my life.
Softball, with its fun and good strife,
Has stayed my love and helped me be.

#SOS Magic, No. 62 – Outside

Denise Krebs6 Comments

This week’s Sharing Our Stories Magic prompt is “Outside.” This weekend I participated in The Poetry Marathon, and I decided to go outside awhile for one of my poems and see what poetry I found. This post was also inspired by Kate Messner and her #teacherswrite prompt for this week.

Outside

It’s an oven outside
The air mostly hot, still–
what you might expect
at noon near the summer
solstice on a desert island.
Onions are frying in ghee
for someone’s lunch,
making my mouth water.
I notice the oleander,
nature’s poison,
wondering again why they are
so widely used for landscaping
in family gardens here.

I wanted to sit and observe nature.
Shade was not to be found, though,
so I kept walking
and went to school
to pick up a letter of recommendation
our departing principal had readied for me.
I sat outside after, enjoying some welcome
shade–the first I had seen.
I read the letter. Along with a lot of
Denise’s there was also one Angela tucked in,
a stray from a previous letter, cut-and-pasted.
I returned it to the secretary. She’ll get it fixed.

The birds seemed to be enjoying the shade
of the frangipani tree
and delighting in the promise
of the fruit-laden palms.

I’m joining an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us. #sosmagic

Big

Denise Krebs11 Comments


Big sky
Big time
Big minds
Tiny-to-me stars flood the big sky
I sit timeless in the big time
Gazing at passing satellites built by big minds

I feel small when I lie under the stars in the moonless summer desert. Other sites are nonexistent at night–it’s just the big sky full of stars that fills my eyes. The sounds are hushed. The animals have burrowed for the night. The birds are roosting. The wind holds its breath.

Time seems to stop, yet it also passes quickly without fanfare. Every ninety minutes that same satellite passes overhead with the same blinking light. I don’t understand it. I feel small with my brain that couldn’t keep a satellite up in the sky.

Occasionally a meteor bursts across the canvas, burning up and leaving a trail of light for my viewing pleasure. Then I don’t feel so small. I feel nurtured and loved.

Big Love.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

I’m joining an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us. This week’s prompt is big. #sosmagic

Oops!

Denise Krebs8 Comments

My writing practice has been sporadic and lacking commitment my whole life. One possible culprit, which I look at as an  “Oops!” is when I destroyed a few years worth of my journals early in my twenties.

Why?

I was embarrassed someone would read them. I’m not sure anyone would have been patient enough to read through the drivel, but I was scared they would.

Now, I look back and think I would like to read them again, especially after so many more life experiences.

Back when they were written, I was a new Christian and dating and breaking up with my future husband. I would have never believed a few years later he was going to turn out to be my husband of 38 years and counting.

Now, I would like to see what I wrote about him.

That probably started my semi-unexamined life’s journey. Of course, my life has been well worth living. It’s been a delightful journey. I believe I have grown and developed through many of my mistakes, but I do wish I had kept more journal entries.

I have continued to toss out occasional journals over the years since, but a few writing successes along the way include:

  • I journaled during my pregnancies and the first year of both my daughter’s lives. As the children grew, though, I wrote less in their journals. When I was a mother of young children, and then later when I became a full-time teacher and mother to school-age children, I did not take much time to write. The stresses of life and exhaustion kept me from the page.
  • For the past eleven years, I have used, very sporadically the website 750Words.com. I have written nearly a quarter of a million words–237,845, to be exact. That is not that many over eleven years, but there is some truth there.  I just went to the page after being away for a year and half, and I downloaded the entries I made. Much drivel, to be sure. However, I stumbled upon one gut-punch entry about a nightmare I had, but how it turned out to shed light on how I had hurt one of my students. Now, I had not remembered the dream or the pain I had caused that child, but reading it took me back and makes me want to be better. That’s some examination I need more of.
  • The third success is that since Covid came, I kept a book of journal entries and daily jots in my weekly planner. I felt like it would be good to capture this pandemic as it was happening day-by-day. I also created a Covid-19 time capsule with my students last spring. I interviewed my children and had my husband write a letter to me.
  • Finally, I have been a fairly consistent blogger, which has helped me to write, record, examine, and develop my writing over the past twelve years. In addition, it has helped me to develop friendships with people all over the world who are also writing about learning, life, and education. Blogging led me to meet Gallit Zvi, and we wrote The Genius Hour Guidebook together, so that was fun. Lately I’ve been writing poetry with the Ethical ELA and Poetry Friday communities, the Slice of Life on Tuesdays, and now here is the Sharing Our Stories Magic group I just discovered too.

I’m joining an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us. #sosmagic

This post is inspired by Connor Toomey’s prompt on The Isolation Journals: “What interrupts your writing practice? What keeps you from the page?”