Mainely Write

It's the last day of March!  Endings...  Almost as good as beginnings... We saw spring, at least in name, arrive.  Not much green here in Maine yet, but the sun is out longer and brighter, so the mud season is creeping upon us.  Spring will follow.  I think my favorite day of the challenge was the day (I put it all in one day, though it was a weekend) we were challenged to read 60 posts.  That is when I got to lots of new bloggers or bloggers I'd never read before.  And it was so much fun, that often I'd read back a few posts even to get more background on what had been written.  I enjoyed that day, broken up in posts of 20, so I didn't totally ignore my husband for the day! Writing Marches On When we began this writing thing It wasn't yet the start of spring, But as this month marched on and on Slices bloomed in spring's sweet song! For some there'd be green budding roses, For others still just runny noses; But either way we kept on writing,

Wow!  Day 30 in the Slice of Life Challenge is upon us!  One more day to go!  And then it will be on to more challenges.  A-to-Z is next and I'll be posting a poem a day with a picture each day of a sign.  You will just have to check back and see on Wednesday.  I'm not even sure what turn it will take. And for more fun in April: on the 22nd, I will be guest hosting at Laura Shovan's Author Amok , and April 29th, I will be adding the next to last line on the Progressive Poem at Irene Latham's Live Your Poem .  It's going to be a fun month! Today's slice is a love poem for a poem...I love writing, so it seemed fitting at the end of this month, I would post a poem about writing poems.  Is there any one else up for the challenge of writing a Love Poem using the guidelines below?  Let me know and I'll make you an official nominee! Gillena Cox has given a challenge to write a love poem of 10 lines using the word "love" in each line.  Here is

Two Writing Teacher's Slice of Life Challenge is winding down...we're almost through March! And Poetry Jam has a prompt to write a poem with a coffee or tea theme.  I wrote a slice poem to coffee yesterday.  Today is it tea's turn!  Lots of bits of memories of my life are contained in this poem, some of which just started to make sense as I was writing it.  I was amazed at the connectedness and came to some realizations about myself as I wrote.  That felt good. My Red Rose Tea figures - my grandmother had quite a few Of Tea and Roses - Red and Yellow I remember my mother saying    I should not wear yellow       it would not look good          on me. Nannie possessed    glorious tea cups;       after dinner they would          hold Red Rose Tea I chose from all her elegant cups    and matching saucers       the one to hold my tea; Always my pick -    her black teacup       yellow roses inside          gold trimmed             with a matching sauc

Each Wednesday, Poetry Jam has a different prompt to write a poem about.  This week it is to write about coffee or tea... And for Two Writing Teachers SOLC , this is also a slice of life, a memory brought back to me through the prompt of coffee. Here's to coffee first!  There will be a slice of Tea tomorrow. What Will You have? bold robust mellow full-bodied (wine?) breakfast blend ah-ha, coffee! there is no ‘breakfast blend’ of wine except from my childhood - our breakfast blend of whine: four kids perched on chairs  parents in a hurry       “I don’t like hard-boiled eggs.” “Eat your eggs.”        “I don’t want raisins in my toast.” “Raisins are good for you. Eat them.”         “Is there grapefruit juice in my orange juice?” “No! (yes, there was!)   Drink it.”         “Can we have pancakes?” “No. Maybe on Sunday. Eat your breakfast.” four kids un-perched and flew out the door to catch the school bus taking our blended breakfast whine

Today is Poetry Friday, hosted by Jone at Check It Out .  I'm in with a monorhyme today for both Poetry Friday AND Heidi Mordhorst's My Juicy Little Universe AND Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge .  This is the last day of Heidi's challenge to write a poem with a required ending 'ch' word.  And we are nearing the end of TWT SOLC....just a few more days left.  Then I will begin the A-to-Z Challenge.  I have a theme of sorts and there will be a poem a day to celebrate Poetry Month and to go with my theme.  I have not pre-written or scheduled any posts for April so far.  Usually I have a number of them ready to go, alleviating the burden on some of the busier days.  We will see how THAT goes! The word today is "QUENCH".  Because I wrote a monorhyme for it, there are a lot of ending ch words...  I liked the last line because it actually has two -ch words.  Get it? What to Say and How to Say It Shovel divulges, “I’ll trench.” Tired back

Two Writing Teachers is hosting the Slice of Life Challenge for the month of March.  Visit some of the wonderful blogs that are linked to their page.  Click the orange slice to get there or on the blog title. If you are looking for today's poem with Perch - it's at the end of my post. Today, I did what I said I was going to do - what I've wanted to try for quite a while. I went to the public library and hung out in the children's area for 2 hours reading and thinking about books.  I should have done this a long time ago.  I read mostly early readers, though one book I read was a biography of Peter Mark Roget, "The Right Word".  You know, the guy who wrote the Thesaurus...which means "treasure" in Latin and Greek.  Did you know that?  I didn't.  I never even thought it had another meaning besides being its own meaning of a book that has a lot of words you can use for other words to mean the same thing.  He started making lists of words a

Wow!  Day 25 at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge 2015 !  Go there to read some very interesting blogs...maybe get an idea or two for your own writing - like I did! First:   I am finally just now putting my link up that I worked on last night.  This morning - no WIFI!  I started and restarted everything in the house except maybe the coffeemaker!  Finally, for no apparent reason, it is again working.  Must hurry though - who knows when the WI-"FI-airy" will be back!  I was scooting to the bottom of the TWT page to post my link when I saw " jarhartz on Wednesday March 25, 2015 at 1:56 am said: A slice of no wifi– 91 words -2 pictures- 2 devices – embracingly 2 hour post https://jarhartz.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/sol15-day-25-the-wifis-killing-me/" and HAD to check it out!  I just spent 2 hours trying to post, too! Now the slice: Yesterday's post had a poem that was taken from an idea gleaned from reading a SOLC bl

At Two Writing Teachers where the Slice of Life Challenge is going strong, it's day 24, which is... 23+1... 11+11+1+1... a dozen plus a dozen... two baker's dozen minus two... a whole lotta' ones... 3 weeks of 8 days a week... 3 and 3/7 weeks... half of 48... 31-7.... What we've completed, leaving only 7 days remaining...  We... can... do... it! While reading 60 blogs on Saturday, some words from "On a Thought", gave me something to think about, and a poem came out.  She did a running clinic evaluation of some sort and she found out she walks like she is dancing (" Did you know I walk like I’m dancing? My feet are the hardest to diagnose. They don’t make shoes for my kind of feet. "), which I don't understand in clinical terms, just that because of this there are no shoes made for you. The terminology was interesting and started me thinking. Though I'm sure, in a real life running clinic evaluation situation it isn'

Two Writing Teachers.   Slice of Life Day 23.  It's a cold, but sunny, Monday in Maine after a cold, snowy and very windy weekend in Maine.  At least the snow didn't amount to much.  The cold and wind, however, made up for that.  The wind has died down and it isn't snowing.  We are left with sunny and cold.  No sign of greening anywhere yet. On Saturday, I spent a lot of the day commenting on blogs for the Highlights writers' retreat drawing. I knew I couldn't do any on Sunday, so I read and read and read on Saturday.  I have to say, I am glad that I got that chance to read.  As Margaret Simon said after reading 60 blogs and commenting, "I won already."  It's true; it really does seem that the reading of so many blogs in a day was the prize itself.  I logged 64 visits, 64 comments...and they were all so much fun to read.  I'd like to take a day and do that again... laundry, lunch and leisure suffer though... and puppy lacks attention. Just

It is day 22 of the Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers - 22 days in a row of writing something about life and for me a poem or two.  I think I'm up to 24 or 25 poems today, since on a few days I wrote two poems.  I'll count sometime. Today is Cabin Fever Day at church!  Yum.  It's gonna be a cookout day!  Enough of winter already!  Okay, so the cookout isn't going to be outside. (Oh, it's snowing as I'm scheduling this for tomorrow, Sunday.  Perfect.)  We'll have a pretend cookout...in the church for dinner.  Can hardly wait for those hot dogs and hamburgers.  Oh, man!  Gluten-free?!?  I'd better bring a head of lettuce to put my burger in! Ever since I discovered some problems I've had have been caused by gluten and quit eating anything containing gluten, I've discovered there are very few good substitutes for old favorites with gluten.  Slowly I'm learning which things are okay substitutes and which things you just do

It's Saturday! Here's a piece of fresh toast and a retoasted slice from the past...the retoast is from my first year of doing the March SOL , Monday, March 21, 2011 - exactly 4 years ago today!  I enjoyed writing poetry even in the first year of Slicing! This has some ending in CH words in it (cinch and Grinch)!  Heidi Mordhorst will be happy even though she doesn't have a ch word for today. But then I had to go and write an acrostic for CRUNCH today.  I couldn't go with only a used poem.  I needed a fresh one - short, but fresh! A-crunch-stic Candy coated chocolate Raked up leaves in fall Underfoot eyeglasses Naughty pup's chewed wall Crystallized snow eating Hammered finger's squall. ©Donna JT Smith, 2015 I think crunch came to me from stepping on my reading glasses yesterday.  There's nothing good about the sound of eyeglasses underfoot!  Fortunately, they will still work. I did not crunch the lenses, only rearranged the

It is Day 20 of the Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers to post a slice each day in March.  So far, so good. Today's word is hatch at Heidi Mordhorst's My Juicy Little Universe .  It should have been my easiest, but my mind would not work on it yesterday.  Too many other things going on, I guess.  So I am up fairly early and pulling up the draft, I see where I need to go.  And so the poem is done below. I also realize from writing it, I do have a slice.  It's a slice from my childhood.  There are actually a few stories about my city-raised-moved-to country parents and their chickens. But today When we first moved out to our "farm" in Maine it had a small chicken coop there.  It was short enough and small enough that we wanted to use it as a playhouse.  We spent some time cleaning it out as I recall, but that wasn't fun at all, so we spent time on the roof instead.  Actually, my brother did.  I went up once.  It was a gorgeous view from up

Wow!  It's slice 19!  March is swiftly sliding spring toward us, or we are marching swiftly toward spring.  Two Writing Teachers hosts the Slice of Life Challenge this month.  It is Lunch I'm talking about today. I hate thinking about lunch.  It is never really a meal.  It's a bunch of afterthoughts put together.  Here, have some chips.  A glass of milk? Soda? Juice?  Maybe you should really make something hot...grilled cheese, well, no.  Not anymore.  I am free of glutenous substances nowadays.  Unfortunately, that means no lunch sandwiches anymore.  But you know what?  Peanut butter tastes great on potatoes chips.  Yes, I've resorted to that.  But lunch is one of those afterthought meals I remember tossing together in a bag on my way out the door for school - yogurt, a cereal bar, a way-too-high-in-sodium-prepackaged-off-the-shelf-pasta-meals to heat in the microwave at school, or some leftovers from the night before... When I was teaching, eating out of Tupperw

Two Writing Teachers is hosting the Slice of Life Challenge for March. Today is a day for me.  Well, I have one appointment at a school this morning, but then it is a day for me.  And I am going to breathe deeply and enjoy it! This afternoon my happy cleaning lady friend will be here and she will make my house look like new...plus I think I'm going to work on the dreaded hall closet!  Boots, coats, hats, work gloves and miscellaneous things that I don't even want to know are in there.  Some of my daughter's dance recital costumes are there, I believe.  Tomorrow you will know what we found!  This will be soooo embarrassing, but I'm going to do it! But right now, I am watching the dogs gnaw on one another, watching the cat watch them from the stairs, looking at a dozen yellow roses my husband brought home for me a couple of days ago because I was making him a Shepherd's Pie, and sipping a nice hot cup of black coffee!  Nice way to start a full da

Voting on the Second Round of Poems is still Open at Think Kid Think , all morning and part of the afternoon. Check it out! We still have plenty of snow on the ground, but the signs of spring are sprouting everywhere.  Our frost heave season, that precedes the pot hole season, that precedes the mud season is upon us.  Talk about lurching.  Goodness, coming home last night from town we came out the back way from the shopping center on one of the newer roads.  The dip was enough to lose your car in. There should have been a sign there that said "Stop. Look ahead and down. If there are enough cars piled up in this hole to proceed safely, do so.  If not, please pull ahead slowly into the hole and kindly let others use your car to get across." I guess that was too much to write.  Hence, no sign.   The roads are untextable right now.  Auto correct can't even discern what in the world you could have meant.  You would think "auto" correct would mean it wa

It's day 16 on the Slice of Life Challenge for March at Two Writing Teachers .  We are over half-way now! I should by rights have the poem I did on March 3 do double duty. That day the word was Stretch, and I used it and "inch".  But I won't.  I'm going to write a new poem while I wait.  "Wait for what?" you ask.  Wait for voting to be happening.  My poem is up against Renee LaTulippe's peom today over at March Madness Poetry 2015 on Think Kid Think ! I wrote 4 poems using the word "trampled" - a really difficult acrostic and a few others that I wasn't really pleased with.  Then the one I submitted came to me.  It came in two parts.  I had just about decided to submit the acrostic (which I was pretty sure wouldn't fit in the space provided), when I looked back over my notes and found a half cooked poem.  I was sitting in Starbucks at the time, and started to work on it again, shuffling it around in my brain and on the screen

It's day 15, and I guess you could say we are as close to half-way without going over as we can be.  Join the slicers for the month of March at Two Writing Teachers - see what's up in the lives of lots of dedicated teachers, retirees, parents, students, and even some animals... And a poem for Heidi Mordhorst's at My Juicy Little Universe : an ending CH word, even though she doesn't have them for the weekend days.  I just can't stop myself.  I apologize.  But it's watCH. Found this on the shoveled walk to our door. I just noticed that the shadow at the top of the picture would indicate a heart shaped shadow with that v shape of light.  Dog prints are extra evidence of love here.  No one made this heart, it was just a clump of snow that fell from one of the banks on either side of the walk, probably when the puppy got to close to the edge of the three to 4 foot high banks right there or maybe the 8 foot mound created by the front end loader that scoope

It is day 14 of Two Writing Teachers' March Slice of Life Challenge to write every day in March.  I'm late today, but I had to finish my poem for Ed DeCaria's March Madness Poetry 2015 Tournament .  I'm in for the second bout.  Unfortunately for me, I'm up against Renée  LaTulippe!  I am shivering in my boots, and not because it's started to storm again! And though it is not an official "ending ch word day" over at Heidi Mordhorst's My Juicy Little Universe ... Grou ch I'm really trying to be calm, but I can't find my sock. I thought it was still early morn, but just look at the clock. It's getting late, no poem done and now the storm begins - I'm walking backwards all day long, on needles and on pins. I need a break from nothing done, I need to stop and rest. I've sat behind this glaring screen and tried to do my best; But now the puppy has a shoe, and I must stop and scold - I think the fire needs

It's Friday, so I am posting for Poetry Friday at Laura Shovan's Author Amok with my poem "Arch Overhead" with the word "arch" in it for Heidi Mordhorst's March challenge words. This is also a post for March 2015 Slice of Life at Two Writing Teachers .  Lots of good posts about daily life and memories if you go there to check it out. And for all who cast a vote for my poem Fowl Call in the March Madness Poetry 2015 Tournament, Thank You!  I'm in for another round!  I must admit I was overwhelmed and shaky about going up against some - no all - of the poets in the tournament.  New word comes tomorrow night.  36 hours of writing a poem.  Voting late Sunday night, all day Monday, and Tuesday until just after 12 Central time.  Hope you can make it back to vote for more poetry one of those days. If Diarrhea Dog doesn't keep me up Friday night, I'm sure I'll be up anyway. Arch Overhead   Sighing for long Winter to end  

Today is day 12 of 31 in the Slice of Life Challenge to write a slice each day in the month of March. It is also the day to write a poem for the word "pitch" at Heidi Mordhorst's My Juicy Little Universe . There are about 6 more hours to vote on the first "Flight" of poems.  The second "Flight" went up yesterday and are open for voting now, too.  Poems galore are on coming up in Ed DeCaria's Think Kid Think March Madness 2015 !  So, so exciting.  I won't know the results until voting for Flight 1 closes just after noon.  Results of the first bout will be posted online, so you can see how your favorites did.  So stop in there and read and vote all month.  You can't get more free fun than this! If you are here for Poem for Poetry Jam - prompt "Eyes" , scroll to the bottom where my poem, " e y e s" , is located . The Pitch The salesman made the perfect pitch and sold me on a tent ; I called my friends they all