Mainely Write

Hope your week has been special!  Ours has been.  And Happy New Year!
Welcome to Poetry Friday!
I am hosting today's lineup of poets and poetry lovers.  Please, if you have some poetry to share, leave your link on Mister Linky below.  Please, if you just love poetry and don't have a poem to share, but just want to read poems, poems and more poems, click on a link and go to there... and hopefully leave a nice comment for someone to savor.

Well, the end of the year is here, an we are at a new beginning, in a new home, in a state in which we've never lived before.  I am totally turned around when I go out and about.  How long will it take to know where I am???

I'd always said that it was easy to know where you were in Maine.  Go east - you are in the ocean.  Head north and northeast and you are in Canada.  Head west or south and you are in New Hampshire.  There aren't a lot of roads, so if you are on one, just stay on it and you will get somewhere.  Get off the road …

It is Poetry Friday.  I missed last week...just totally got by me!  I have been cleaning and shopping, putting up a tree and unpacking, changing addresses and mailing the former owner's unforwarded mail to her.
I finally got my Swap mailed out.  It is going to Australia, to Erin Mauger, so it will be late-late getting to her!  I've had it ready and carried it about with me until I finally had the time to mail it.


I got Matt Esenwine's swap in the mail here!  And I can tell you that Granite State chocolate is amazingly delicious.  I may just have to go looking for some more online!

Matt's poem creation was no easy task... he sent was a found poem gleaned from my Christmas season blog posts.  Thanks for this capture, Matt!  I love it!


"A Better Christmas"

It is snowing. Again.
In no hurry, we can wait
maybe a few days,
           an evening.
We can still celebrate,
inch along,
take delight in the little things
          pause, take notice,
           …

It's been an incredibly long, and short year.  Doors have been opened, doors have been closed.  But every time a door has been closed, a new door has appeared just down the road apiece.  Sometimes it has been a struggle to reach that door, but we've managed to get there.
We are at a new door today.

I am pre-scheduling this post today, as at 2 pm we will be at our closing - or should I say "new door opening"? - for our new home in PA.  For the next few years, we will be living here with our daughter and two grandchildren.  There should be some really fun times ahead.  We are, of course, bringing our motorcycles.  Though the roads in PA are much worse than those in Maine (I promise to be very careful!), the season for riding is much longer!
We still own our 2 homes in Maine, and plan to return in a few years.  It has been a struggle to buy a home, and I don't want to give up any ties to Maine.   Gull Haven, in Friendship, that we have been renovating for many years…

This is the last Spiritual First Thursday of 2018.  Please check out more of our One Little Word posts at Irene Latham's blog, Live Your Poem, www.irenelatham.blogspot.com.
This year's OLW for me is "Flourish".  I'd found it on a Starbuck's ornament and bought it to remind myself to go through the year and each day adding a bit of a flourish to it...or perhaps just to flourish in the new year.

Well, it seemed to be a good word.  But then the year began to have some major upheavals.  Family started to fall apart.  One at a time.  Then the times overlapped.  On-going events just continued to build and piggy-back one upon the other - events life-threatening, near death, unsettling, unnerving, disappointing, ulcer-inducing, nervous breakdown fodder...
One in a year would have been enough to be wrenching.  Two in a year really wretched...5 or so (only because I'm counting fast and might be actually - yay!- forgetting one or two) just unacceptable for a human b…