Mattie's Pillow

After a month of sad news, the snow is melted and the temperatures are above freezing pretty much consistently.  We’re in what passes for spring in the Interior–the brown-up period of mud, dead grass, and January’s trash come back to remind us of winter’s events.   The air is warm and moist after months of dry and bitter cold.

In her blog Wild Roots Homestead, my neighbor, Emily, writes of her toddler’s reaction to seeing the dirt emerge after a whole winter’s snow.  “What’s that?” she asked, and Emily said, “It’s dirt, remember?”

So write about something that was once as familiar as dirt, but now seems new and strange–full of possibilities.

Post it in the comments and I’ll add it to this post.

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This came from Karen at KD’s Bookblog:

At the Level of Dirt

Until Gram died when I was seven, I lived
at the level of dirt—powdery and dry
beneath the overarching honeysuckle
near the porch, drifted deep into cracks
of the empty carriage shed, scuffed
and tamped hard beneath my rope swing
hanging from one of four huge sugar maples.

The long gravel driveway ended in a patch
of yellow sand where I traced thin roads leading
nowhere. Our narrow blacktop circled
to the village either way. Side roads
without signs suggested nothing. Mostly,

Gram and I walked through the hayfield
and crossed a low stone wall to visit
Millie Stuart. She and Gram listened
to their stories on the radio. Millie died
first and her husband, Cecil, burned
things in a barrel. Ash drifted upward,
pulling my gaze away from the ground
where I stood, rooted and uprooted.

Karen Douglass

Tags: dirt, not complaining, poetry, spring, writing, writing prompt

This entry was posted on April 28, 2011 at 12:07 am and is filed under Poetry Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.