The Prom

She felt like a kid at the prom, standing there in a scratchy, poofed up dress trying to look sophisticated. Only she wasn’t a kid and she felt absolutely ridiculous in this getup. Sharon, her sister, twirling before the mirror, didn’t seem to share her sentiments.

“Why do we have to dress like this, Shar? It’s silly.”

“You’ll see,” Shar said, “mom will like it. And we look great, don’t we!”

“I’m not wearing high heels. No matter what.”

Shar gave her the big sister stare-down look. She hated that . . .

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Sunday paper

The only traffic as she rode her bike home in the pre-dawn light was the slow crawl of workers delivering the Sunday paper. None of them gave her a second glance. If they’d looked close they would have seen her bleeding face, her torn clothing, and the blooming bruises on her arms. She supposed she look purposeful peddling steadily on the bike, purposeful enough to seem normal.

But she felt anything but normal. She’d spent the night . . .

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My favorite uncle

He was my favorite uncle. I suspect he was everyone’s favorite. We had an array of choices among our uncles, but he was the youngest, the handsomest, the most likely to let you drive his sports car, and the most romantically exotic and worldly-wise.

In WWII, in the Navy, he was sent into Hiroshima just a couple of weeks after we dropped the bomb on it. Somehow that bit of Navy duty never caused him to have cancer or leukemia, but it did have other effects . . .

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The best time

Conventional wisdom for the best time to plant where I live is to wait until April. So I have strawberries from last year coming up in the garden. They don’t know that there might still be a frost or a snow. And I have strawberries in pots on the windowsill, waiting to go in the ground. They don’t know they are being treated to extra care in case the weather is nuts.

And of course, the weather is nuts. In my state, the last year has seen the most rain ever recorded in one month, the most snow ever recorded in one snowfall, and we just had 13 tornados in one night, more than our usual total for a whole year. The global warming nay-sayers need . . .

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in Web-

Please see this poem I wrote elsewhere. A take-off on ee cummings in Just-.

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Lady Liberty

Millions of images of the Statue of Liberty crossed my gaze in my long lifetime. But seeing a photo is nothing like flying into La Guardia and looking out the window to see Lady Liberty in the harbor. Really seeing it is a thrill. Your brain knows the difference.

Compare looking at a photo of the Lincoln Memorial to walking up those steps and seeing the actual statue looming above you. A thrill. A reality based thrill.

Is interacting in virtual space fooling our brains into thinking we’ve experienced something real? Many . . .

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Remnants

Gerri woke to remnants. Misty recollections of drinking at the frat house, taking a glass of rum and Coke from Jason. She stretched and realized she ached. She sat up and bed and looked at herself, her surroundings.

She wasn’t in her own bed. She didn’t know where she was. Her forearms were bruised and she was afraid to look under the covers to see why she . . .

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Take action

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Finding Inspiration

Where do you find inspiration? How do you have that inspired idea that compares apples to buicks and oranges to Pablo Picasso.

The inspiration for writing prompts on this blog come from the moment when I sit down to create one. A word on the radio. A scene outside the window. The book or blog I was just reading.

A writing prompt can come from anything. What you saw driving this morning. A randomly chosen word from the Thesaurus. The beautiful thing about writing prompts is that each writer takes an idea and moves in his or her own unique direction with . . .

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My favorite animal

My favorite animal is probably the giraffe. They are graceful and elegant: the Audrey Hepburns of the animal world. But you can’t have one as a house pet. Gerbils make a mess. Fish are hard to keep alive. Dogs are too exuberant for me. Cats are nice, they stay out of your way and don’t make a lot of noise.

Since my favorite must stay in the wild (or the zoo) I opt for no pets. There are many advantages to the no pet household. For one thing, you . . .