Red's Wrap

Two teenage Jewish girls are playing catch with a football in the middle of our street. They are early teens, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and, of course, they are wearing skirts because their family is Orthodox as are all the Jewish families on our street except us. We, well, my husband is genetically Jewish, culturally Jewish, Jewish in a hundred different ways, but he’s not religious. Still,…

Daily writing promptWhat is the meaning of life?View all responses I don’t do a lot of interpretive dance anymore but occasionally I take a picture that could generate some earnest group discussion. If this picture of dear Tempest ready to lead her human down a sunny trail doesn’t speak to you in some way, well, I have a lot of cat pictures. Nobody knows the meaning of life. That’s the true…

Sometimes if you can’t write about a thing, you can write around the edges of a thing. Today, while I was waiting outside the hospital for the valet parking guy to get my car, I espied a huge man clad in all white sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. He had blond hair but was older and had a face that had piles of years, decades, folded every which way. He was enormous, so much so that where…

Though some strange turn of events which I might explain later or maybe never at all, we are taking care of our four-year-old granddaughter, for a while or for longer than a while, we don’t know. We did a variation of this several years ago so we know the drill of suddenly turning one’s life upside down to accommodate Play-Doh and Barbies. Another grandchild spent a lot of time growing up here,…

Durant has died. This happened four days ago but I still can’t believe it. If I think about it for more than a second, my eyes fill up with tears. Out for a walk yesterday with Tempest, our surviving dog, I burst into tears while sitting on a park bench watching people sail. It was their first sail of the season, you could tell, because they were weaving one way and then another, full of the…

Daily writing promptWhat’s a moment you wish you could freeze and live in forever?View all responses I can tell you the exact moment. It is August, late afternoon. The sun is shining but it’s heading to the horizon. After an afternoon of rolling waves, Lake Superior has evened out. The water is blue, the bluest blue, so blue that the lake and the sky could be drawn by a child with a single blue…

Photo by Anna Earl on Unsplash I spent the summer of 1973 sitting on a blanket atop the scorched brown grass behind our Flint townhouse, yards of black cord connected my bagel-size headphones to our stereo inside. I watched my eight-month old baby girl sit and crawl and eat the brown grass while Eric Clapton’s Layla, the screaming, wild, knife in the heart, electric version, roared in my…

Daily writing promptDo you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?View all responses My answer to the question is yes. Love is a place. Yes is a world. Two lines from a very short poem by E. E. Cummings. The words are engraved on the underside of the silver bracelet I wear almost every day. I would have done the topside, but I didn’t want people leaning over to see what was…

My friend opened the truck door, looked up at me and said, “How do you drive such a big vehicle?” And I paused for a long minute and then said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’m tough.” Then I told her that there is an axe in the side pocket of the driver’s side door in case we want to cut down a tree on the way to the swimming pool or cause some other kind of mayhem. These are moments to…

Mr. Dillard always wore a dress shirt buttoned up to the neck but no tie along with pleated dress pants, I remember khakis but maybe they were just plain black pants, and nice shoes. He was always handsomely put together with a cardigan or light jacket over his shirt. He was a man who thought about what to wear. I remember his brown hands and his long fingers, the perfectly manicured ovals of his…

Daily writing promptJot down the first thing that comes to your mind.View all responses This is exactly the first thing that came to mind when I opened my eyes this morning. Gray is a color. It’s not the memory of a color. Gray is the color of doves and steel. Gray is a long life’s memory. I must have been pondering this in my sleep because when I woke up I thought of putting Gray is a…

Seventy-seven is cool but it’s got nothing on seventy-eight. Tomorrow’s my birthday. I don’t dread it or rue it or pretend it’s not happening. I’m oddly proud of being an old person and feel that, in many ways, I am just coming into my own. I’ll maybe get there by eighty. (I like writing the numbers out. It feels more elegant.) Last night at a favorite restaurant, I had my first Manhattan. It…

Daily writing promptDescribe a positive thing a family member has done for you.View all responses My son gave me his cat. But it was more of a desperation thing than a considered gift. There’s a story attached to the giving or loaning or ‘please, can you take Herc for a while’ but the details aren’t important. The gist of this is that, after five years here, the ungifted cat turned out to be a…

I love serendipity as a word because it smells like flowers and butterflies and happenstance, but I love the word solivagant even more. I’ve never laid eyes on this word – solivagant – until it popped up in a prompt. So, I had to look it up and when I did, I marveled at how it fit my morning at the dog park where it was so wonderfully wet that I had to wear my beloved mud boots. Solivagant, if…

[The prompt this week for my writing group is “I smell _____, and I am.” This is my go at it.] I smell bees.             It is August. The grass in our yard is yellow, burned by the sun. Everything is dry, brittle. I would water the lawn but my father says it is a waste of money. He knows about money and there not being enough of it which is why he runs his dime store during the day and sells…