Dear loyal followers of beebeesworld. My computer has broken again and been sent in for repairs please excuse me if I don’t answer mail expediently for the next week or so. i will try to keep up, but without my computer, it will be slow. Thanks for your patience!
beebeesworld
I liked the idea put forth by Daily Prompt to say your name, describe what it means, how you got it how it fits you. I have always felt that it was a little bit unfair that our most personal thing-our name-is something someone else gives us. My father got my name-Brenda-off of an insurance form. He had been looking for names for his new child (back in the day, we didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl) and liked the name. It had just become popular in 1955. I don’t know anyone much older than me with my name. As with the name I gave one of my daughters, it seemed to take off after we adopetd it.
I have read “Brenda” means firebrand in Gaelic-which fits me perfectly. both my fiery temper and my genealogy. I think of my name sometimes when i am in a bad mood, an I think of the snake that says “Don’t tread on me.” I like that. Don’t mess with me, you never know what may be in store…. There are times that I have wished that my name had not become so popular-it is dated, for sure. Mostly Hispanic little girls are named Brenda now But that’s ok. So many names in the 50’s were dated-Debbie, Lynn, Linda, Susan, Sherry, Lisa ,Carol, and many more. I like my name. It fits me, it fits my time. All the Brenda’s I knew were tall with long brown hair, much like a trademark. I think I will keep it! Thanks, Dad.
The crow flies overhead
watching for a baby bird
to fall from its nest
We have a lot of black bears, but it isn’t always easy to get your camera and take their picture when they tend to stay close to the woods.
A few weeks ago I put the audio of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” on my blog. Today, thought the title is much the same, the topic is very different. This one is personal. I hope it touches you as s much as it did me. I wrote it with my father standing with me as we cleaned the kitchen after our big Sunday dinner. To me, the meaning is so prophetic. I was fighting tears as I tried to read it to my dad, who doesn’t hear well. To those who Know: I hope this means something to you. To those who do ot,I hope you never have to understand what each Sunday feels like to me.
The Sound AND Silence
In the sun upon the hill,
among the stones, among the flowers.
There upon a towel, soft,
I will sleep with him for hours.
Gone now, is that Sunday morn,
I wash and cook and clean so long.
Four generations eat with me,
I find my strength is simply gone.
I hear grandchildren laugh and play
by then my body’s racked with pain.
I feel so thankful that they’re here.
I swear that I’ll do it again.
They wave goodbye, and turn from me,
As I close that old back door.
I find that I can hardly see,
Tears are puddling on my floor.
I know inside, that he should be,
Here with us, but soon, I’ll be,
Back to those flowers and the stones
And lay to rest, just him and me.
“I must be dreaming!” I said to myself as I walked around the corner of the old brick building and saw the aging phone booth.
“I haven’t seen one of those in years!” Cell phones had pretty much sent phone booths the way of the dinosaur.
Even though I never had the cause to use them much, they did hold a sweet ring of nostalgia.
I walked up to the phone booth, running my finger over the fading red paint on the surrounding box. I smiled as I saw the push button dial, even with the buttons, it seemed quaint.
“What? 50 cents?” I sighed. I looked up to see the modern building and knew I was in the present time after all.
It stood alone in the barren plain. Since I was a child, my mother had wondered what the structure was, and why my grandpa had saved the photo of his father standing there by the steps.. Was it a church? The oddly shaped windows and door seemed to make that a possibility. What about the apparently hexagonal room that served as the second story? Was there a third wing to the structure that could not be seen?
Even in the tattered photo, the building was obviously abandoned, its siding tattered, a few broken windows, eerie, haunting. Why couldn’t I have found this picture when my grandpa was alive? He lived to be 91, we labeled so many photos together, from civil war era battle fields, to boxes filled with faded mementos that cousins sent to him. Each was hoping beyond hope that he could identify the people in the ragged box they had found in an old closet. He often did-why was this one never labeled? Why was it tucked in an envelope at the bottom of his grandfathers chest?
Years went by, the photo forgotten, now rested in the bottom of another drawer in the stained and faded envelope. As I lay reading by candle light, my teen walked in with an old book he had found in the discard pile at the school library.
“Mom”, he whispered, so as not to startle me, “something about this picture looks familiar, do you know what it is?”
I took a deep breath, and peeked at the cover of the faded old book. Ukrainian History. That just didn’t strike me as having anything to do with anything I recalled. Then I thumbed through the dusty book and saw a chapter titled “Famous famines in Eastern Europe”
I gasped. I hesitated to turn back to the picture. What could that have to do with my grandfather? Slowly, I turned into the candle’s glow to get a better view. It was the same building, it had to be, surely no other building looked like that one. My great grandfather wasn’t in it of course. The script below the photo was in Russian, with an English translation below it. Prague, 1933: Grain famine caused by Stalin’s troops.”
“My great grandfather wasn’t from Ukraine.” I said as I looked at my son. What did that picture have to do with my family, again, I asked myself why there was a photo of that church in my grandfathers chest.. I turned the page. On it was a painting of a lady with a foreign name-one I recognized from my study of family history. Underneath the photo was her name, and the inscription, ‘”One of the few survivors of the great famine of 1933” Then it hit me-the genealogical connection that I could never find-the missing link that no one would talk about.. My great grandmother had come to America, changed her name and painfully put her past behind her.
I handed the book back to my son. “I don’t know.” I said to my son. “Perhaps you just saw it in a history book.”
I dream of you-your face,your smile, how I cherished it
how it made my soul feel alive, even in the worst of times
and then I realize you are gone-never NEVER do I have
the slightest hope of seeing you, touching you again.
I wonder how many times I can die-drowning in this pain?
And I dream of those still here, yet so far away
wonder if I have any more chance of touching them, loving them
than I do those who lie among the flowers on the hill…
Hope-sometimes it dies because life has stolen it
and you don’t know why or how to fix it, even though it could be- somehow
and sometimes it dies when hearts stops beating.
There is no breath, no life, what was is frozen in time,
all that is left is night, darkness, dreams…
I wonder, here, alone in the cold and darkness…
which is worse, the death of hope or the death of life
or is there really any difference?
beebeesworld 