More Quilling– Lighthouses

I am showing off more of my friend’s artwork. Check Bonnie out here. 

The Great Point Light, built in 1785, was destroyed by fire in 1816 and rebuilt. In 1984 it was undone through erosion and destroyed by storm and again rebuilt. It remains today, though without any keeper’s house. 

Sankaty Head  Light was built in 1849 and was the first U.S. lighthouse to have a Fresnel lens, making it extremely powerful. The lens was replaced by aerobeacons in 1950. It was automated in 1965, though the keepers’ residencies remained until 1992. In 2007 the lighthouse was moved farther back from the eroding bluff that has claimed many houses in the past three decades.

Lighthouses

Great Point Lighthouse – Nantucket

Sankaty Lighthouse – Nantucket   

Nantucket is an island located off the coast of Cape Cod.  Often shrouded in fog, it’s lighthouses have safely guided many a vessel through treacherous waters.

Truro lighthouse

The community of Truro is located on the outer cape.  It’s lighthouse is the tallest and oldest one on Cape Cod.

Rodeo #3: Three-Act Story

What’s the story? The third rodeo event would have you tell it in three acts, 99 words. No entry fee, cash prize. Write on!

Carrot Ranch Literary Community

What is a story? We all tell them, and as writers, we craft them in the written word. A story is about Something that happens to Someone, Somewhere. It’s plot, character, and setting. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Because we are hardwired for stories, we retain data better from narrative. Storytelling is in my blood.

When I was a kid, my mother ran a general mercantile in a town of 99 people. One of those 99 was Eloise Fairbanks, a one-eyed shut-in born in 1908. Her father operated the water mill, and when she was a young woman, she rode the backcountry of the Sierra Nevadas as a telegraph lineman. Weezy, as she was called, would call the store and order a six-pack of Coors. My job was to pedal the brown bag over to her house. She’d holler for me to come in when I knocked…

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Lost

It’s a haibun Monday at d’Verse, and Frank J. Tassone is serving. On this dubious day of remembrance we are asked to use “indigenous” as our prompt word. Here’s where that prompt led me. 

 

You have displaced me. You have disparaged and disowned me. You have left me behind, left me out, left me for dead.

Now you seek me out, entreat me to take up with you again; beseech me to be your guide. You’re beginning to realize that the knowledge you sought cannot replace my innate wisdom.

No matter where you are, I am native to your place. I am native to you; I am your indigenous self. But somehow you have lost your way. You cry for me, the child you once were.

I cry for you. I have reason to be wary, yet I appear, hopeful you will listen, hopeful I can lead you back.

all lost in conquest

interior landscapes razed

wild voice echoing

Comfortably Off

She actually won the lottery. Not millions. But thousands, enough to make some changes. She walked through her home, taking stock.

She would have the bathroom totally renovated. She didn’t mind the bedroom, but would get a new mattress. The downstairs floors could use refinishing. Maybe upgrade the appliances, at least get the dishwasher repaired.

She thoughtfully surveyed the living room. Without taking his eyes from the television her husband told her to not even think about replacing his recliner.

That was not what she was thinking of replacing.

An 89 word story for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt #127. The prompt word is “replace”.

Rodeo #2: Pro-Bull Mashup

Hang on to your hats! The second Carrot Ranch rodeo event has begun. Give free rein to your creativity. This free writing contest will have you spinning and bucking.

Carrot Ranch Literary Community

Where else would you find a bull-riding flash fiction 99-word contest but at Carrot Ranch? Come on, all you pencil crunchers, gather ’round and listen to a  tale.

My dad rode bulls. His dad and his dad’s dad rode bulls. My second great-grandfather wore high-heeled vaquero boots in an 1880s photograph, and while I have no more evidence than those boots, I suspect he rode bulls, too. When you grow up around ranch critters, you ride everything that will hold your weight (you can’t ride a chicken, but you can ride a pig).

Getting bucked off is fun, or so you grow up believing. Your relatives and their friends, congregate in the corrals, hold down a critter, set you on it, hoot like crazy throughout your ride, and dust you off when you faceplant in the dirt and critter-pies.

Following this generational bent, I wanted to ride bulls, too. I…

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Small Acts

Small Acts

It was a simple note, hastily scrawled, but it made her smile. Leaving a note was a small thing that she appreciated and that he usually didn’t bother with; he’d even signed this one “I love you”.

According to the note he would be back from his errands in an hour. She decided, as a small act of reciprocation, to have his favorite snack ready and waiting for him.

When an hour and a half passed she was mildly annoyed; when two and a half hours passed she had gone from anger to worry; when the phone rang following the distant sirens, she trembled answering it.

She still has the note, reads it often and wonders what the rest of their lives together would have been had it not been for that terrible accident that took him so swiftly and unexpectedly that afternoon.

 

Take NOTE. It’s another Six Sentence Story prompt from Denise at GirlieOntheEdge. Drop by and leave a Six of your own or read the others.

Please read and write responsibly, six sentences at a time.

Forestall

It’s a quadrille Monday at the Poet’s Pub, #89 in fact, and Merril has served up the word “set”. Despite some initial technical difficulties I am now all set with these 44 words.

 

Forestall

Seed potatoes and onion sets

his planting now mostly these

come fall he’ll gather butternuts

apple drops from straggly trees.

His old horse predeceased him

hamed collar hangs near the plow

wonders how he’ll get the wood in

to keep winter fires burning now.

Crossed

Not here.

Not today,

not tomorrow;

there’s no more safe haven.

Dreams die.

You know

ugly truths

under myths’ cloaks.

Were there ever havens?

We’ve lied.

All hopes wither with yours

deprived.

 

 

For awhile I have been meaning to try out “cinqku”, a form that Kat Myrman has been using quite effectively at like mercury colliding. This is not that five line form. This poem  does have two sets of  five lines with the cinqku 2,3,4,6,2 syllable count, followed by two final lines of 6 and 2 syllables. I fudged it, in form and function, all so that I cold make the 32 word count for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt challenge using the word “haven“.  

Well Read

It’s bad enough having a brother, even worse when he’s a twin, but not an identical twin, just fraternal, just another brother, except this one has the same birthday and everyone compares us, which he likes because to him everything is a competition, a contest, even though everything comes easily to him, even school.

In fifth grade Mrs. Wilson said she can’t go bending the rules now can she, that even though I have started reading a sixth book I haven’t finished six books so I can’t get on the bus to go on the special picnic with my brother and all the other kids who’ve managed to read six or more chapter books since Christmas break. I will have to stay behind with Ms. Danielson and her first and second graders.

It’s lunchtime but instead of going upstairs to the gym where lunch is usually served the little kids carry boxes of sandwiches and chips outside for a picnic and then we stay outside all afternoon because some of the boxes contain picture books. Ms. Danielson has me help some of the little kids with their reading and she tells her class to always choose kind and to work hard like me, tells me she knows I don’t just coast through school.

Now I am in sixth grade and Mrs. Wilson is trying to convince me to go on the picnic bus because I read eight chapter books, two more than my brother, but I don’t, I get permission to stay behind because it’s Friday and ever since that day in fifth grade I go to Ms. Danielson’s on Friday afternoons to read with the little kids.

  The Six Sentence Story prompt is “coast”. Thank you Denise at GirlieOnTheEdge for continuing the venerable tradition and coaxing stories, six sentences at a time. 

Rodeo #1: Modern Tall Tale

Saddle up! The Carrot Ranch Literary Community’s writing contests have begun.

Carrot Ranch Literary Community

Out west where I grew up, to tell a tall tale was to tell a whopper of a lie so big no one would ever believe it. Someone would start the storytelling, and the next person would try to out-exaggerate the last one. Some told tall tales as a joke, especially if an inexperienced newbie might believe it. Wild Bill Hickok’s biographer, Joseph Rosa, suspected that Bill magnified the truth for fun.

Tall tales are the stuff of dime-store novels and pulp fiction.

What is a tall tale? One that openly exaggerates and magnifies the truth to the point of being unbelievable. The story itself is hyperbole. But we want to believe it because it’s humorous, melodramatic, or sensational.

This contest asks you to give a tall tale a modern bent. Don’t rely on the stories of Pecos Bill or 19th-century dime-store westerns. Go past the early sci-fi and…

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