Please post the link to your blog's weekly Slice of Life in the comments of this post.
Remember, you may also complete the Slice of Life on Schoology.com.
Please post the link to your blog's weekly Slice of Life in the comments of this post. Remember, you may also complete the Slice of Life on Schoology.com. "Don't forget to try new things." This is cantaloupe, and an artist's rendering of cantaloupe. Two artists' renderings of cantaloupe, to be more exact. One in 35mm and another in palm-sized porcelain. Today's message is two-fold, as well. You see, the larger, juicer, ice-chilled melon is my first cantaloupe, which I tasted, savored, enjoyed, relished - and snapped a picture of - while eating dinner with my beloved Aunt Jo on the Champs Elysees as L'arc de Triomphe was slowly silhouetted by the setting sun. And being me, when I am getting to know someone, getting to trust someone, sharing my pictures with them is pulling back the curtain of my introvert self. Like the way novels told in verse let us hear the characters' secrets, my photo albums and the accompanying commentary tell my stories of people, places of home, foreign adventures abroad and in new cities, and the aesthetic that gets tucked inside - a filmstrip of memories, or a filing cabinet of consciousness, or individual beads strung together or like last week's assessment of Christmas ornaments as evergreen-hanging memories and tokens, all coming together to make a bigger meaning. And I shared this album of snapshots of family, my brother, our barn, my nieces and nephews, pleasing things in Santa Fe, Paris, Boston, Mystic, Pittsburgh, etc, and someone noticed and took a slide from my filmstrip and placed it in his memory, too. You see, the smaller, firmer, delicate melon is a gift my boyfriend brought me from his week in New Orleans in June 2005, a month into our relationship. While by definition a "souvenir," this palm-sized melon and its contents are so much more than a treat, or t-shirt, or useless novelty. It is capable of saying, even now six years later, that "I see you. I get you. I want the best for you. I know you well." So well, in fact, that I didn't fully comprehend the message contained on a thin strip of paper inside until this past weekend. "DONT FORGET TO TRY NEW THINGS :-) - JON" was not a random, preachy adage, but an echo to the unexpected delight a cantaloupe brought years before we'd met, and a forecast of adventures like this weekend's twenty-plus trips down the hill sledding where we kept saying, "One more time, ok?" "No, one more time again...". When I heard my husband say, "Oh, yeah, don't forget to try new things" as he glanced at the cantaloupe box and the photo that precipitated it, it clicked that cantaloupe is not cantaloupe, or a trinket, or contrive fortune cookie-esque advice. This gift has been given over years, and, so long as I "don't forget to try new things," I hope that I will recognize the joy that is waiting to be had everywhere in life. Because, as I have been reminded, when you love someone, you help them be their best self. When you slice a good slice, you feel fuller, and more alive and appreciative in the end.
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Please post the link to your weekly Slice of Life in the comments of this post. Remember, you may also complete the weekly Slice of Life on Schoology.com. christmas left-overs Looking at the cheery Christmas tree on the edge of the living room this evening gave me the surge slice. Around this time of year our "Christmas tree" morphs into a early-to-mid-winter tree, which still lights the main areas of the house as a distraction from the 5:30 p.m. twilight we all somehow get used to in the colder months; I occasionally contemplate how novel it is that the summer sun sets at nearly 1o p.m. while our winter days wind down with sweatshirts pulled on and blankets pulled up when there's a quarter of the day left to be had in the dark (6 p.m. to 12 a.m.). The first image in the slideshow is a shot of the front of the tree from the ground up. The menagerie of tri-colored, swirl lights, and jewel-toned, thread-wrapped balls, and the collection of six years' worth of ornament-sized memories and tokens of the year. The next photos are of the first ornaments my husband and I got for our Christmas tree six years ago. Our current tree is still the same one we bought for $16.99 at Target in 2005. As college students, we could barely afford the tree, a container of brightly-colored balls, and two "special" ornaments: a ceramic snowman that is a bell, and a pine cone and straw owl. I still remember when we came back to Ball State from Christmas vacation that first year dating and seeing that, whoa!, Joanie, the stray cat we'd taken in had wrestled several of the pink and red and white and lime green thread-covered balls off the tree and chased them all around the room leaving a maze of string zig-zagging around the legs of chairs, desks, etc; it looked like one of those scenes in the movies where someone is trying to steal a jewel from a museum, but there is a lattice-work of lasers protecting the room. A few other fun and favorite ornaments on the tree include the flying pig that I painted on my first trip to Muncie's "The Artist Within" with my friend Liz; a small gourd carved in Peru to look like another owl (there are seeds in this owl that rattle when you shake the ornament); a miniature "ear hat" I got last year while at Disney for a conference (this year my husband perched it on top of a felt snowman face); a beaded Alamo that we got in San Antonio while at a conference; the Snoopy canoe that my mom got Jon and I after our adventure canoeing in the rain on our first camping trip with my husband's brother and my future sister-in-law; and the mini toaster with little hearts "toasted" into pieces of bread that Mom got us the year we got married. I savor decorating the tree and the slow-mo way memories come back, one after another as I unpack the box with our small collection of ornaments and the lifetime of ornaments that are upstairs in the attic "at Home" where a live Christmas tree comes inside every year and where we actually gather together for the holidays. My tree can be a pre-Christmas tree, and morph into a winter pleasantry, but the real "tree" is at home, with Mom, Dad, and J, and the jingle bells on the door to the porch and the advent calendar on the way to the attic and the personalized stockings hanging outside our bedroom doors. Please post the link to your weekly Slice of Life in the comments section of this post. Remember, you may also complete the weekly Slice of Life in your Writer's Notebook. dominick and friends: new holiday adventures Even though I have had twenty-seven Christmases, I had never heard the song that is now probably my "favorite Christmas 'carole'" until Christmas morning this year. Within seconds of hearing the beginning notes of Lou Monte's apparent Christmas classic, "Dominick the Donkey," I was up out off the couch and bouncing around the living room doing a dance something like a polka-leprechaun jig hybrid around discarded wrapping papers and gift boxes. This memorable, undeniably merry song reminded me of happiness and the joyful spirit of the season. It's an example of the newness that the holidays and this time of year should be. |
Ms. McCullough
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