My favorite sound?

I just identified it, just this moment. 

I’ve never voiced it, but deep within my heart, I knew that sound immediately upon re-hearing it a few nights ago, and I felt again the serenity it gives me. 

I have named it, so it now exists.

This sound and darkness are braided together in my memory, rich blackness, warm and cozy as a handmade flannel quilt kind of darkness. 

I can sense familiar smells wafting from a deep, down pillow in which my head still lies when I am comfortable. To be nestled deeply while in those precious moments before entirely awake, surrounded by air warmed and dense with a lover’s breath, I love to search for it before coaxing my still clumsy mind to process a new day. 

I admit I have always sought this noise, between the darkness of sunset and sunrise, but rarely of lately have I found it.

It’s not the chirp of hungry morning finches, although so pleasant a greeting for the day. 

It’s not the sound of multiple syncopated ticking alarm clocks marking my wasting of time.

Nor is it the sound of early risers stomping beneath my window, hustling to begin their day.

My favorite music is the delicate breathing of a slumbering partner, the rhythmical pulling in of air, then the lower pitch of warmed air released from within their soul followed by a brief silence before beginning again. The relentless proof of life. 

At first, this sound belonged to my husband, whose sleeping breath I searched for in the loneliness of my insomnia.

I felt comfort in hearing his nearby breathing.

My husband left, and the sound was gone, but not truly missed because of the funny sounds of my cat’s half-purr and half-snore. This cat gratefully insisted on sleeping near me and I adored the nightly performance.

My cat died over a year ago, and until now, I hadn’t realized how much I missed finding the sounds of slumber in the darkness of nighttime. I must have given up because, until now, I had forgotten all about my love for that sweet noise.

Until just these past few nights as I share a room with my best friend on our travel adventure. I lay last night trying to go to sleep, wondering why I found her breathing on the other side of the room so fascinating. Then it hit me; I had found the gift of a sound my heart so loves. 

On this trip I am able, once again, to feel the pleasure and comfort of knowing someone whom I love is alive and near me, and I am not alone. 

COLORS

                           

You would think a patchwork quilt of thousands of colors of green would be enough.

 But no, the quilter of the scene before me had to add dabs of flowery blues and purples

 and a bright red spot representing a woman bent over working in the field of green. 

A few alarming contradictions of black and white, 

perhaps meant by the quilter’s knots to be cows grazing on the golden braided grass plumes. 

The cloth has been deftly woven with silken threads 

shimmering in purples and reds from the side.

And entire patch sprinkled with yarns the colors of the rainbow upon the patchwork green.

(written Mar. 30, 2020 on the drive to Chechaouen, Morocco)

The Legend of the Moroccan Stairs

March 27, 2020

                                   




He said, "Come away with me to live in my old country."
She said, "I would go anywhere with you, my love."

They were young and so in love. Off to Morocco they fled, hand in hand with crazy dreams of family and contentment and yes, lots and lots of love.

She said, "My but the streets of Fez are close and the stairs are so steep."
and he said, "Yes, my love, the better to keep you close and clinging to me."

And they filled their new house with much love.

She said, "I'm heavy with your child, my love but we have so little space."
He said, "I shall build us an extra room above."

And with each child came workers to build a new room above with more tight, steep steps to reach each new room.

She said, "They rains have come, my love. There is water in the kitchen on the ground floor."
He said, "Go down quickly my love and sweep the water away."

And so she sweep and bucketed until the floor was once again dry.

He said, "I want to have the room at the very top, only for myself and you."
She said, "I will have more steep, narrow steps to climb to be with you?"

And she climbed more steep, curving, narrow stairs each night up and down for her children and for her love.

He said, "I need more food, please go down to the kitchen and get it for me, good woman."
She said, "Down the stairs again today? Down the steep, dark, winding, narrow stairs?"

And down she went to retrieve a tray of food to carry a heavy load back up the winding, narrow, uneven and dark steep stairs.

He said, "Woman, I need more oranges. I need more tobacco, and I need more tea. Go and fetch it quickly."
She said, "I am old and the rain has come again. Can you not go down the steep stairs to help me clean and dry the kitchen?"

And she hobbled down the stairs taking a long time to return because many of the orange slices which would mysteriously drop from her clumsy fingers onto the steep, uneven winding steps.

She said, "I guess I better pick up those slippery orange slices for anyone in my family could step on them and tumble to their death below."

He said, "Hurry, woman, I need my tea and oranges!"

And the rains came and the floor of kitchen continued to flood as it did every year.

He said, "Woman, clean up the water and get the floors and stairs dry before I slip on them if I ever decide to come down."

She said, "Yes, my husband, I shall walk down all the slippery, steep, winding steps and have them dry for you when you descend."

But he never went down and the rains poured for many days and she grew worried and fearful so she gathered her children to leave their home and climb to the top of the nearest hill.

He said, "Come back and help me. How do I get down these horrible slick, steep and winding steps?"

She said, "Come as fast as you can, out of our house and to the top of the hill. We will all climb together to safety at the top of the hill."

But he had not walked the stairs in a long time. He had not learned their secrets and he had no strong leg muscles to climb to the top of the hill.

She said, "Come dear children, we shall move away to a flat land with lots of room to spread out without stairs so we can share our love together."

(written by Brenda Wright during a writing retreat in Morocco. The stairs scared her to death and it seemed that each place they stayed had some steep, winding and very narrow stairs to climb.)

Number Twenty-seven

     She headed east on her lonely travel, swiping to clear away hordes of buzzing flies doing their thing in the patch of sunshine before the shade of the largest tree around.
     “I’ll go twenty-seven steps up,” she whispered to herself. “Only twenty-seven then I can stop and rest.”
     At the appropriate number of steps, no more, no less, a large cool boulder caught her sight. A rock with a seat exactly her height for sitting upon to rest her tired weight.
     “This is good,” she said. “I am meant to be here. From here I can see the sheer rock wall ahead. But, from here I can also still hear the warning calls of the cock below.”
     Birds chirping near her told of all the excitement ahead but the foreboding call of the cocks told her there was danger and she was old.
     “What else has made it this far,” she wondered.
     Tiny little heads of yellow and purple flowers, no more than a couple of inches above the ground proved that this was an unforgiving place and no extra energy to grow tall and magnificent should ever be expended in this high thin air.
     “Go on,” chirped the noisy chorus of birds.
     “No, you need to rest and go easy,” the small flowers shouted as they desperately clung to their rocks.
     The old lonely woman focused her tired eyes on the leaves of various shapes and tones of green covering the verdant hills leading up to the sheer rock cliff to the East for which she was headed.
     It can be climbed and she knew it.  But the stunted flowers reminded her that there is a price to pay for reaching such heights, a price to pay for going East all alone through the thinning cold air.
      She is weary but drawn to the other side and takes another twenty-seven steps East.


(Written on the hillside of Chefchaouen, Morocco March 4, 2020.)

Books I read in 2019, in reverse order:

1. “The Tangled Tree, A Radical New History of Life” by David Quammen

2. “Buried Deep” by Margot Hunt

3. “Crossing to Safety” by Wallace Stegner

4. “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey

5. “Kindred” by Octavia Butler

6. “The Chemist” by Stephanie Meyer

7. “Gone to Dust” by Matt Goldman

8. “In the Skin of a Lion” by Michael Ondaatje

9. “The Testaments, Handmaid’s Tale, #2” by Margaret Atwood

10. “The Tie that Binds” by Kent Hartford

11. “Days Without End: by Sebastian Barry

12. “Pursuit” by Joyce Carol Oates

13. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

14. “Life After Life (Todd Family, #1) by Kate Atkinson

15. “A Heart Breaking Work of a Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers

16. “The x-Files: Trust No One” by Jonathan Mayberry

17. “Quichotte” by Salman Rushdie

18. “Tangier, A Literary Guide for Travellers” by Josh Shoemaker

19. “The Chain” by Adrian McKinty

20. “Wally Roux, Quantun. Mechanic” by Nick Carr

21. “The Last Girl (The Dominion Trilogy, #1) “ by Joe Hart

22. “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

23. “Thicker Than Water: A Tony Flaner Mystery” by Johnny Worthen

24. “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate” by Peter Wholleben

25. “The Loon” by Michaelbrent Collings

26. “Level Five” by William Ledbetter

27. “There There” by Tommy Orange

28. “The Museum of Modern Love” by Heather Rose

29. “Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity” by Jamie Metal

30. “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs

31. “The Conception of Terror: Tales Inspired by M.R. James, Vol 1” by M.R. James

32. “Shadow Beast” by Luke Phillips

33. “Obscura” by Joe Hart

34. “The Last Days of Night” by Graham Moore

35. “Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes”
            By Nathan H. Lentos
36. “Jubilee” by Margaret Walker

37. “Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mystery of Blood” by Rose George

38. “The Wisdom of Wolves” by Jim Dutcher

39. “The Signature of All Things” by Elizabeth Gilbert

40. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

41. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James

42. “Fear” by L. Ron Hubbard

43. “I Am Number Four (Lorien Legacies, #1)” by Pittacus Lore

44. “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens

45. “The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Dedly Medicine, and Murder Most
             Foul” by Eleanor Herman
46. “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life”
              By Ed Yong
47. “Rebellion (Tankborn, #3)” by Karen Sandler

48. “Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers” by Chris Gravenstein

49. “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

50. “The Dispatcher” by John Scalzi

51. “True West” by Sam Shepard

52. “Junk” by Les Bohem

53. “Awakening (Tankborn, #2)” by Karen Sandler

54. “The Finger Trap” by Johnny Worthen

55. “What Immortal Hands”  by Johnny Worthen

56. “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich

57. “The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)” by Raymond Chandler

58. “Uglies (Uglies, #1)” by Scott Westerfeld

59. “Points in Time” by Paul Bowles

60. “Milkman” by Anna Burns

61. “Remembering Roth” by James Atlas

62. “Killer of Enemies (Killer of Enemies, #1)” by Joseph Bruchac

63. “Jean Genet in Tangier” by Mohamed Choukri

64. “Tankborn (Tankborn, #1)” by Karen Sandler

65. “Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami

66. “Harry Clarke” by David Cale

67. “A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution”
              By Jennifer A. Doudna
68. “The Obesity Code” by Jason Fung

69. “Imago (Xenogenesis, #3)” by Octavia E. Butler

70, “Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis, #2)” by Octavia E, Butler

71. “Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)” by Octavia E. Butler

72. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Frankenberg

73. “The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, #1)” by Rick Riordan

74. “The Brand Demand” by Johnny Worthen

75. “Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism” by Sareen S. Gripper

76. “What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins” by Jonathan Balcome

77. “Foundation (Foundation, #1)” by Isaac Asimov

78. “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clark

New Beginnings for year 2020

Well, 2019 is gone and in the record books.  It was so eventful in many ways:

1. Divorced in July 2019
2. My first published short story came out in the anthology book called “Peaks of Madness, A collection of Utah Horror.”  It is still available on Amazon.com

3. I spent a lot of time in New Zealand.  Time with my querida amiga, Jo Jack. She is also a writer.
4. I attended a lot of writing conferences and classes.
5. I read 78 books! ( I will list them all on a later blog.)

6. And my second short story was published and is now available on Amazon.com.
It’s also an anthology called: “Strange Stories, Vol. 1” These stories are not for the faint of heart or for the queasy!   But how fun to be in TWO books now!

So what will I do this year, 2020?  First is my up-coming trip with Jo Jack to Spain and Morocco. I am planning on writing as I travel.

Plus I am going to finish editing my first book in 2020.  Editing is so hard and rather hateful but I must do it and get this book done and over with just because, because I need the experience all the way through the writing, the editing, the publishing and the promotion/advertising end.  

Who knows what next book I will announce to you all! 

P.S. if you prefer hardback books, the Strange Stories, Vol. 1 book is available on:

Www.storenvy.com/stores/1302571-forty-two-books

At a sale rate of $34.99  for a Hardback copy!

The book containing my short story is now available on Amazon.com

My first publication, but hopefully not the last!  This is a very fun book of horror with Utah locations.