A is for Airborne

Airborne

Bloggingfrom A to Z

When I checked today I am number 1455 out of 2215 writers - feel free to check out as many as you can! My sister, Vicki Paulus, is number 1454. 

We ran down the hill. No, that’s wrong.  We galloped down the hill, slipping and tumbling as though the sands of the hillside were mud.  End over end, down the steep hill.  Mouths wide open gulping in as much of the gritty sand as air.   

Blue skies overhead erupt as the fly-boys from Kincheloe  scream overhead breaking the sound barrier with a deafening boom.  The sound reverberating off the hill sides.  Hurriedly we clap our hands to the sides of our heads, covering our ears.  

Somewhere nearby another flyer is heard, a large bird of prey screams at us.  We have, once again, disrupted it’s hunt.  Several rabbits take advantage of our distraction and scurry to cover. 

It’s late spring, nearly summer.  School will be out and we will have three glorious months.  Soon enough the hot sun will beat the sides of the sand-pit, turning the moist, pliable, soft sands into baked hard crust.  But for now, the tumbling is fantastic.  The sands have just enough moisture to cling, but not enough to make sludge. 

From the top, running as hard as we can.  Arms pumping, lips pursed in concentration, dodging the blackberry bushes on our freshly made path, feet pushing off the ground….out, out, into the air. Airborne, just like the fly-boys.  For just a moment…that one elongated, may last forever moment, we are airborne.  We can fly.

Our flying contest is marked, not by where your behind fell, or where you rolled until you could finally stop, but where your feet dug into the sands.  Your landing gear is what counts here, not the fuselage, not the wings. 

Brushing the sand from our hair, off our clothes and somewhat off our faces.  We give one another a knowing glance.  It will take days to get the sand out of our ears and nose and any other crevice it will have worked its way into. We laugh and trudge back up the hill to do it all over again. 

leigh

Turmoil

Turmoil

The BloggingLounge   
Hosted by: Ariana Browning


Prompt #5

Racing against time, she pressed down upon the gas pedal more firmly.  Coaxing the old pick-up truck around the curves and bends in the road at what her father would call, break neck speed.  Gusts of wind had knocked down branches and trees across the road.  So far the downed trees had been small enough to simply drive over, jerking her back and forth, straining against the seat belt. 

Peering into the rear view mirror, she could see the lights gaining on her.  She could feel them trying to overcome her independence.  They were trying to probe her mind and control her without even being in proximity.  “Fools!” she spat out the word as she rounded a curve on two wheels.

Knowing full well the turmoil she would cause, she escaped her captors.  Unwillingly, she had left others behind.  Others she fully planned to go back for, once she had figured out how. 

Mind control.  There was no need for them to chain anyone.  There was no need for them to discipline anyone, they simply controlled your thoughts.  Oh, they said it wasn’t control.  They said they could only foster a thought process.  Instill a certain pattern and our brains willingly followed.  They said, from the time we are very young, we, the lazy humans would much rather be told what to think and how to behave rather than make those tough decisions on our own.  

It had taken years to figure it out.  But, that knowledge was the key to her escape.  Learning to block their suggestions!  Learning to think for herself!  Learning to made decisions on her own! Initially, these had been very nearly intoxicating.  Initially, she was nearly found out on many occasion.  Initially, she had been giddy with the new-found self awareness.

Escape had been relatively easy once she mastered the “turn about”.  Instilling a suggestion into her guard’s mind had been as simple as the old woman was.  She was just an old woman doing a job to get by in life.  No point in hurting anyone, that would only make her as bad a person as her captors.  No reason to start out her new life with a “bad omen”. 

The lights were getting closer, but so was the town she was heading for.  Expletives burst from her.  She shouted at the heavens.  Then calmed, quieted, and began the tiresome act of transmitting to her pursuers.  Slowing, merging into traffic, she disappeared.

leigh

To My Younger Self

The Blogging Lounge

 

To My Younger Self

Blogging Lounge #4

Sitting near my Grandmother, she reaches out a gnarled claw like hand to stroke my hair.  Grizzled as she appears on the outside, she is all soft and love on the inside, at least I thought so.  She loved me like no other.  I had not seen her extend even a thought of kindness to anyone else, ever. 

My Grandmother lay on her deathbed.  She wheezed and groaned as she fought the inevitable.  Hard as nails, she was determined to see my wedding day.  She was determined to have the right to request her “wish” be granted.  Only my Grandmother knew what that wish was, but I had a good guess.  Often I could catch snatches of words, as I sat next to her.

After days of lifting her nearly hairless head off her pillows to spoon feed her broth, I finally got the gist of what her request was going to be.  I was struck nearly dumbfounded when I realized what she planned.  I dropped the warm cloth I had been bathing her face with.  Staggering backward, I knocked over the stool I had perched upon for the past week.  My back aching from hunkering over her was thrown into an upright position.  My very nerves jangled at the thought of touching this person I had so long thought of tenderly. 

The years of her telling me that if she had it all to do again, she wouldn’t change a thing.  The hours of plotting and planning she had divulged what she would do if she were young in today’s world.  How often she had said “if I were to tell my younger self anything, it would be to implement this plan sooner”.  I had adored watching the movements of such a swift mind.  Her ability to envision a plan and implement it down to every detail was astonishing and wondrous to watch. Her plans were always to her advantage, the other individual always left hurting.  She had no qualms about using the other grandchildren.  

Always whispering to me how much she loved me, how she was teaching them lessons I didn’t need to learn, and how I was her favored one.

My wedding day was also my 21^st birthday.  Two magical days rolled into one!  I was so excited, and had been for months.  Giddiness was normally squelched by my Grandmother.  She did not delight in other’s joy.  It was difficult to hide my excitement.  She said she could “see” it on me.  She said it hung about me like a shroud, colorful and bright.  However, she did not punish me overly much.  I assumed she knew it would be futile to try to sober me up.

How wrong I had been!  How naïve!  This wicked old woman had been planning something so cruel I never would have conceived it!  “To my younger self”, indeed!  She was planning to utilize my magic day!  Every lesson she taught me, she would always add that even if I forgot the actual lesson, my body would remember when the time came.  

Every extra helping of food, every ministering when I was ill, every look she bestowed upon me was the path she had lain out to execute her plan. 

Transmogrification!

 That wicked old witch!  That devious horrible woman! The vileness radiated from her body.  I stepped back, with my hand to my mouth and my mind reeling.  Slowly, vowing she would NEVER again hurt anyone.  Vowing she would NOT be trading bodies with me on my wedding night, I moved her nearly hairless head from her pillow and forced it onto her face.

leigh

Something Worth Writing

Something Worth Writing

Rise of the Pheonix : Week #12

Quote and a Word

I had begun the class thinking I would stir the imaginations of those who dared think.  I wanted to stir the imagination.  Explore the “unexplorable” with those whose minds were formulating beliefs.  Bend their thought process to view their lives as a grand experience, rather than the drudgery obligatory grind I saw on the faces I knew. 

To behold the world and see what had transpired, not as though a great burden had been thrust upon them, but that they hold the knowledge and can weld it as a sword to make their life experience in a better world. I never anticipated my words, said with earnest enthusiasm, would lead me to this jail cell.  Anticipating a severe outcome does little to bolster forgiveness for those who put me here.

Awakening from the vivid dream, the colors still carry into my conscious mind.  Knowing that dreams are our minds way of rehashing the day, sorting the information, and filing it into pockets of brain matter, I am astonished by the transient images which waft across my vision. The orange bird taking yellow seed from my hand while it’s red mother looks on approvingly. I find it inspiring. 

Here we are in this brightly hued world, wondering at our “beginnings”, fighting over who’s ideas are the most accurate, and who is withholding information. Mostly, I think there are many withholding information. 

There are tales written in stone, depicted on the walls of caves, and inscribed upon the hides of animals no longer roaming the Earth.  We, the human species, were “made”.  Does that make us Golems?  Mindless drones to do the bidding of our overlords? If so, just who are the overlords?  Are the overlords benevolent or filled with

Inscriptions dating back to the Mesopotamian era tell of God creating mankind.  God gave mankind the ability to speak. Now we need think we need to figure out who's God and then which God? 

Acts 2:1-4 ''Now while the day of the [festival of] Pentecost was in progress they were all together at the same place,  and suddenly there occurred from heaven a noise just like that of a rushing stiff breeze, and it filled the whole house in which they were sitting.  And tongues as if of fire became visible to them and were distributed about, and one sat upon each one of them,  and they all became filled with holy spirit and started to speak with different tongues, just as the spirit was granting them to make utterance.''   

Does this indicate that prior to “interference” we, mankind, had as much ability to speak as most animals?  Therefore we were, as many claim, animals prior to intervention? Are we merely "tweeked" animals some claim we are?  Without the ability to actually "see".

Benjamin Franklin told us “ Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing” Silly me, I thought I was following those words to the fullest extent.  I held those words in my heart and followed as best I could see how.

Perhaps someday.  Perhaps someday someone will see my story and find it worthwhile to explore the unexplorable.  To see the world as an exhilaratingly wonder-filled place.  For, there are miracles, and whomever brings them really doesn’t matter to the one experiencing them!  We DO exist! I will escape this prison they have created. 

leigh

Earth

Earth

Riseof the Phoenix Writing Group

#5  Prompt hosted by Diana Jillian

Earth as seen from Mars : NASA 

Brisk winds picked up the fine snow. Swirling and twirling, deep drifts formed along the paths which had once been two lane streets.  Winter was deeply entrenched along the land.  Blankets of white stretched for as far as the eye could see. 

Hard winter’s had become a thing of the past.  Lore handed down from Grandparents in the form of afternoon stories.  No one had seen drifts reaching the rooftops, therefore it could not have really happened. 

This weather so reminds me of my youth.  Brothers, sisters and neighbors skating on the ice of the lake in front of our house.  Or perhaps sledding down the hillside on the old wooden toboggan.  Ski goggles on plowing headlong through drifts and dodging the trees!  What fun to trudge back up the hill, set the sled, pile on and squeal all the way down!

The difference in this snow and the snow from my youth is the planet we are living on.  It’s no longer Earth.  We’ve moved on.  They demanded we leave the only home our generations have known.  Oh, there were stories, but we too thought them myth.

‘They’ appeared nearly twenty years ago.  As if out of thin air the sky was filled with their crafts.  So many over each countries capitals, it nearly blotted out the sun.  I remember as though it were only yesterday instead of two hundred years.

We, Humans, found the Derinkuyu Underground City.  They had anticipated our discovery and abandoned that location.  They had moved to underwater caverns, we soon found many of those as well. They moved deeper into the oceans.  Our “veils” were lifted and we began to notice them as they moved about.

The chronicles of Mesopotamia told us of their being, too many generations had transpired between their open existence on top of the planet.  We forgot there were physical beings far greater than ourselves.  Then something odd began to happen, people and I mean specifically women, began to simply disappear. 

The stories some brought back and told were scoffed at.  There are no “aliens” we laughed and pointed at the weirdoes who told tales of fertilization/implantation only to have the fetus removed.  Turned out to be fact.  We started noticing more and more anomalies among the successful people.  Artists. Actors. 

The shape of their ears, the odd coloration of eyes, the smoothness of skin.  These all pointed to enhanced beings, born to be successful. Not simply exist. Born for success, to endear themselves to those of us who were born less of them and more of the earth. We are more animalistic.  More prone to tend and care for one another.  Not the ruthless “anything for the win” attitude of this new breed.  They had bred with our species enough to reproduce should they want to.

They no longer had a need for us, the breeders, the dirty abusers of their planet, the slow witted. 

We were deported.  They did not want our type on ‘their’ planet any longer.  They said they did not want to destroy their planet again in an attempt to purge it of us.  They gave us the technology to build our own crafts and sent us on our way. Leave or die. We moved on,

The sun shines here every day.  The wind howls, the snows do not melt in this region.  Food is grown in greenhouses.  There are entities here that frighten us.  The night frightens us.  We do not have the technology we had once had.  New Earth is a new beginning.

And the Human cycle begins again.

leigh

Wheelbarrow

Wheelbarrow

The Blogging Lounge

#2 Picture Prompt
Hosted by the talented Ariana Browning

Walking past the old house, I couldn't tear my eyes away.  The two story was sorely in need of some repair.  The front porch, once supported with intricately detailed vines and flowered wrought iron, now was held up by two weathered two by twos which seemed to sag in the middle. 

The gnarled old mulberry tree just off to the side of the house told a tale of many pies and jars of jelly. I recalled my Grandfather feeding the chipmunks.  Almost as soon as he sat in the old rocker, they would scamper around him like bees to a flower.  He would pull mulberries out of a pocket and hand feed them.  If the mulberries weren’t ripe, he had other treats.  He always had treats for the little people stored away in his shirt pocket.  

I could nearly hear the laughter of children on a tire swing, as I spied the scarred limbs on the maple tree in the back yard.  Close enough to the garden plot to keep an eye on and far enough away to keep the children out of trouble.

Grandmother would want to see each of us as soon as we arrived at her home.  Marched through the front door and into the parlor, past the formal dining area filled with lace and good china, into the kitchen, handed a ginger-snap cookie and then whisked out the back porch and told to stay away from the pies cooling on her rack. While she didn’t actually pull ears back to check for cleanliness, it was obvious we were being “inspected”.  One of us was always a little “wanting” of what she called “a lick and a promise.”  I suspect it was a lick to clean up whatever dirt was there and a promise of a good scrubbing to come!  I smile remembering the aroma and the look on Grandmother’s face as we stopped, usually a little too close to the pie, to breathe deeply.

Out the back door, around the wooden boat with the hole in it that Grandmother planted petunias, under the mulberry tree, and around the wheelbarrow with today’s haul from the garden.  The scare-crow closest to the house was made up as a man.  They had even hung pie tins from the outstretched arms to clatter together and frighten the birds out of the garden.  Whatever was ripe, that’s what we had for dinner that evening. 

I kept walking and gawking.  The repair crew was there, taking down the gray shingled siding.  I could see the piles of aluminum siding to be put up.  There was still an old wheelbarrow standing off to the side of the house.  Someone’s Grandmother must have lived there too.

leigh

Nature - Path - Lost

Nature, Path, Lost

#3 Writers Post – Hosted by the talented T.A. Woods

# 11   Picture and a Prompt

Riseof the Phoenix (Writing Group)

He grabbed my arm and jerked me around.  Just as I was gasping a huge inhale for a wondrously loud “Hey!” He clapped his gloved hand over my mouth.  The taste of grime and tree sap filled my half opened mouth.  Shards of the new bark we had been stripping from saplings flew up my nose.  Eyes wide with fury I started to struggle.  Had he lost his mind?!

Putting his finger over his lips indicating I should be quiet, I decided rather than berate him perhaps I should find out what his fuss was all about. 

We had been out taking suckers, or new shoots, from specific trees for grafting.  In an effort to continue the line of white birch trees, we would graft them onto poplars or yellow birch then harvest the seeds.  In the wild, nature had thrown this graceful tree a curve ball.

We worked our way from the deep woods back onto the path.  Our footfalls would be less noisy, no cracking of twigs buried beneath rotting leaves on the forest floor. Dropping down, he started to creep towards the crest of the hill.  We could smell the fire and the sweet acrid smell of overripe flowers.

There just beyond us, through the trees we could see their house!  Them!  Dancing under the stars, round and around the fire!  It was the wee folk. 

It was the deserted home at the end of the forest.  Destined to be torn down to make way for progress.  Torn down for either a mini-mall or a condominium complex or last but not least, a parking lot.  At here we were, witness to the supernatural.  Witness to something so spectacular we just stared, wide eyed and slack jawed.

Afterwards, I would have sworn we watched them dance and sing for hours, only moments had passed. He touched my arm.  In unison we turned, both filled with unspoken conviction.  We would save that space from “progress”.  We would make certain of it.  Mother Nature had shown us a prize and now it was up to us to keep it safe.

 leigh