MissMeliss: Escribition

A 2008 Best of Holidailies Selection. Thanks, Holidailies Reviewers!
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My mother posted earlier today about the tradition of drinking hot chocolate on the 12th Day of Christmas (aka Three Kings Day / Epiphany), which she has adopted since retiring to Mexico several years ago. I still live here, but I’m all about [...]

And ice like vinyl
On the streets
Cold as silver
White as sheets
Rain like strings
And changing things
Like leaves.
– Stephen Sondheim

It was a cold, wet day, with razor-sharp rain outside my windows most of the day. Zorro refused to go out until his bladder was so full he was practically floating, and then he came back in looking bedraggled [...]

In January it’s so nice
While slipping on the sliding ice
To sip hot chicken soup with rice
Sipping once, sipping twice
Sipping chicken soup with rice
~ Maurice Sendak/Carole King,
“Chicken Soup with Rice”
Really Rosie

I was seven years old when I was first introduced to the Carole King/Maurice Sendak musical Really Rosie, not by [...]

Because I’m tired, cranky, and my knee is throbbing:
– Slept til 12:30. Or really almost one. Spent fifteen minutes figuring out which pants fit with knee brace. Went out in public (well, the salon) in really big t-shirt and stretch pants, choosing comfort over style. And sneakers. Yay sneakers.
- Spent four hours [...]

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.
~Ellen Goodman

In my column at All Things [...]

If what you do on the first day of the year really does inform the next 364, I’m going to be a well rested writer because sleeping and writing were pretty much all I did today, though the former activity was helped along by a little vicodin.
When I couldn’t sleep any more, I convinced Fuzzy [...]

On the first day of a new year, it seems fitting to include music in a post. The song, “You Are the New Day,” is by the Kings Singers. I had the privilege of attending a brown-bag lunch with them when I was in high school, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
This song [...]

A 2008 Best of Holidailies Selection. Thanks, Holidailies Reviewers!
Just as plastic trees become objects of wonder just as they’re bedecked with fairy lights and ornaments, Christmas decorations, in general, become unmagical as soon as the Christmas season is over.
For some, this change happens around the 6th of January – Epiphany, the 12th Day of Christmas. [...]

We visit others as a matter of social obligation. How long has it been since we have visited with ourselves?
~Morris Adler

This week I’ve been feeling insular, and basking in not-quite-solitude. I say “not-quite” because Fuzzy has been in the house, but mainly keeping to himself, in his office. I, on the other hand, have [...]

Music
From the white truck
Hails childhood’s sweet return.
Magic wrapped in freezer paper:
Ice cream.
Totally Optional Prompts invites us, this week, to create a Cinquain, which is, “… a short, unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines.”
I’m not so great at poetry, but I like challenges that encourage [...]