Thoughts Join Letters

New Blog Site for Elece

2018-08-17T21:46:00.000-05:00

Hello Friends and Followers,
I am moving my blog to Wordpress and will be continuing Thoughts Join Letters there. Come join in at Elecehollis.com and find out about my books coming out in September and November. I would love to share my photography, stories, poetry and prose, as well as my family, farm and home with you.

Thanks for following me,
Elece

Sun Coming to the Orchard

2017-04-18T11:05:00.002-05:00

Sun Coming to the Orchard

By Elece Hollis

There is shade this morning on the orchard where fog lay heavy last night and through the dawn. As I watch, sunlight falls on the grass and spreads in a stream across it. Rows of trees stand tall working hard to leaf out and flower. These flowers will be our pecans come November. First the flowers and then green hulls and inside them woody shells begin. Inside these a green fluid that will form a pecan nut.

A palliated woodpecker hammers in one of the old oaks along the creek bank. Sun now is so inviting I am tempted to walk out in the pasture where cows are moving slow and silently grazing. Our old white horse quivers and shakes at the first horse flies of the season. Somedays that can make him run and kick and bellow.

The swing hangs still on the porch––a Carolina wren perched on the chain. He will build a nest in the crape myrtle bush and raise another pair of fledglings. I love these perky little wrens with red tail feathers that jut up and down as he moves in and out of the branches.

The irises are beginning to fade. They last such a short time but they are glorious. The peonies are budding the size of shooter marbles. They will be a soft pink with streaks of hot pink running through them. Their heads too heavy to stay upright; they pray with bowed heads that would overjoy a preacher.

Do you hear the doves cooing at the morning? They seem the laziest of birds sauntering under the sycamore tree cooing softly. Never flitting here and there nest building, never swooping and swishing like the barn swallows, never hopping about like robins searching the grass for worms. They seem to love the sound of their own voices. Their song––mellow and sweet––like that of a mother rocking alone after her children are grown, singing the old lullabies to her own heart––remembering.

Today the air will heat up warm and wonderful as toast. We will enjoy sitting outside letting the heat and light soak into our souls refueling us from the long winter. We will stop and smell roses. We will listen to tree frogs singing after a rain and we will pause to hear the cottonwood leaves in the evening wind rustle and rattle a drumbeat.

Nature raises its thousand voices in praise of the Creator. Light, color, rhythm, texture, song; everywhere rising––constantly swaying––a dance. Life.

May Morning

2016-05-02T10:22:00.000-05:00

God passes through the thicket of the world,

and wherever his glance falls he turns all things

to beauty. St. John of the Cross

Monday morning

By Elece

Monday morning and the sky is overcast after three lovely sun-filled days––like a semi-colon in spring. I suppose that the spring has passed and we are in early summer, but I love spring so much, I cling to it.

Birds are busy at the feeders, singing, and building nests. The barn swallows have already finished their new homes under the eaves of the porch.

Monday morning and a light rain is dripping from the roof and trees. There are rain drops beaded up on the iris leaves and the faces of my roses.

May has arrived and the whole world has turned violently green––shockingly green––startlingly green. To look back in my mind and winter's leafless trees and the brown lifeless grass seems unreal––could they have been?

My coffee is strong and hot and dark. It is like sipping muscle––cured my morning headache and wakes me from the night's hold.

Hugs and "I love you, Mama." from my children this weekend has lifted my soul. So often the house feels empty without these people whom I have held so close for the years. It does me good when they come home and hug me.

As Seasons Change

2014-09-17T17:51:00.003-05:00

To every thing there is a season and a time for every purpose

under the sun. Ecclesiastes 3:1

As the seasons change, I wonder how many seasons of my life remain. How long any of us has left in this life is an unknown, but most likely there are many springs and summers, autumns, and winters ahead for me.

Still, I feel the narrowing of time and I know my youth is past and even most of my summer years. I am starting into my autumn. I know there are many autumn things to love.

Summer with all its long super-heated days, days of play and outdoor work are past, days when a woman knows her place and feels right in it, robust days filled with shout-out-loud joy and run-in-the-sprinkler laughter, days of being, not becoming, but being who you are and not of going but having made it there days.

Summer is a filled to full time when all we want in life, what we wished for when children, hoped for when teens, and finally fell into in our twenties is there. Since we were told this is what all our years of schooling are to prepare us for, what is there for us once we pass those star-studded happy days?

Empty nest syndrome is where we find our parenting days in recession, melting away and our adult children trundling off across the playground like curious toddlers, in our eyes—still kids—but we know different. So we let them go and leaves begin to dry and lose their hold on our branches.

And that is how it should be and how it happens to most of us Mamas. We find we need the rest and enjoy the changes, the spare time, the quiet evenings with no baseball practice, no requests for outings or rides here and there.

Then we find a little of our inner child still alive and a bit fragile from lack of exercise. "Come on out," we hear and we begin to say it to ourselves, our shy selves.

Gradually our colors change and we begin to show our brightest sides—oranges, reds, yellows, purples still among our greens. It is the time to find ourselves and drink in the scents and sights of the season.

Do you smell the apples ripening on the hill? Do you see the bright pumpkins in heaps and piles for sale beside the road? Do you hear the wind in the night change its tune and after all the rustling and swishing and swaying in the wind move down an octave on the keys?

Soon we see the leaves begin to fall.

Leaves begin to flutter and fly in the winds of these changing times and they settle to the ground. The trees feel bare and some folks wonder if they are dead, but they are just passing into the next phase of life, the next season. There is much life yet to live and much growth and change to come.

Change is the nursery of music, joy, life, and eternity.

John Donne

Poetry and Ax Handles

2013-09-06T12:09:00.000-05:00

"Making an ax-helve is like writing a poem. The material is free enough but it takes a poet to use it. Some people imagine that any fine thought is poetry, but there was never a greater mistake.

A fine thought, to become poetry, must be seasoned in the upper garrets of the mind for long and long, then it must be brought down and slowly carved into words, shaped with emotion, polished with love. Else it is no true poem. "

From Adventures in Contentment chapter 5 The Ax-Helve, by David Grayson

A Dream of Friends

2013-08-09T21:48:00.005-05:00

The room was full of people. People crowded in chairs at rows of white clothed tables. I sat at the end of one of the center rows, turned sideways in my chair to spoon feed a baby in a highchair.
The room was alive, voices raising and a constant current of conversation mingled spurts with laughter and an occasional baby or toddler fussing. Overall it was just the happy sound of people eating together.
I saw her headed toward me and I was glad to see her. She had a determined gleam in her eye as she carefully and slowly navigated around people and conversations, and chairs and dishes and spills. She kept coming and she got slowly closer until she was standing beside the highchair. I gave the baby her final spoon of food and smiled at my friend, my dear, long-time, from the first minute we met friend, Barbara Rauls.
She stepped closer and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said simply "I love you," turned and headed out of the room.
"Wait," I called after her. Leaving the baby in the charge of a friend, I followed after her to her car in the parking lot to give her a hug and to say a proper goodbye.

Then in an empty space, cameos—appeared with the faces of many of my friends from over my sixty years. I saw Mary Ruth Stevens and heard her sweet perky voice say "I love you." Then others friends from my past in Oklahoma: Linda Gaunt, and Cindy Hoover, Pamela Wedel saying "I love you."And from my years in Louisiana: Bonnie Hollis, Linda Doughty, Pamela Calish, and Judy Mock. Each said, "I love you" and in the dream their voices each sounded so familiar, so real and near.
Then my friends here in Oklahoma again Shelley Boland, Ronee Jordan, Valerie Wright, Rebecca Lee, etc. They each appeared, said I love you, and then faded.

It was a happy dream—a wonderful dream, because I knew when I woke what I had known all along. I was loved. I had friends from way back long ago and right up to the present that loved me.

Friends are friends forever.

2013-07-31T17:15:00.002-05:00

“But an empty shell, like an empty nest, invites day-dreams of refuge."
-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classical Look at How We Experience Intimate Places

Home Away from Home

2013-01-22T20:25:00.000-06:00

My grandchildren, four of them and their mother, my oldest daughter, have come to to stay with us awhile while they resettle in the US. They have lived several years in Mexico City and returned to us to start over without their "Poppy" who has drinking problems and been abusive. To start over in a new place with a new language. Oh, my how hard it will be.

So far, they have enjoyed getting to know their aunts and uncle and grandparents and cousins. The oldest only having retained any memories of us and the farm. They seem to love the quiet and peaceful countryside and the family, clean warm beds, warm baths, new toys, books, and plenty of new foods.

The little boy Bryan, just three-years-old, loves his Abuelo, who he now calls "Grand-pa Pecan". We have pushed the children on the swings and played and run and picked up pecans in the back yard. They have eaten ice cream with Grandpa, leaned to bow their heads and listen quietly for a prayer around the table at supper each night, and pronounce with him the "Amen." They love to play and wrestle and say, "I love you" with Grandpa and the uncles, Alton, especially, whom all the children always love.

This morning the house was chilly. The porch thermometer read thirty degrees. The sunlight slanted in yet it is cold light. I piled logs in the woodstove atop a bed of hot coals and soon a fire was burning bright and the room beginning to heat up.We had comfort coming!

Three of the children are playing in the floor here now, one with a box of dominoes, one with toy cars and another with blocks. The sun spills in on the carpet. It is good to have them here safe and sound after such a fiery time they have come through and after the hard journey over so many miles, three long hard days traveling to Oklahoma. There was danger, fear, and weariness. There was sickness and doubt and there was trauma, but God brought them through it all.

This was one of those times when trials burn like threatening wild fires, like house fires, forest fires, not comforting woodstove fires. Fires like the times when someone is very sick, when the car has broken down, a hurricane is raging nearer, or a job is lost. They are fires we fight like one last year when the drought dried grasses out back burst suddenly into moving thriving flames. Fires we have to survive.

When these fires burn we turn to our God who guides us, who protects us, who comforts us, and supports us. He is our refuge and our consolation through those raging fires. He brings us back to safe places where we can sit and rest in the warmth of love and know He is with us.

A Few of my Favorite Things

2012-09-13T21:40:00.006-05:00

Pink roses. Always bouquets at my house. I love flowers.

Hummingbird chimes in my garden bedroom.

Morning Glories climb my garden gate.

Yellow flowers and sea shells are some of my treasures.

Calligraphy by my daughter, Delaney, with one of our favorite

scriptures about children seated round about the table

like young olive shoots.

My bird dish from Michigan, a blue pot of African Violets, sea shells, rocks, sunshine

Books, books, books, books Some of these I helped write!

A glass paperweight on my desk

Sunflowers from my yard

Milk warmed to make yogurt. I love to cook.

Cookbook and tomatoes in a bowl

Baskets are filled with apples and pears from the orchard. At our house we love fruit.

At my house roses are a must!

Mama loves dried flowers and plants

Planter and garden vines

Our favorite pet, Ginger

Fresh peaches from Porter

Cantaloupes and tomatoes from our garden

Pretty dishes

I love dishes like my retro yellow bowl and my plaid platter,

yellow Frankoma,

Marshall pottery (pitchers, crocks, and bowls) and USA Hull brown pottery.

The supper table with a pork roast and garden salad and watermelon.

Fun in Pool

2012-08-12T11:45:00.000-05:00

Surviving 100 plus degree weather is easier with a back yard pool. We enjoy our pool along with our children and grandchildren. danny used a water pistol to try to get people wet?

Dan Jacob and his daddy Joe, my son-in-law.

My son Quinton with his niece Jessie and Audra with Madison her youngest.

Uncle Quinton with Jessie Lynn.

Uncle Alton, my son with his niece Emma.

Grandson Taylor stayed underwater most the time.

This shot came out blurry but I love how Daniel is laughing at his brother Jacob.

Dad Joe and Jacob.

Alton and Emma

Emma is so cute.

Emma Irene throwing the pool dive toy.

Grandpa Ron and our little grandgirl Madison who loved the water!

Jacob cheesing for the camera.

A Morning at Audra's House

2012-07-11T11:41:00.000-05:00

Surprise!

Take my picture, Grandma.

Little Grand-girl Madison

Dance and twirl

I can open it, Grandma!

Taylor's pet turtle

Pretty dishes in the cupboard

Apples and tomatoes in a wooden dough bowl

Black-Eyed Susan

2012-05-26T16:08:00.002-05:00

Simply Beautiful

My Fairy Garden

2012-05-09T14:15:00.000-05:00

I heard fairy gardens are very popular this year. "What's a fairy garden," I asked?

They are, or so I hear,

large container gardens decorated with tiny lawn furniture and trinkets, small plants and vines,

As a place where the tiny creatures might like to hang out on summer nights. Being an essentially hospitable person, I decided to make a fairy garden for my porch.

I chose an abandoned bird's nest as a more natural bed for a fairy .

I gathered some plants with tiny blooms and leaves and some stuff that fairies might like furniture wise or as lawn ornaments, like sea shells, polished stones, and beach glass.

A miniature fern

A tinsy variegated ivy

If the rumor is true, fairies will come at night and lounge around in my fairy garden

and leave me gifts like gold coins, fifty-cent pieces, and other treats.

I planted a white moon vine that blooms only in the dark of night

and gives off a sickly-sweet scent to draw special moths.

I think the fairies will be awestruck!

Tulip Memories

2012-05-07T14:54:00.000-05:00

My tulip

a new one I planted this year.

It looked white in bud, just white and green.

Not until it began to open did I know that I had a special pink ruffled tulip on my hands.

Oh, it did turn out to be a pretty bloom and I enjoyed for a while before it faded.

Tulips are a favorite of mine.

When I was a child and lived in western Michigan, we got to go to Holland, Michigan to see the tulip festival that they hold there every spring. The Michigan winter is long and dreary,

so spring is especially welcome. The streets were lined with tulips of every color imaginable. Windmills turned their Dutch heads along the coastline of the big lake.Shops stood for handouts from tourists along the highway. Holland New Holland full of Dutch people with surnames like Brink, De Vries, Meijer, Jansen, DeJong and Smit.

I recall going there once after I was married and had my little Delaney in tow.

In a gift shop she chose a pair of wooden shoes which she kept for many years

as a remembrance of the trip.

Tulips take me back there. They make windmills turn in my mind. They are a Maypole with little girls in pastel dresses pulling sashes of ribbons into a braid.

They are spring, new life, rebirth and rejoicing!

Azaleas

2012-04-01T22:34:00.000-05:00

Azaleas bloom in the Honor Heights Gardens in Muskogee, OK

White like snow covered bushes.

Purple blooms are some of the first colors to show off.

Stone walks run up and down the hills with waterfalls, streams and pools.

Some varieties are so gorgeous they are breathtaking

Farm Morning

2012-03-31T11:53:00.002-05:00

Walk in dew-soaked grass to the hen house.

Lift the door latch.

Chickens come squeaking

Out to catch bugs in the morning shade.

I chose a place in the sun,

On the stump by the water pump.

A smell of fresh turned earth

And freshly mown grass meets me.

I stop to break stalks of asparagus.

Creamed soup for supper.

Learning to See

2012-03-30T21:12:00.002-05:00

This year I turn sixty and eye surgery this week made me really feel my age. There I sat in a big massage chair having taken a muscle relaxer and listening to soft music waiting my turn in the assembly line of young men and women waiting for the laser machine to hum warm and all the right lights to flash.

The kind nurses reassured us each and reminded us not to touch our faces. She gave us sterile booties to cover out dirty shoes and a hairnet to wear. I felt like I was in the dryer row at a beauty salon and decided I might just pretend I was at a spa. So I closed my eyes and tried to totally relax and pretend I was going to have a facial after the massage.

Cucumbers slices on each eye, cool and fresh, or was a nurse washing my skin around my eyes. Slathering on the mud or a washing of Mercurochrome. Hmmm... Certainly doesn't smell like a spa.

Few more minutes and no more glasses. The doctor comes in wearing surgery scrubs "Alice," he says? "No, Elece, I say. "Elece? Nice to meet you. Follow me." So the rest is a blur and a pain. I was afraid and the whole thing was a terrible ordeal. But now it is over and I can see the sky and the sun and the flowers.

Today I talked to my mom in Michigan. I told her I needed to hear her voice and she said, "I'm here and I am still your Mama and you are still my girl." Oh how nice to have such a mama! I told her I feel like a skink, a lizard, because if the skink loses a tail it will grow back. The doctor cut off the top layer of my cornea and it will grow back in three days. That's pretty amazing to me.What good care God takes of all his creatures.

Now I will have to learn to see. Not from nothing but from the blurry eyes to the new prescription for sight that the doctor gave me with laser. Mono-vision will give me one eye correction a short distance so I can read, see the computer screen and the car's dashboard without strain. The other eye to see into the distance. Gradually, my brain will learn to see that way.

I hope that I will see much clearer and better. I hope that flowers will be brighter colors and that faces will be sharp and clear. I hope my heart will see differently too, always appreciating all the beauty and wonder around me, that could have been lost. I hope it will help me look with more compassion on those who can't see. I hope this trial and time of healing will teach me to truly see.

Look at That!

2012-03-10T19:03:00.002-06:00

"Oh Marilla, how much you miss!' This line from Anne of Green Gables stayed with me and played over and over in my mind. I know we miss lots and lots. We miss sunrises and sunsets. We see a few and we relish them and then we forget them. We miss the sky.We see the sky when it is gray and we forget when it was blue with fluffy white clouds floating along. We miss the sky so many times because we only notice when it is suiting us.

We miss trees and flowers and beautiful old buildings, and beautiful people, and colors and shapes, and sounds, and rhythms and songs. We haven't got time for wonder and joy. We're too busy. Yes, we are too busy!

With a love for nature and my photography bug, I see many things others might not notice. I took a photo of a nice bridge with a design in its concrete railings and a W.P.A. plaque attached. I showed the pictures to my family. Where is this bridge my husband asked? When I told him he drove across it everyday to get to work, he was surprised and a little doubtful until he went to work the next morning.

How could he have missed it? He just wasn't expecting to see anything lovely or amazing in the ordinary. That is how we people are.

When we travel we take cameras and our eyes are open watching for sights, wonderful, historical, majestic, breathtaking sights, sights others may see everyday. I wonder if the people in those places might want to see what wonders are in ours.

How many wonders do we walk past in our everyday routines?

I think about the old story-line from some movies and books. The main character looks for happiness all the world over. He comes home at long last to find it was in his own back yard the whole time. Search the world for love, peace, joy, beauty and you may find it was accessible all along right near home.

I have friends who want to live in the country to find peace and contentment. It is peaceful here. I love my farm, but am I wrong to think that a person must first find contentment in his heart before he can then find it in his place, his world, his home, his life?

I have one dear friend who dreams of living on a farm and owning a pink pig. When she told me her vision, I pictured the fat pastel hog with a perky satin ribbon tied on its curly tail and a contented smile on its docile face, while ten little pink piglets nursed at her belly. A sweet dream it is! But is it preventing my friend from seeing something even more wonderful that she has already in her city, in her own neighborhood, in her own back yard? Ah, it may well be.

"Look at that!" said the old man in a voice whose earnest inflection inspires me. "Look at that!" "Look at that!" If we only see what we saw before; if we only listen for voices and melodies we know; if we rush through our days only glimpsing here and there a wonder; we surely will miss the marvels that are packed into every space and spot in every inch of our world. How sad that would be. How very sad.

So I say , Look at that!

The mulberry tree is budding!

A wren is building a nest in the Crape Mrytle bush outside my bedroom window.

Look at that! The rope swing's shadow.

Look at that! Black hen lost a feather in the grass.

Look at that! The apple trees in my orchard are dressed in pink.

Look! The Periwinkle sprouts fresh leaves and purple pinwheel blooms outside my front door.

Meadowlark

By Elece Hollis

Dandelions in the grass

Smiling sweetly as I pass

Nodding heads of yellow fluff

You tell me I don’t smile enough?

Meadowlark perched on the fence

Would you sing for fifty cents?

“I only sing for free,” said he,

“For life is good and sweet to me”.

Iris fronds like swords of green

Purple blossoms in between,

You say I’m walking much too fast?

How many wonders I walk past!

Oak tree towering overhead

Rooted in a lily bed

My vision is too small you think?

I do not know how deep roots sink?

Snow white clouds up in the blue

You tell me what I fear is true

I hurry, scurry, stop too rarely

Only know my world too sparely!

Remind me to come out of self

To take my soul down from the shelf

To find the Lark’s own cause to sing:

Yes, life is good and sweet in spring.

Surprise of the Day

2012-03-02T09:17:00.000-06:00

A beautiful tulip tree blooming in town caught my eye.

What a sweet surprise on a sunny Thursday morning!

I pulled in the driveway and pulled my camera from its bag.
I climbed out and got some lovely shots of these tree blossoms.

The Pink Magnolia blooming means spring is at the door.

Spring in the Meadow

By Elece Hollis

The treetops show a palest green.

The iris fronds point straight and clean.

The daffodils nod in between

The earth and sky.

The air above is slate-grey blue;

It shines with very different hue

Than golden warm when robins flew

South in the fall.

The grass appears about to burst

Forth from the ground whose long cold thirst

Is sated now with the fresh first

Swells of spring rain.

Under the mat of last year’s grass

Bright flowers struggle up to pass

Through to the sun’s warm rays at last

From winter’s night.

The geese fly honking overhead,

As Spring arises from his bed;

He shakes himself, comes to be fed

On bread of light.

No, Spring has not arrived, but come,

Like Papa from a journey home,

Calls from the soil, calls from the loam

“I’m almost there!”

Christmas Cactus

2011-11-09T09:10:00.003-06:00

Zygocactus

A glorious bloom worth waiting for.

This cactus lived outside all summer. I watered it against the drought. It seemed to thrive in the dry heat. It began to show some buds which is odd. I had thought it wouldn't bloom until it had been through a dry and dark four weeks followed by light and watering.

I have counted forty-five buds and blossoms on this Zygocactus plant. Unlike a cactus, this plant produces no prickles or spines.

The white booms are elegant. The buds are long and fat and then gradually fold petals back like fairy wings until the stigma and stamens are revealed. I love how the magenta color edges the opening in the flower.

The blooms almost appear to be flying free of the plant, like little white birds, only attached by a light green stem. This is how the "zygo" gets in the name. The blooms sprout from the ends of the leaves which support them. "Zygo" means yoke or joining.

Summer Poems

2011-08-02T09:41:00.002-05:00

This poem won an award at a writer's Conference:

Of a Summer Morning

By Elece Hollis

Out in the field where the meadowlark goes,

Red Paintbrushes stand on the tips of their toes.

Butterflies—yellow ones, white, orange, and black

Weave melodies over the grasses and back.

Out in the woods where the tanager sings,

Luna moth travels on gossamer wings.

Timid mouse peeps from his leafy retreat

Looking for wild winterberries to eat.

Down by the swift river’s warm sandy shore,

Sandpipers skitter about to explore.

Water bugs dart across sparkling blue

Where sunlight reflects the sky’s silvery hue.

Deep in the forest’s cool shadowy rooms,

Mosses cling staunchly to fallen tree tombs.

Gray squirrels hold conference on nutting technique

With Jack-in-his-pulpit preparing to speak.

Out in the pasture where cows gentle graze,

White egrets stalk silently through summer days.

Grasshoppers balance—on hot grasses sway

To the melodies blackbirds and barbed wire play.

The following was not intended to become a poem but was composed of lines
I had written to go with a batch of photographs I took and was posting.
It was published in Life Notes this week with editor Cheryl Barker .

Cicada Days

by Elece Hollis

The sun is bright and harsh in the

Oklahoma sky.

The grasses sway in the heat.

The first leaves dry and float to the ground.

The cicadas thrum and throb.

The trees struggle to provide shade.

Everything metal is too hot to touch.

The pecans begin to dry and their hulls brown and split.

Dragonflies spin and swoop and rest on dry grass stems.

Children swelter until their sweet faces flush rosy.

Little girls go barefoot. Lazy dogs rest in the shade.

Children go swimming in the early morning.

We watch the apples ripen.

Spiders set up webs in broad daylight.

Butterflies flutter across the yard. Cicadas buzz and drone.

Thistle blooms. Last nasturtiums fade.

Farmers line up huge rounds of hay.

The sky is stark blue.

Follow the barbed wire to fall.

This poem was published this month in the FCW ReadyWriter as
a "writing to inspire lesson," by poet writer James Tate.

Light

By Elece Hollis

Sunlight filters down

Through the branches

of towering trees

to the woodland floor.

A few leaves cling tenaciously

to the branches.

The wind pulls at them.

Their shadows dance

in ever-changing patterns

on the narrow winding path.

Moss and low hardy shrubs

hold fast to their places.

Last night’s rain is trapped

in the leafy layers

making a spongy labyrinth

for mice and beetles.

A late butterfly flutters

among the barren branches.

A crow calls from the pine,

“This is my wood,” he screeches.

“Go away!”

Despite his scolding,

I do not find this a dreary place,

although it is so different

from the early summer’s world.

It is full of movement,

sound, light and life.

There is a healing here,

a comforting sense of belonging.

Lord, may my life be like

these woods,

that those who encounter me

may find peace, comfort, hope

and the light

of encouragement.

John 8:12

“Then spoke Jesus again unto them,

saying, I am the light of the world:

he that followeth me

shall not walk in darkness,

but shall have the light

of life.”

The following is one of my favorite poems for late summer:

Dog Days

By Elece Hollis

The porch swing hangs heavy.

The potted plants sigh;

But none is so hot nor

So weary as I.

The music of crickets,

The buzz of the fly

Is droning unanswered

Tired and dry.

The sun on the garden

Has dried every leaf

The vines have all withered

Gone summer’s feast.

The Queen Anne has faded.

Is no longer white.

All life waits in stillness

For coolness of night.

We watch for the promise

Of color on trees,

Of pears and of pumpkins

To come with the ease,

Of cooler and wetter

Oh, welcome relief

From the dogs days of summer.

The satin cerise

Of summer’s late sunsets,

That guarantee all

The geese winging southward

God sending us fall.

The Victorian Lady of Jenks, Oklahoma

2011-07-21T14:11:00.004-05:00

This is the front of the Victorian Lady Bed and Breakfast where

Ron and I spent our anniversary celebration. It is in Jenks, a town just south of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Victorian Lady, was a welcome retreat from the July heat.

Well-kept flowerbeds cheered us as we were greeted by the proprietor, Deena Slass.

Inside she served us chocolate covered strawberries with dark chocolate. They were sumptuous.

And beautiful.

These lace curtains hung in the front bedroom.

Footboard of the bed in our room, a hope chest, and jewelry/photo box.

More Chocolate covered strawberries. ( My sister says Chocolate is not capitalized, but I beg to differ.)

An oil lamp over the dining table.

Decorative trim

A fine old clock

This piece was designed to hold nuts or fruit and the cones live flower blossoms.

Bed skirt of crocheted lace

Rocking chair fit for a queen

Lace bedspread

Headboard in another room.

This headboard was in the room we stayed in. I loved the wood floors, the paint color here and the wallpaper borders.

Coffee service in candlelight

One of many paintings and art pieces with lovely old frames.

Blueberry Coffee cake is a favorite at this bed and breakfast.

Good to the last crumb.

Peach topped French toast was served for breakfast.

Plant in the kitchen some kind of violet.

Embroidered pedal covers on a parlor organ.

I loved this headboard and I love the blue walls.

Vases of peacock featheres were in many of the rooms.

Lots of Lace and artistry.

Thanks to the Victorian Lady in Jenks for a wonderful visit.

Life of Roses

2011-07-15T14:51:00.002-05:00

Pink-Eyed Roses

Fresh from the greenhouse. Bright and willful,

Wrapped in buttery yellow parchment,

Ready to please

Strong

Self-Confident

Soften with age in a few swift-passing days,

Yet beautiful and joyful with life

Begin to mellow, to lose intensity

Unfurling, gradually losing their grip on life

Softly saying their farewells

Holding still the fragrance of all they know

Fragile and sweet to the end.

2011-06-22T22:50:00.000-05:00

One ought, every day at least,to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Hollis Table

2011-06-20T16:08:00.003-05:00

This is my friend from Claremore, Carol A. Round. Some of you may recognize her face or name from the daily newspaper. Carol writes a weekly inspirational column that is found in Okmulgee's Daily Times and several other papers across north east Oklahoma. She joined me for a salad lunch before we headed out on our trip to Texas last Friday.

We attended a writer's workshop at Cross Timbers church in Keller, Texas Saturday taught by Karen Power and Frank Ball. We had plenty of time on the 6 hour ride to talk about our writing projects, our children, and our homes (and Carol's dog, Taco!)

The workshop was well worth the expense and the drive. I trust we will both progress and improve because of the information we gleaned in the classes. Also, meeting so many other writers is a blessing and encouragement.

Carol has two books which are collections of her reader's favorite columns. She is working on a third. Doesn't she look bright and friendly and like someone who has a lot to share?