Butterfly Mind

Dry-stone wall

November 12th, 2015

When I hear “dry-stone wall,” the first thing I think of is a wet stone wall: moss-covered with a sparkling trickle of water running down damp cobbles, or the clammy stone walls of a cave.

But a dry-stone wall? Where does that happen?

In sunlight. In fact I have a picture of the stone chimney of a cabin at Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s one of my favorite photographs. I love stone, and I alway want to use the image for social media profiles: my Twitter or Facebook header. But what does an image of a stone wall say about me if I use it as a banner? Other than my love of earth and rock, the photograph does not portray me, so I upload it, preview it, overthink it, then remove it.

I’ll add it as the featured image here instead.

The problem is the hyphen. Why is there a hyphen in “dry-stone” in this prompt? Is dry-stone a thing — is it something different from sun-warmed cobbles, from the smooth uneven structure of a stone chimney?

I cheated. I stopped my timer to look up dry-stone:

adj. 1. (of a wall) made without mortar

Does that mean the stones are pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle? This indentation lays on this protrusion, this jag fits in this cranny? I think it does. The chimney in my image has no mortar.

I see low walls like this in the mountains. I seem to remember one that stretched for miles in Shenendoah, about knee-height, of thousand and thousands of stones pieced together without anything to bind them. Yet the structure was somehow stable, somehow not tumbling to pieces. A masterpiece of irregular parts fitting together to make something regular. A dry-stone wall.

Thank you Dapplegrey for the prompt, “dry-stone wall.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Giggles

November 11th, 2015

When our daughter was eight, she’d have one friend over at a time. On a Saturday, a little friend would come over for the afternoon, and for four hours, they would giggle.

They’d eat a snack, look at each other, and burst into the tinkling sound of little girl laughter. They did not need a reason to laugh, the joy and silliness just bubbled out.

As the girls age, they still giggle. Our daughter is almost 10 now, and when she has a friend over, there are frequent bursts of laughter for no apparent reason. The laughs are deeper now — not as high pitched and airy as an eight-year-old giggle. The giggle fits are often inspired by a boy somewhere in the vicinity: our son, or his friend if he has one over.

I remember the days of giggle fits, where I’d start laughing and couldn’t stop. And then my mom would say, “Some one turned Andrea’s giggle box over,” and I’d laugh even harder, until tears streamed down my face and my abs felt like I’d crunched 100 sit-ups.

A laugh that goes so deep you forget what you’re laughing at, and that lasts so long it hurts, is one of the best feelings in the world. I hope our daughter has thousands of them.

Photo credit: Bubbles by pandajenn1234.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Sand

November 10th, 2015

I grew up on Tybee Island, Georgia, where we spent nearly every summer weekend at the beach, on sand. I love sand under my bare feet, especially underwater. I love how sand is golden in the shallows of southern east coast beaches. It sparkles in morning and evening sunlight, and it’s firm under my feet but soft between my toes.

At low tide, when the Atlantic is calm and flat, you can shuffle your feet in the sand off the beach to feel for the hard disks of sand dollars. I used to love finding sand dollars, to lift them above the green water and watch their hundreds of bristle legs glisten in the sunlight.

Later we moved to Florida’s Gulf coast, where the sand is white and fine. The sand there contains limestone and bleached seashells in addition to the quartz grains that dominates both Gulf and East coast sand — quartz from the Appalachian mountains we now live in.

This is my favorite thing about sand: its origins. I remember learning about sand in elementary school, or maybe in earth science in 8th grade — about how the sand on our beaches at Tybee Island used to be stone at the top of Appalachian mountains. How it is old. So old thtat it was once solid rock, but eroded into smaller stones, then got pummeled into smaller and smaller bits as it worked its way down rivers, until eventually it was ground to the tan quartz sand of our beaches. When you hold a handful in the light, you can see sparkling bits of mica, and the orange tint of iron in the glittering quartz.

I’ve heard the Appalachians mocked by folks in western states. They laugh, “Those are hills, not mountains.” The sight of them may not stagger, but the the Appalachians are mountains. They are old mountains. So old they’ve rounded off in their age. So old they’ve worn down. So old that they are subtle, not imposing; they are soft not jagged. The are old enough that they span solid earth to fine grains of sand, and have spread, from mountaintop to coastal plain.

Photo credit: Sand Structures by fdecomite

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Register Now for WordCamp US in Philadelphia!

November 9th, 2015

If you’re a blogger, I hope you’ll consider joining us in Philly!

WordPress.com News

We’re less than a month away from the inaugural WordCamp US, the largest WordPress conference in the world. Join us in Philadelphia for two days of informative sessions and stimulating conversations with everyone from blogging newbies to the most experienced WordPress developers in the world. WCUS will be on December 4–5 (with Contributor Day on the 6th), in Center City at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

In previous years, WordCamp San Francisco has acted as the official annual WordPress conference, where WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg gives the “State of the Word,” sharing the latest WordPress developments, answering questions from the audience, and offering his thoughts on what’s next for WordPress — and the future of the web. This year’s “State of the Word” will happen at WCUS!

Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp SF in 2014. Image by Sheri Bigelow.

The event is packed with two tracks of sessions plus lightning talks…

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Kissing Gate

November 9th, 2015

A girl in a pretty white frock, her heel in the air, her hands on the top board of the gate at the end of the drive, lips puckered and leaning forward for her beau to kiss her before he rides off on his horse.

A kissing gate sounds very Gone With the Wind. Spanish moss would drip from trees overhead. The scent of jasmine would hang in the air. The path would be dusty and lined with wildflowers, and the girl and the beau both would turn away with smiles on their faces.

There is a kissing gate scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I remember the protagonist, Janie, standing under a tree of blooms by her husband’s fence by the dusty roadside, waiting for something — or someone — to come along and change her life. And one day he did. A man came along and kissed her over the fence, and that kiss changed the course of everything. *

Does anyone have a kissing gate anymore? It seems they are better suited to a life on foot rather than a life behind the wheel. I love the thought of them, though — the fresh air, the green grass, the earthy smell of a dirt path. A wooden gate to smooch over when you say goodbye until next time to your sweetheart.

*I could be remembering the kiss wrong — if he didn’t actually kiss her, Janie sure wanted him to.

Thank you Dapplegrey for the prompt, “kissing gate.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Ice

November 8th, 2015

I am ready for winter. Glittering palaces of ice where waterfalls once flowed. Crystal ornaments in trees, where dew drops froze. A smooth flat of ice on puddles and ponds — skating rinks for the right sized feet.

One of my favorite books is The Snow Child. Much of my love for that book is for the delicate descriptions of winter, snow, and ice. The Snow Child is set in interior Alaska, and the author Eowyn Ivey makes me want to disappear into her shimmering snowscape.

Unlike most fantasy, where the villain occupies any icy peak and threatens to kill with cold — as if eternal winter were a more exacting hell than eternal fire — The Snow Child is stunning in its portrayal of the tundra beauty. Beryl glaciers. Glowing blue spires of ice. White snow with berries like rubies poking through. Ivey’s prose sparkles like snow in moonlight.

Here in Blacksburg, the ice is like silver. I don’t remember many wet storms during our winters in Minnesota — it was too cold for much besides dry powdery snow — but Appalachia knows how to throw an ice storm. Limbs droop under the weight of shining crusts, leaves drip with streams of water frozen mid-drop, roofs and roods glisten with sheets of slick black ice, and when the sun comes up, the whole world glitters as if encrusted in diamonds.

Ice can be treacherous — when the power goes out and you don’t have a backup heat source, or when you have to drive somewhere and you fear for your life — but if you remove those annoyances, if you bundle up and take a walk out in the frozen, silent world, ice can be one of life’s great glories.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.

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Dry-stone wall

Giggles

Sand

Register Now for WordCamp US in Philadelphia!

Kissing Gate

Ice