The exercise:
Your word for today is: half.
Mine:
A lot of couples refer to their partners as their 'better half'. Kat and I don't belong in that particular category; I think, if anything along those lines, we'd go with 'my other half'.
I mention this because this morning I drove Kat to Keremeos so that she could catch a bus to the Lower Mainland. She's taking a workshop there for the next two weeks and I'm staying behind to take care of the farm. I'll be getting lots of help from Kat's parents, of course, and hopefully a little extra assistance from a friend or two.
8 comments:
I refer to Mark as my insignificant other from time to time, but then I have to dodge. Or duck. He finds it inexplicably less amusing than I do.
So, is 'extra assistance from a friend or two' code for 'partying for two weeks straight and hoping the weeds don't grow over waist height'? ;-)
Half
Madame Sosotris, famous clairvoyante,
Still has her bad cold,
And now her eyes run as much as her nose.
Her wicked pack of cards has been split in half,
And still she deals futures for desperate men.
Here, she says, is your card,
And she shows me the Boiled Frog,
Sitting replete in a vat of briny water.
Here is Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks,
But the card is torn down the middle,
And the half that remains is more sinister than the night.
I cannot find the Hanged Man, says she,
Shuffling the cards, unaware this is cheating;
That Alecto is standing unseen at her shoulder,
Waiting to exact his price.
Fear death and slaughter she concludes,
Wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
And I, poor Phlebitis, pay her price in silver,
Thankful she's not charging gold.
Greg - so much I liked in there, the feeling of her ineptitude combined with true foreboding, very nice.
Marc - very poetic, and true. Mine's a different take on that phrase.
My better half. I always thought that meant my upper body. Then she came along and everyone told me she was it. She had something I obviously didn’t. Poor me, lacking before and not even knowing it. All of them, every single one, must have been laughing at me. What’s so funny? I never did anything to them. I just lived my life. I paid my bills on time. I went to work. I said please and thank you. But they must have been laughing if I lacked whatever she had. I bet they couldn’t even tell me what it was. I never saw it and I bet they never did either. Doesn’t matter now. She doesn’t have it anymore either. I wonder if they’ll be laughing when they find that out.
"Now children," the math teacher asked her kindergartners, "did you remember your examples of halves?"
They all nodded in quick agreement.
"Okay, let's start with Billy." A little kid walked to the front of the room. "And what did you bring?"
"I brought half of a pencil!" Billy exclaimed with pride, then walked back to his chair.
She invited the next kid up, who stated, "I've got half of an old shoe of mine! I tore it myself!" he said cheerfully and made his way to sit back down.
Then the next child came up, with a red and brown bundle in his hands. The teacher's questioning eyes made him clarify what he brought. "This is half of my new puppy!" The teacher ran screaming from the room.
Partner
Half of a whole
Incomplete yet
Sufficient in itself.
Am I made from pieces?
If I say I am half this, half that,
which parts form those halves?
My arms and eyes and jaw are my mother's,
my nose and legs and hair my father's,
but I look more my mother than father.
I thought they had equal share in my creation.
Greg - as long as the garden looks good when she gets back, where's the problem? It just might take a whole lot of last minute work :P
'... unaware this is cheating' is great line.
David - it took me a couple of reads to catch on to what you were doing, but I suspect that's more my fault than the writing's. Very clever :)
Andrew - aw man, I knew I didn't want to read the end to that. Haha, gruesome, but well setup.
Morganna - yeah, exactly. :)
Jack - perhaps the 9 months in the womb shifted the percentages a little bit?
I once had half a cookie,
the other I gave to the rookie.
Confidence not yet full,
he wasn't used to the pull.
A hesitant smile upon his face,
up on the mound he took his place.
Staring down the batter,
from the stands came no clatter.
He wound up and sent the ball,
unsure where it would fall.
Ump rises from his state of psych
and loudly declares strike.
The smile stronger still,
the rookie has but pure will.
Two years later he is gold,
the cookie made him twice as bold.
Denin - that's some powerful cookie. You appealed to my childhood with that baseball theme :)
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