Eggs, eggs, who's got the eggs?

As early as I could remember, there was a tradition on Good Friday to achieve the most vibrant colors on our hard boil eggs.  Letting the eggs sit in the dye for as long as the excitement will allow.
My most memorable occasion was one Easter season spent with my neighbor.  She was from the Ukraine and her eggs put my blinding colors to shame.  To this day I can not remember her method, but those eggs were a work of art.  The eggs were not cooked, but a small pin was placed on the bottom of the egg and ever so gently, piercing the egg without breaking.  Then the yoke was sucked out until it ran dry.

Now fifty years later, the tradition continues with my daughter and son-in-law.  We have a contest for the best Easter eggs.  My son-in-law won again this year.  His prize was a Pez candy dispenser.
He won on originality.  My daughters eggs were beautiful also.  The colors she achieved were breathtaking!
They almost looked like the plastic Easter eggs used in the hunts that is how bright and gorgeous the colors were.

There was one tramatizing moment in my history of egg dying.  One I will never forget took place when I was five years old and I was attending kindergarten.  I was so excited to dye eggs.  I even brought in two extra eggs for who may have forget there own eggs.  That morning  our room was buzzing from excitement waiting to dye eggs.
My demented teacher claimed that I was taking, so I was put in the corner and wore a dunce cap.
Needless to say I did not dye eggs that day.  My second slap on the face arrived when my three eggs, my one and two extra, were given to the teachers daughters who were visitors to our class that particular day.
It was marked as one of my worse days.

Some people would say I was a fortunate little girl and my little incident was trivial.  Put on your big girl panties and go on your way. 
As an adult, I must agree they are right.  If this incident marks a dark Easter, then consider myself blessed.

Psst...I must make a confession.  My daughters eggs were better then her husbands, but I cheat and allow my son-in-law to win every year, well almost every year.

"Happy Easter and Happy Spring"  Enjoy the beautiful pallet of colors that splash across the earth.

Tales of the Human Race

The check is in the mail

So I can’t go out for the sale

I’ve waited all week

For someone to say

The check is in the mail

A woman is late

With her period to date

Months go by

Boy does she cry

The oven is baking

Cause there is something mak’in

Wake up and smell the bacon

That ain’t no pig in the oven

You are the sun

You are the moon

I can’t go on

Without you I will die

Around the corner comes a skirt

Silk stockings and stiletto shoes

I need her

I want her

Now where was I

I need her

I want her

Promises not to fib any more

Heard this time in and time out

Don’t fill my ears with torture

Cause I finally done with the rat race

So I sit in my corner

As I act like a mourner

Waiting for time to end
Cause I'm done with the human race

Different Forms of Poetry

Did you know there are approximately 55 forms of poetry?  Some of us are stuck in thinking poems have to rhyme.  Here are some of the interesting and different renditions of poetry:

Cinquain:  Poetry with five lines.  The first line, line one, had one word using the title.
Line two has two words describing the title.
Line three has three words that tell of action
Line four had words expressing feeling
Line five as one word which recalls title.

The cinquain poem is little known outside the hardcore poet world.
This particular form of poetry can be very confusing for the novice and to say the least the professional too.

Elegy:  A sad, thoughtful poem about the passing of person
Narrative:  Poems that tell a story\
Tanka:  Japanese poetry with five lines.  First and third composed of five syllables and all other lines contain seven syllables


Now you know four very different forms of poetry.  Try to write one form shown.  It is a challenge that can soothe your soul.

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Welcoming of Spring

Once again the excitement of April takes away my breath.  Looking at the soil, there are little arms stretching and yawning.  Everyday their colors are growing brighter and legs getting as tall as a drink of water.
I am describing flowers.  Every year the Spring season gives me hope and light to my own life.
If nature can sleep or meditate for many months, then metamorphosis into a beauty, well then I can wake up and smell the lilacs.

On the front lawn a family of rabbits grazes on the grass.  The bunnies are so precious!  They remind me of the cute stuffed animals we were given at Easter.  The robins this awakening season are telling us something and I can not figure out what they are telling the human race.
There chest are bigger, rounder, and redder then I have ever witnessed before.  What does this all mean?
Are they heeding a warning, or are they sending us messages of hope? 
Time will tell.

As Spring heads closer to its end, and teters on Summer breezes, I can almost hear the hither come yonder calls of the ocean.  I do not know what I would do if I could never see or feel the ocean again.
I believe a piece of myself would be missing forever.

Lets all enjoy the beauty, hope, and new life Spring brings to us once again.

Bio of Emily Dickinson

As some of you already know, April is National Poetry Month.
My favorite poet is Ms. Dickinson.  I personally favor Victorian poets.
Since this is April, I would like to educate the world on poet Emily Dickinson.
Education of poetry is necessary, for the art is disappearing.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of the local college. He also served in Congress. Dickinson's mother, whose name was also Emily, was a cold, religious, hard-working housewife, who suffered from depression. Her relationship with her daughter was distant. Later Dickinson wrote in a letter, that she never had a mother.

Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48). Around 1850 she started to compose poems - "Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, / Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!" she said in her earliest known poem, dated March 4, 1850. It was published in Springfield Daily Republican in 1852.

The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the metre of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language. From c.1858 Dickinson assembled many of her poems in packets of 'fascicles', which she bound herself with needle and thread. A selection of these poems appeared in 1890.

In 1862 Dickinson started her life long correspondence and friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a writer and reformer, who commanded during the Civil War the first troop of African-American soldiers. Higginson later published Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1870. On of the four poems he received from Dickinson was the famous 'Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.'

(Google 2011 Bio of Emily Dickson)