Month: June 2023

For Flashback Friday: The Window Upstairs

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First Published on June, 23-2021

Reprinted for Fandango’s Flashback Friday

Vilhelm Hammershøi

I wanted to tell you a story about the empty rooms in the house next door to where I live.

I wanted to tell you the name of the daughter who did unthinkable things to her family and when the police arrested her, they asked her why she did those awful deeds and then made her family dinner, like always, and set the table with fresh linens, flowers from the garden out back and why did set the table with  her mother’s best bone china and why did she put on her prettiest dress and then take her seat and ate her meal- like always.

She had peach cobbler for dessert.

I wanted to tell you that the Devil made her do it. that her boyfriend talked her into it that there was something wrong with her brain and that someone did unspeakable things to her as a child and that is why she did those terrible things.

But none of that was true. She was as normal and predictable as you or the lady who made you coffee at the Espresso stand this morning. It’s a mystery to us all  where the idea to murder her entire family came from.

I can tell you she used to look out of the window on the top floor of her house and from her floor she could look down into my backyard. She used to watch me garden late at night. She used to watch me dig and turn the earth with deadly efficiency and grim determination.

Sometimes she waved at me and sometimes I waved back.

And sometimes she just watched me dig.

I Lost My Heart ( on the monkey bars )

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WP Prompt asks us to write about  our first crush-  m’kay.

Photographer Unknown

His name was Darrin and we met for the first time in the third grade.

We were both 8 years old and the one thing we seemed to have in common was our ability to get into trouble and get right back out of it before we were caught. Also, he got high scores for math and I got high scores for reading and spelling.

For some reason, we didn’t exactly click and we weren’t exactly friends. I mean. He was a boy.

Regardless of that barrier, during recess Darrin and I would gravitate slowly to the monkey bars- like convicts in a prison yard  we sort of skirted along the fence  line with one eye on each other and the other eye on the kids around us.

Eventually we ended up on the monkey bars, almost side by side where we would hang upside down by our knees and sway a little and from the sides of our metal cage. Not a single word passed between us-

until one day he asked me

” Do you really want to be an astronaut? ”

I told him yes. I planned to fly my ship and not only was I going to the Moon, I was going to head out to Mars.

He looked at me. His eyes were shining.

” What do you want to be? ” I asked him.

Darrin said, ” I want to be a lizard so that I can touch my eyeball with my tongue. ”

I reached for his hand and he reached for mine and we have been friends now for over 50 years,

Two Stories of Enduring and Steadfast Bones

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Today’s Quote morphed into a blog post- but that’s okay. Sometimes you just have to go where the Muse sends you:

    Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone

   The steadfast and enduring bone.

A Shropshire Lad – XLIII – The Immortal Part

by A. E. Housman

Skeletons of Grover Krantz and His Dog, Clyde, at the Smithsonian Institution. Mr, Krantz donated his body to science and his skeleton and that of his beloved dog are displayed in the National Museum of Natural History.

I am very excited about these two episodes from Netflix’s new  docuseries that will kick off in July.

Each of these episodes deal with burial customs from two very intriguing groups of people- one being the Ancient Egyptians of whom most of us are familiar and the other is the Homo Naledi of who none of us were familiar with until 2013.

Homo Naledi is an extinct species of archaic humans discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star Cave, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. They are dated to the Middle Pleistocene 335,000–236,000 years ago and they not only buried their dead, they marked their graves too.

Art and burial customs are believed to belong to humans ( we have those big brains you know ), but this discovery speaks to the theory that death and burials may not be a tradition unique to humans.

Here are some clips from the upcoming series, see if you find them as fantastic as I do!

amm

UNKNOWN: ” Cave of Bones,” journeys to South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, where Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has found the world’s oldest graveyard. If Lee and his team can prove that this ancient, small brained, ape-like creature practiced complex burial rituals, it will change everything we know about hominid evolution and the origins of belief. -Netflix

A rendering of Homo naledi, an early hominin discovered in 2013 that likely lived between 335,000 to 236,000 years ago.
Mark Thiessan/National Geographic

I couldn’t find a trailer for this series so I pulled a couple of clips together for you to look at:

Discovered on July 28th, 2022. This picture shows an image of Panel B in the Hill Antechamber exhibiting numerous engravings and etchings on the ancient dolomitic wall. The panel shows repeated etchings likely done over a considerable period. The etchings include geometric figures such as squares, ladders, triangles, crosses, and X’s. Image from Berger et al. (2023b).