sleeping with cats

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesdays  participants can add the book to their To Read Lists if they like your teasers!

I have been many people in my life.  We all change as we take new lovers and partners, as we take on new tasks, new jobs, new interests.  Yet there have been constants: my need to write, my drive to write what was meaningful to me and I hope to other people, my desire to love and be loved, my valuing of freedom as close to an absolute, and of course my companions, the cats whose love was there when others failed me or I failed them.

a moment to unwind

 

Raspberry Torte

RASPBERRY TORTE

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups butter or margarine (3 sticks)
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup raspberry jam
¼ cup sliced almonds

Mix the flour, salt, butter, sugar, and egg together in a food processor or by hand.  Press 2/3 of the dough onto a cookie sheet.  Cover with raspberry jam.  Use the remaining dough to roll into pencil strips and form a lattice top.  Sprinkle with sliced almonds.  Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 to 35 minutes.  Cool and cut into squares for pastries or into 1×2 ½-inch bar cookies.  This keeps well for up to a week.

Makes 1 ½ to 3 dozen.

time-worn

You may search my time-worn face, You’ll find a merry eye that twinkles. I am NOT an old lady, just a little girl with wrinkles.
– Edythe E. Bregnard

It never fails

 

why we must struggle

Why We Must Struggle
by Kay Ryan

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

we have eternity in our hearts

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11

the Author’s intent

My fellow citizens, we live in a great nation. Its occasional resemblance to a lunatic asylum is purely coincidental and doubtlessly not the intention of the author of us all.
– Molly Ivins, 1944 – 2007

Seguin has Art!

Seguin Oakwood Art Gallery

a going away party

forgetting

Forgetting
by Kay Ryan

Forgetting takes space.
Forgotten matters displace
as much anything else as
anything else.  We must
skirt unlabeled crates
as though it made sense
and take them when we go
to other states.

final resting place

Riverside Cemetery - Seguin, Texas

Cemetery Stones
by Raymond A. Foss

Tactile memories
in the cemetery stones
visual reflections of the times
the ages in which the country knew
imagery of hell, of heaven,
of lives as they were lived,
or of how they want to be remembered
tactile granite, marble, slate,
yielding in their turn to the rain,
the ice, the lichen, the moss,
the wind, the ages
Hear the whispers in the wind
the feel of the cemetery stones
rough, cool, smooth
places of remembrance
to be felt