Failure IS An Option!

This week, we’ve asked you to share with us a special recipe. But, we’ve asked you to do more than just list out ingredients.

We challenged you to take us back…to take us into your memory, in 500 words or less

You'll never want to eat at my house again after I tell you this story.

I've been cooking with game meat for a quarter of a century, now. It's lean. It's healthy. In our area, it's as organic as anything ever was. It's LEAN. So one year, we added some beef fat to the grind when we made hamburger meat. That was the start of my undoing.

I found a recipe for Cornbread-Tamale Pie: a lovely casserole using ground meat. With hundreds of pounds of ground meat in my freezer, every new recipe was a treasure. It called for tomatoes, green chilies, onions, corn, spices and two whole pounds of ground meat! A winner!

I sauteed the onions. Then I added the meat and browned everything. Added the rest of the ingredients....what I didn't do was drain the meat. Yeah. Silly me.

Then I discovered I did not have enough yellow cornmeal. I did have a little bit of blue cornmeal, though.
Everything I knew about the color wheel left me, because I mixed the two together.

It smelled good. It was probably safe to eat. But when I pulled that dish out of the oven, it looked exactly like a bowl of greenish dog puke.

The undrained fat had bubbled up through the tomatoes and floated the corn to the edges. The greenish "cornbread" topping had greasy holes punctuating it, with tomato juice perking through like some weird geological feature at Yellowstone.

We stood as a family and looked at the abomination of a casserole, silent and frowning. Then we had Lucky Charms for dinner.


Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

Where Will The Flowers Go?

This week we asked you to write a piece – fiction or creative non-fiction – in which a tattoo figures prominently.

We wanted you to explore the many facets of tattoos: why someone would get them, what the meaning was, what the tattoo says about them. Word limit was 300

I stood in line at the grocery store and tried not to stare at the young woman in line ahead of me. Her blonde hair was dyed black and red at the tips, and was gelled up into a dangerous-looking row of mohawk spikes. A pack of cigarattes peeped out of the black leather bra, which was also peeping out. She was wearing "zombie leggings" and black leather biker boots.

Her groceries inched down the conveyor belt. Cigarettes. Cheez-whiz. Petron Silver. Tortilla chips. A bag of M&Ms. And an incongruous bouquet of pink roses.

She pulled her wallet from her back pocket, showing a flash of white wrist, with a tattoo of a rosebud on it. It was a pink rosebud, angel wings on each side, and the words, "Momma's Angel". As she reached out to hand the checker her club card, I saw the tattoo on her ring finger. It looked like a prison tat. A skull and cross-bones.

She took the divider bar from the slot and plopped it down behind her groceries and glanced back at me. She smiled a flashing, brilliant white smile that reached up to illuminate her bright blue eyes. I smiled back.

Thanks for the comments! I tried switching the last two paragraphs and it does seem better. Thank you!

(I am working on polishing my descriptive voice regarding people. I want to be better at showing my reader a true depiction of characters, in a way that will give answers and still inspire questions. This is one of my attempts.)

Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

Opening Day

Stephen King said, “The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”

This week we asked you to write a memoir post inspired by that statement – in 300 words or less.

It happens every time. I plan. I worry. I walk to get ready.

I get out my backpack, my camouflage clothes and my 30.06 rifle.

Sleep eludes me that Thursday night, because opening day is Friday.

We rise early, Sweet Hubs and I. We want to be in our spot before sunrise.

My heart rises higher and higher in my chest until it feels like it beats at the back of my tongue, hard enough to make me gag.

The sky pinks up. The sun inches higher, at last showing its pop of yellow-orange above the horizon and turning the hills purple.

And there he is. A bull elk. The sun gleams on his pale coat. His antlers, polished brown with ivory tips, crown his magnificent head. 750 pounds of God's stunning handiwork. Several hundred pounds of potential meat for the freezer.

I lift my gun to my shoulder and look through the scope. I will my heart to slow. Deep breath. Find the "boiler room" and focus the crosshairs there. Calm down. Squeeze the trigger. (This is the part where I wince because my gun kicks like a mule and I just got knocked back into last week.)

I take a moment to thank God...and to thank the elk. Then the work begins.


My family is a hunting family. It's how we eat. We have raised our own chickens and beef, but we predominantly eat game meat. Arizona has Coues' Whitetailed deer, mule deer, elk, turkey, bison, Desert Bighorn and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, antelope, javelina and black bear. I figure I have cooked close to 6,000 meals out of game meat.
Just for fun, visit http://contemplatinghappiness.blogspot.com/2011/01/ground-meat-marathon.html 

Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

Turkey Creek

This week we asked you to take us somewhere. Where was up to you -fiction or creative nonfiction- but we asked you to use your words to paint the setting as vividly as possible. In 200 words.

    Just off of Aravaipa in south-central Arizona is a cool, fragrant canyon. It's a gash in the desert, shaded from the harsh reality of the arid, rocky, cactus-ridden challenge above. Sheer rock walls angle over the canyon floor. Cottonwood and Sycamore trees filter the sunlight. In the autumn, those trees drop colorful, oval leaves and turn the blue granite boulders into mosaics of color.

    A lazy creek wanders from one side of the canyon wall to the other, ambling back and forth like a child chasing a butterfly. Coatis run amok in the canyon, a gang of noisy delinquents. I don't speak Coati, but if I did, I bet I'd be shocked at the names they call each other. Canyon Wrens stay above the fray and let their liquid songs fill the canyon. Dainty prints of whitetailed deer in the mud tell me that the little gray ghosts stopped to drink, before darting back up to the desert hills above. Black bears amble back and forth between canyon and desert, eating whatever looks good on nature's salad bar.

     It's a quiet place, ancient and delicate. If you listen carefully, you can hear the echoes of the ones who walked here before: Hohokams, Mogollons, Saladoans, settlers and ranchers and Basque sheep herders. The sounds of the bawling cattle, bleating sheep and even the sounds of a massacre have faded away to a whisper....a whisper of a road less traveled.

Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

What is it?

Your memoir prompt this week comes from Assistant Editor Galit.

Conjure

Writing short posts is an excellent way to flex your word choice muscles. Which word is the most clear? Poignant? Direct?

This week I want you to conjure something.

An object, a person, a feeling, a color, a season- whatever you like.

But don’t tell me what it is, conjure it.

Soft, velvety smoothness against my bare skin.
A warm smell of newness and earthiness, inexplicably intermingled.
Hard and perfectly rounded, fuzzy and fragile in my right hand,
A firm and well-padded little bump in my left hand, he is light
And yet this is the heaviest responsibility I have ever held.
A dark fringe lying soft against his cheek as he sleeps,
A fleeting smile across his rosebud lips and then a crooked, sideways yawn.
My heart opens wide like a flower in bloom,
Bursting with a new love.





Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

April 20, 1994

Choose a moment from your personal history and mine it for sensory detail. Describe it to us in rich, evocative details. Let us breath the air, hear the heartbeat, the songs, feel the fabric and the touch of that moment.

The room was quiet. Only his halting breaths and the distant, low voices at the nurse's station. The blinds were closed and the midday light was a soft, creamy glow at the window.

His outline seemed so small, almost insignificant, beneath the white sheet: a mere shadow of the man he once was. That sharp, almost gasping breathing punctuated the air. I sat by his side and held his hand, just in case he knew enough to know someone was with him. His fingertips were still rough from his years at the jeweler's bench. Diaphonous, parchment-thin skin, prickled with black hair covered the back of his hand. It was so unlike the powerful, capable, hard-working hand I had always known.

Those halting breaths were bitter, adding to the smell of disinfectant and dying in the air. I thought of other days. The smells of campfires, jeweler's rouge, family dinners, sawdust, trout streams and Old Spice. I thought of a little boy who would be losing his cherished grandfather that day: a little boy who was, at that very moment, sharing his dinosaur birthday cake with his kindergarten class. How would I explain this?

A sudden, ragged, stuttered intake of air. A sharp exhale. The breathing stopped. And my father was gone.


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Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

Orange Crush

Your assignment this week was to write a piece where you explore the first broken heart for your character – or for you.

Janna was picked for the cheerleading squad. She was only a freshman, but she'd been picked. Her heart pounded with joy and excitement as she put on her blue sweater and orange skirt, ready to cheer at her first football game. She held her pom-poms in front of her and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her red hair was pulled back in a smooth ponytail. Her mascara was perfect. That was all Mom would let her wear: mascara. It had to be perfect. It was all she had to work with.

The bus ride to the game took 90 minutes. The football players and cheerleaders rode together. Janna sat toward the back. Every once in a while, the star quarterback, Jeremy, would turn around in his seat and smile at her. It made her feel like she could take flight, that the hottest boy in school was smiling at her. At her. At HER!

Then he got up from his seat and started walking toward the back. Janna's breath came faster. He looked down at her, she scooted over, and QB Jeremy The Hottest Boy In School, a senior, sat down. The blood pumped through her head so quickly that she could barely hear him. I noticed you before. Now you're on the cheer team, we can see each other more. Do you have a boyfriend? Is that what he said? Was he talking to her? She tried not to show him the colossal crush that she'd been carrying around for him all year.

Janna thought if the bus rolled over in a fiery crash right that second, she'd die happy. She was sitting next to QB Jeremy The Hottest Boy In School and he was talking to her like he liked her. He was looking into her pale blue eyes and .... and.... looking!

He leaned toward her. Told her she smelled good. He slipped his arm around her. And then he kissed her. He stroked her thigh and, accidentally it seemed, brushed her breast when he put his hand up on her shoulder. Janna gasped with surprise and thrilling excitement. When he tried to really get a feel, she pulled his hand away but kissed him harder.

The bus turned the corner into the high school parking lot. QB Jeremy The Hottest Boy In School darted away and everyone filed off the bus. Janna waited, trying to compose herself. She was the last one off the bus.

A group of cheerleaders and football players stood off to one side and didn't look at Janna. The others stood together and were laughing. Janna caught Jeremy's eye and beamed a smile at him. They laughed harder. Some of them imitated her lovesick smile and they laughed some more.

Hot tears welled up in her pale blue eyes and her face flamed red as the realization hit her.


Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ