Short.

I'm two weeks behind on my writing challenge and have "best thing you ever ate" and "what you'd do if failure wasn't on the table" in the queue, and the reasons I generally don't participate in these kinds of things multiply as deadlines and expectations hit the "I don't know what" board.

The "best thing I ever ate" happens in a compendium. There is no "best." There's a taco, a bowl of soup, a sauce, a plate of pasta, some fried okra, a loaf of bread, meatloaf, a rack of ribs, some biscuits.

I refuse to name something I love the most, because my life is a place where I don't live by the extremes of best and worst. We are. We do. We make and we take.

If failure wasn't on the table, I'd never do my best ---

Southern Winter

I don't remember what I was looking for in the closet when I ran across a small watercolor painted by a best friend's mother back in the '80's. 

The scene is a simple landscape of a pasture surrounded by barren trees with a ceiling of dense, snow-blue clouds. Blotches of green are scattered throughout the sawgrass in the foreground. Some with the dark of last summer's grass, holding color in clumps of leathery blades; some with the fresh of moss, ever-youthful in bright mounds, luscious and sun-kissed, despite the cold gloom of the day.

A sprinkle of snowflakes falls across the view - gentle, whole, beautiful. 

There will be no accumulation. Children will dream, but no schools will close, and the muddy paws of frisky dogs leave only temporary evidence on the kitchen floor.

Southern Winter. This is our time.

(This is a departure from what I usually post, but I'm participating in a friend's writing challenge, and this week's subject is "Southern Winter.")