Page 6 of 6

Posted on

Be My Semiotic Valentine

Be My
Semiotic Valentine!

There are few things in life that delight as much as Valentine’s Day.

We can freely express our love for beloveds, animals and all people of the earth.

Today is ours to ponder why hatred and avarice are more common during the year than flowers and hearts.

Today, however, isn’t for wondering where we went wrong.

Today is for celebrating where we are together.

Hug someone.

Kiss everyone.

Celebrate the love inside.

Here are some Semiotic Hearts from me to you and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do in presenting them to you.

Continue reading → Be My Semiotic Valentine

Posted on

A Special Place

by Ken Druce

“We love someone who will give us a special place in their hearts, minds, and souls”
(María L. Trigos-Gilbert, GO INSIDE magazine)

I just read this today and it inspired me to write the story of my grandfather I’ve been thinking about for months. Maria was talking about her beloved Uncle Ramos who had died recently and my story is about my time spent with Grampa on his farm in Missouri before he died. I was quite young when we first took the long trip from Wyoming to visit but there are little snippets I remember as vividly as if they happened only yesterday.

Continue reading → A Special Place

Posted on

The Forgotten Garden

by Noemi Szadeczky-Kardoss

We are just newcomers on this planet. Those, who arrived here before us, have every right to claim that it belongs to them. We marvel at things they hold to be commonplace, and they laugh at our childlike curiosity.

“Look! There’s a cat! It’s coming down the path!” my ten-year-old brother said and pointed down the valley.

“Yeah, I see it! It’s black and white.” I was holding the binoculars to my eyes and followed the cat’s way down the path which was paved with stone slabs.

“I want to see it too! Give that to me!” he demanded and snatched the binoculars out of my hand.

“Hey, don’t drop it!”

“I won’t,” he said and started to sweep the distant trees and bushes. “Where’s the cat? I don’t see it.”

In that moment, I didn’t see it either. It had probably stopped somewhere under the leaves.

Continue reading → The Forgotten Garden

Posted on

Childhood Never Changes on the Beach

by Nancy McDaniel

For some reason, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my father lately. My dad and I were very close. I was an only child and my mom died when I was 16, so Daddy and I spent a lot of time together. He died about 12 years ago. I don’t think about him every day, but I’ve thought of him a lot lately.

Continue reading → Childhood Never Changes on the Beach

Posted on

Mama's Voice

by Nancy McDaniel

A few years ago, I was sitting on a rickety plastic chair in the courtyard of a little motel in a dusty small village in northwestern Tanzania. I was trying to listen to old men tell stories about a magic chicken and an epic folk hero.

That was why I was there: Helping to document these stories. But the problem was, they were talking in the Sukuma language and there was no interpreter.

Continue reading → Mama's Voice

Posted on

Giant Yellow Memory-Eating Beast

by Nancy McDaniel

The man from Omega (“The Last Word in Demolition”) told me it was called a “track hoe with a grappler.” He said it was a small one, only about 50,000 pounds. But to me it looks like a giant yellow beast. A very hungry one. First it bashes and crashes, then it munches and crunches, knocking down the house next door and eating it. Along with 18 years of memories of my next door neighbor, George.

Continue reading → Giant Yellow Memory-Eating Beast

Posted on

Mothers Never Forget

by Joyce Kohl

Contrary to what their children may believe and though little has been written on this phenomena, mothers never forget the days their children arrived. Neither do they forget very much of the every day ho-hum tasks of rearing them. They do tend to forget the negative and concentrate on the positive. However, mothers may get mixed up as to which child did what if the number of her children exceeds the average 2.5 per household.

Continue reading → Mothers Never Forget

Posted on

A 1984 North Loup Photo Memory

During Christmas of 1984, I visited North Loup, Nebraska to spend the holiday with my mother and Great Aunt Ellamae along with her son Russ, her daughter Martha and the their families. Christmastime in North Loup was always a postcard: Tables overflowed with smoked turkey and candied ham and chokecherry jam smiled from hot slices of homemade bread. Santa Claus with his dancing reindeer kicked along rooftops while flickering colored lights reflected from rain gutters and downspouts.

North Loup is my mother’s home village (it isn’t big enough to qualify as a “town” in Census records). She and I would visit my Grandpa there often as I grew up. My Grandpa, Bill Vodehnal, was the village pharmacist and he and I would explore the village together in his old, slate-grey, Plymouth Fury II at a blazing two miles per hour. Every street, except for “Main Street” (which was really Highway 11) was paved with gravel. My Grandpa was long dead when I visited North Loup in 1984, but I always felt his spirit rumbling deep within me every time we pulled into town.

In 1984, I wanted to take down a visual diary of the village for a novel I was writing based upon the atmosphere and earthiness I knew only to exist in North Loup, Nebraska. The images you’ll tour in this article are the touchstones I committed to film that day. Even now, these images speak to me without having to listen or comprehend. These thoughts touch me on the dirt level of the soul where things silently grow and blossom into magical, emotional, things one could never comprehend in any intellectual moment.

Continue reading → A 1984 North Loup Photo Memory

Posted on

A Joyous Memory…

by Marshall Jamison

…Of Sunday morning in the little town where my mother was born and my brother and I first saw the light literally and spiritually.

My great aunt Mame used to worship our Lord at the top of her rich, contralto voice out on her front porch across the street from our house. For an hour before she and Uncle Will walked across the green to church she sang the glorious old hymns, Rock of Ages, Onward Christian Soldiers, Lead, Kindly Light, The Old, Rugged Cross and other favorites.

Occasionally passersby would pause to listen, eyeing the Doctor’s sign beside the door, weather-beaten by the passing years. Uncle Will had been a true horse and buggy practitioner in his early days. Later he drove his ancient Nash with great care on his round of house calls. When he sometimes took my brother and me with him, we would sing the hymns we learned from Aunt Mame on Sunday.

Posted on

For My Father

by Steve Gaines

captured in the bronze of time
my father’s memory shines
hangs prominently on the granite wall
of my own mortality.

Continue reading → For My Father