Yesterday’s summer haiku challenge from NPR has sent me toodling down memory lane. Three haiku apparently weren’t enough, so I keep flashing back to new memories of summers long gone.

Blink, and I’m looking at the two-acre plot at the back edge of our rural property where my mom made her vegetable garden. Rows and rows of corn and beans, potatoes, onions, radishes, tomatoes, peas, blueberries and blackberries, zucchini that grew to the size of Whiffle ball bats…more than I can remember. I see my mother crouching between rows, weeding and harvesting, filling up bushel baskets with each day’s plenty. Continue reading →

Poet Kwame Alexander issued a call this morning on National Public Radio for haiku inspired by summer memories, but without using the word summer. As Alexander was finishing up his segment on NPR’s Morning Edition, I was just pulling into the parking lot of my office building, and the opening line “Watermelon drips” popped into my brain. I forgot it for the duration of my (11 1/2-hour) workday, but after coming home I opened my notepad and started playing.

Here are my three offerings. Continue reading →

At the risk of calling down calamity on myself, I will say that I have been in three, or maybe two, car accidents in my life. (Knock wood.) The least serious was a minor collision in the parking lot of my office building on the afternoon of 9/11, when probably everyone in the United States was too upset to be behind the wheel of a car. I definitely was. The most serious happened when I was in high school, and a drunk driver blew through a stop sign at high speed, hitting the car in which I was a front-seat passenger.

Neither of those is the one that haunts me. Continue reading →