Thanks, Erika and Kristin. Yeah, the "Written Right Now" contest is weekly at the Frantic Rabbit reading, here in Worcester. The host, Gary, presents a strange-ass prize, and everybody has ten minutes to write a poem about it. Hopefully, Thessaly will post hers, which won, on her livejournal.

Ginger, your drabble reminds me of an ee cummings poem that I love:

In Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

I found it. It was just percolating around a little before it decided to quit playing hide and seek.

The Sunflower

The skirt was lemon yellow, cinched at the waist with broad black elastic and a row of hooks and eyes. Sleeveless yellow blouse with a low scoop neck that allowed the sun to reach nearly everywhere. I needed only shoes, until I saw them. Sitting there bold and bright in the spring sunlight at the outdoor gypsy market. Bright yellow fabric with a black wooden stacked heel. They begged to be worn, to tap a dance down the streets of Cadiz in merry revelry. To follow the sun like a flower in the field. So, I did that--in Spain.

I'm still trying to think of ideas for a drabble. I think I have fewer associations for yellow than for any other major color. Not sure why.

My new favorite research link from the British library: [link]

It's basically recordings, some nearly fifty years old, of people from different parts of England talking. So now if I want to hear a character better, all I have to do is find someone from the right place and listen in.

Oh, Sail, that's a lovely piece.

Thanks, Deb. There's so much I miss about Spain. This was just one small way of expressing that.

Susan, thanks for posting that link! Now, if I could find a similar link illustrating different regional French accents, I would be a very, very happy girl indeed.

It’s just a sweater, the color of new corn or maybe the butter you might put on it. I was a very different girl when this was the sort of thing that got my attention on the rack.(I was a girl, too. Seventeen. Here in the middle of the desert we keep our sweaters for a long time.) I still love this color but have accepted that my life is never going to match it. When I was seventeen, I wasn’t ready. I just believed so much I wanted everyone’s day to be yellow and soft. This is a sweater of a girl embarrassed that she might want somebody’s tongue in her mouth. This is a sweater she could buy in the store with her dad, one of the few things he ever liked to see her in.(She pretends she never wonders what she’d look like in one of those other kinds of sweaters, now that They have finally arrived. She pretends so well she believes herself. She’s better off not being stared at, anyway. She spends so much time in her room being better off, three books is a slow week.) So, now, thirties, cleaning her closet. ”What have you got there?”

“Nothing. Just a sweater. I guess I’ll hang on to it, though.”

Oof. erika, that's got a kick like a mule. Powerful.

Huh. Thanks.(I've still got the damn sweater, too)