The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: SALTWATER

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above.

This month's prompts are pipe, playground, prayers, recipes, ribbon, rice, road, saltwater, sandwich, school, sewing.

SALTWATER

I have plenty of saltwater experiences, thanks to countless visits to my grandparents' home in Port St. Joe, Florida. We loved fishing with Granddaddy off the canal banks, and sometimes in the boat in open water. My sister was often the best fisherman among us! Granddaddy would clean and fry the fish in an outdoor fryer. If we were lucky, there were also oysters (Granddaddy's favorite!).

We also loved playing on the beach at Mexico Beach and even better, on Cape San Blas where the dunes are mountainous and the beaches often empty. One summer our visit unfortunately hit at the same time as a tide of jellyfish. Oh the agony of being repeatedly stung in neck-deep water! How long the swim to the shore! I wrote a poem about it once, called “Year of the Jellyfish.” It's kind of a dark poem, or at least menacing. While I prefer to focus on the wonderful parts of my childhood, it wasn't always sunny. Sometimes there were jellyfish.

And sometimes there are jellyfish skies!