Succinctly Yours Week 240: Tricked

Thank you to Grandma of Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours. Participants are invited to carve a story to a mere 140 words or 140 characters or fewer based on the photo. The word of the week is “border.”

His friends told him if he smiled nicely, the people would let him cross the border of the pumpkin patch to live in a place called “Pumpkin Paradise.” Those punks.   134

His “cute face,” which bordered on adorable, at last got him picked. He found out they weren’t adopting him when the carving knife came out. The horror. The horror.  136


Every year, people crossed the borders of the quiet pumpkin patch and changed their sweet faces into grimaces of death. Those ghouls.  112

Squidward, I used your clarinet to unclog my toilet. ~Spongebob Sqarepants

The Orange Prayer

Years ago, when I was student teaching in a rather snobbish Midwestern high school, I sometimes ate lunch with another teacher. The two of us were outcasts who ended up tablemates due to our respective disabilities. Hers was that she was blind. Mine was that I was 21. I don’t remember what my friend’s name was or what she taught. What I do remember is the time she ate an orange.

She divined her way around the rind, then held it in front of her face like a crystal ball and pried off the peel, smiling into the air as she did. The finest sparkling spray, backlit by the fluorescent lights of the teachers’ lounge, poofed into her face like a magic spell. When she laughed with childish delight, I realized she’d cast it on purpose.

Then she carefully separated the segments, arranged them on her napkin, and steepled her orange-scented hands in front of her nose and breathed in the scent as if it were a life-giving prayer of thanks. And I believe in a sense it was.

She turned to me and beamed. “There’s nothing like eating an orange,” she said.

I have never seen an orange in quite the same way since. In fact, she taught me to see thanks itself in a new way.

For that gift, too, I am immensely thankful.

“…that’s why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.” Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Those Magical Orange Orbs

My next (sachral) chakra is supposedly associated with sweetness, the little book tells me. It is important to savor food in order to unblock the orange chakra. This reminded me of my tomatoes.

It’s been a bad year for tomatoes here. I don’t know if it’s the cool spells we’ve had this season or what, but I just haven’t had any. Now that it’s almost fall, I finally have enough cherries that I could make a sling out of my t-shirt and pile them in.

There is something almost spiritual about eating tomatoes right off the vine while they’re still warm from the sun. They are sweeter, but it’s something else. It’s as if they hold a little magic. Star magic.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. ~Thoreau