It's odd how the prompt on the poetry challenges keep fitting my experiences and mood. Today the prompt was to write a travel poem - and today I rode the Greyhound bus down to Corpus to visit Bob. Writing this travel poem was fun.

Secret Time Machine

Greyhound bus sailed across
across green Texas green flats,
where cattle took shade, munched
bluebonnets under knots of live oak,
through tiny towns with giant
courthouses, tempting bakery
signs, main street banners
proclaiming rodeo, water melon
thump, football championship.
Homecoming..Secret time machine.

Greyhound bus let me out
today in beach city where
husband's welcoming arms
pulled me in.. He couldn't see
I'd detoured back forty six years
to my first bus trip alone, finally
old enough at twelve, sucking
Crystomint, playing solitaire, past
grazing cattle, under bright banners.
Homecoming. Secret time machine.

Victoria Hendricks, April 25, 2009


I'm glad to be here with Bob as he nervously prepares to tutor kids in math tomorrow morning - nervous because this group is just beginning to get important concepts, and very close to the dreaded TAKS. While he tutors, I'll clean. Then we'll join a teacher friend and her husband for lunch and hope for dusk on the beach. It is good to be here. And I was glad we were together when we learned that Heidi's tumor markers were increasingly abnormal this month. I haven't absorbed that news entirely yet, just sitting up feeling love and support for them while Bob sleeps to get ready for the tutoring.