Lakeshore this Weekend

was great.


indubitably!

a much smaller concentration of bad writing. highlights include: morgan, eileen, beav, ruby, josh brown, troy, allyson, danielle, and some productivity. for example, heres something silly, an acrostic from the spark word "prom" cowritten be me and josh brown:

Pretty dresses
Really cute guys
O my gosh!
Mom, shut up!

(c) 2006 josh brown and sara stephens

bwahahahaa. we are brilliant. and heres something less silly that i started last retreat and finished at this one from a prompt of texas (not as good as three affiliated tribes, but pretty okay i think):

I spent a good ten hours
in one place
reading everything I could find
before making it to
Nondescript, Texas
the humble homestead of my humble homesteaders.
There are sixteen of them,
two parents, nine children (seven of them girls),
and three of the children are married
and have their own children,
bumbling bouncing babes
who learn to knit and tie knots in the womb
and by seven are harvesting vegetables and eggs,
birthing horses,
cooking casseroles independently.

I spent a good two days
in one place
with my extremely distant cousins
who never cut their hair and have
thick French braids to the back of their knees
(the girls at least)
and who don’t own a microwave or a TV
but make the best food and the best entertainment.
I spent two days walking their land,
grass up to my hips,
through a plot of earth so big it might have been
the entire state of Texas,
past the warm wood houses of the children
who grew up and married
and moved out
to another part of their land.
Spent two days listening
to the three sisters aged ten to fourteen
who knew the exact color of every blade of grass
as compared to the shades in their dresses
and how to climb over fallen trees
without catching the hems.
Who knew nothing about politics
but everything
about planting a garden and pulling weeds
about picking corn before the worms come,
about living
really living
in Nondescript, Texas
without a microwave
or a TV.