A blade of grass grows from one of two hanging baskets in my front yard. In years past, I’ve grown petunias or moss roses in those baskets. This year, well, I hung the baskets.

Another transition is upon us as the earth spins and the weather shifts. In my small bubble of the world, I can enjoy a pristine blade of grass that grew to shine as the featured plant in a flower basket.

For centuries, likely for thousands of years, humans have pondered blades of grass and recreated their image in our depths. From Wadsworth to Whitman, the human soul becomes the one thing growing in my flower basket.

How amazing is that? How amazing, a blade of grass.

Said a Blade of Grass

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass. And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise!

Kahlil Gibran

Another poet goes deeper and portrays the interconnectedness between nature and art. Brian Patten compares a poem to a blade of grass (you can read the poem in the Blue Ridge Journal).

How long have humans been living and we still can write something meaningful through nature images? And we continue to feel so compelled; we long to create as much as we need to communicate. In the reverse, it also improves our sense of well-being when we go outside or view art.

This coming Saturday, September 30 the Keweenaw Interactive Art Walk is set to invite yoopers outside to walk a path through an art show that features 20 local paintings (by TOJ) paired with 20 stories by writer from Carrot Ranch. The full experience includes art activities to encourage people to paint and craft with words. This is the fun we can have when we collaborate with artists and audiences. A sense of play can grow our craft, too.

Consider Gibran’s “Said a Blade of Grass.” What can you learn about your own writing by imitating his? In my first college-level creative writing class, Dr. Stottlemeyer had us students write an imitation of a passage by Hemingway. The lesson stuck with me for three reasons. First, I learned how Hemmingway’s strategy to “write tight” made his stories feel punchy. I appreciated how the author spread the flesh thin on the solid bones of story. Second, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing tight. I liked the feel of it; a kidskin glove to my dominant writing hand.

The third reason the imitation activity made a lasting impression on me distills to one word — play. The assignment reminded me of Mad Libs, the game you play with a group of people replacing sentence components for hilarious results when read with the new words. Word games that instill a sense of play can be our best teachers.

If technology and time cooperate this weekend, I plan to launch a Virtual Art Walk on September 30. It’s meant to invoke play and the encouragement to get outside and connect our art to nature. To feel the inspiration of breeze in our hair, the whispers of a story from moving water, and the impulse to capture something beautiful, tragic, or both in a sunset. While I can’t supply you with paints and brushes or colored pens, I will include DIY art activities with suggestions for alternatives. Look for the post on September 30 or October 1.

Meanwhile, go play with a blade of grass!

September 26, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story that includes a blade of grass. What can you compare it to? Or in contrast? Is it a character prop or a story linchpin? Go poetic, go any genre or tone. Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by October 7, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

Bumblebees curl up in blooms of pink cosmos. The Keweenaw is cooling as the world balances and the equinox cools the Northern hemisphere and warms the Southern. The honey-makers are slow on the day of the Farm Tour, a local co-op event connecting eaters to their food growers.

Lily Venable, photographer, local food promoter, and friend of Ghost House Farm, walks the paths and fields with her camera. (All the photos in this post are her creations, including the challenge pic.) She notices the bear in a pine burl, the contrast of colors between green clover and orange pumpkins, and the delight of kids encountering goats.

Siblings, the children of parents who are also friends of the farm, spend the afternoon hanging out. One settles into the tractor seat to read and the other kicks a soccer ball as high as the weeping willow. Then, they find a feline. Or does the cat find them? Their mom joins the chase and before long they’ve tamed a yearling.

The cat must live most her days outdoors, she’s so wild. It could be her youthful exuberance but she displays skills beyond that of a domestic cat. The family helps with local cat rescues so they have the patience and understanding to call her. They plop in the grass and thump the ground; the kitten answers the thud of their drumming. The youngest swoops her up and before long, we are all snuggling a purr-fectly soft and amenable near-cat. Lily snaps photos.

People park along Boston Location Road and walk onto the farm. “Welcome to Ghost House Farm,” one of us, or all of us greet. What do they tour and learn?

You see the fenced area full of colored lettuce and flowers? That’s the original market garden — the origin spot of the farm. Go ahead, you can walk among bumble and blooms. The bees are slow today. The people in light jackets, sweatshirts, or flannels. I’m wearing my turquoise Stowe (Vermont) sweatshirt in solidarity with the farmers in that state whose fields did not yield harvests because of the extreme summer flooding. We understand the term “thousand year flood,” as do many in our world.

Yet we grow. Stay the course. Adjust. Help where we can, seed another year.

Next, you can go into the greenhouse we built last spring when the snow was still four feet deep. “We” means my SIL and his father who does not believe we are ever without snow along the lee shore of Lake Superior. This glorious day proves that we do go snowless and yet the chill reminds us that winter is not far off. See the dirt pile to the left? That’s topsoil. We’ve ripped out all the beautiful tomato and cucumber vines, not because of the cooler weather but because of the shorter days of sunlight. The tomatoes stopped growing. We are putting in drain tile to help mitigate flooding of the farm’s shallow fragipan, and will build up the beds with more topsoil. Then, we (Drew) will plant lettuce.

Here’s the cool thing about lettuce — it will grow over winter even below freezing as long as it is covered by the hoop house. The plants will stop germinating but we can have (we hope) year-round triple-washed salad mix for the Keweenaw. Like people all around the world. We are experimenting with ways to extend seasons and work with changing climates and extreme weather episodes. And, yes, the washing machine in the pack tent is brand new from Kirkish Furniture and we (Drew) have altered it to be a giant salad spinner (thank you Vermonters for innovating).

Don’t miss the goats(es). They live in the Ghost House. That ghostly sound you hear is Chip, the buck in rut. If you hear him woo-woo-woo-ing, and see his tongue sticking out, step back. Don’t let him pee on you (Yes, Chip peed on a farm guest). The ladies are less stinky and do not projectile urinate in anyone’s general direction, but if you bend down to grab kale or cabbage leaves to feed the goats(es), Molly might chew on your hair. She grabbed me good and I’m her Gigi. Impatient, is all. She loves greens. Pegasus is the pregnant one (good job jumping the fence, Chip) and the smallest is Vandalia. She’s shy.

From the Ghost House, you can walk down the path to the main fields where pumpkins, delicatas, costata romanesco, Brussels sprouts, celery, rose potatoes, and green clover grow. The clover is a cover crop and there’s a balance between the crop it grows with and we missed the sweet spot with winter squash. Our fall harvest will not be as planned. Such is farming. We grow, we learn.

All the glass? Well, humans haven’t changed all that much. Wherever we live, we leave trash piles. The glass is like today’s plastics. It’s what the miners and earlier inhabitants left behind between 1850 and 1970. Earlier inhabitants used natural materials, but even early humans left midden piles behind. We are a trashy species. But innovative, too. We make use of the glass — we study our past and save the material for artists and industrial archaeologists.

Back to the bumbles. As evening falls, they stay in the cosmos, using petals as blankets. A three-year-old grabs my hand to show me. A new farm feline plays with the older kids. And the adults eat grilled zucchini and local burgers with artisan bread. How sweet the day.

September 19, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story that includes a blanket. Any interpretation works! What happens to a story when you give a character the prop of a blanket? Is the blanket the story? Is it a memory container, a source of comfort, or smothering? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by September 25, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

I don’t know who had the worst day — me or the spider. It began with laundry in the basement and ended in battle for the sanctity of my Rodeo Room.

But first, I have to explain to you what a “rat’s nest” is.

When I was a kid, I had long hair that tangled despite the braids the adults made me wear. I swear my two grandmothers competed for who could braid the tightest (for the record, my mom’s mom Donna could alter my facial features with French braids).

It was my mom who had to comb out the mess I’d somehow made of my braids complete with tangles, hay, and horse snot. She’d grab at the debris with a thick comb and pull. Any knots with dislodged strands she discarded as a rat’s nest.

The tradition continued with my daughters who both inherited my baby-fine hair in thick, copious amounts. One wore her hair in ballet buns; the other allowed me to plaster her scalp in rows of tiny rubber bands. My son escaped the hairy rat race with buzz cuts. Between the three of us with tons of long hair, we regularly choked the vacuum rollers and clogged the bathroom plumbing. One daughter loved to brush her locks outside and make huge rats’ nests to give to the birds; the other buzzed her head like her brother.

To this day, rat’s nest remains a fond phrase. My hair is short and my children grown, but I can still collect masses of fallen hair when I sweep. Sometimes, a rat’s nest will form in the washing machine and adhere to a flannel shirt. I tell you this to set the scene.

Laundry is a basement activity. We live in an old three-story mining house built around 1910 on Roberts Street near the Quincy Mine on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The third-story stairs are now blocked as we filled the top floor with insulation and the second story is where our rooms are — the bathroom, Bird Farts Room (not my room, his), Rodeo Room (my dream sanctuary), and the Unicorn Room for breathing, writing, and office work. To do laundry, I carry my towels, bedding, or hamper down two flights of stairs and back.

In the basement, I hang delicates on a line, fold towels, return bedding upstairs, and the last task is to collect my clean clothes in the hamper. In the Rodeo Room, I dump my clothes onto my bed to fold, sort, hang, and put away. Something I appreciate about domestic chores is how complete the tasks can feel. When I’m overwhelmed, laundry can calm me. I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Everything is neat, orderly, and in its place. A peace came over me as I began to sort and fold on this day.

Right away, I noticed a rat’s nest and chuckled. I don’t see many these days and I wondered if my son will come to know them as an expectant father. For fun, I flicked the rat’s nest from one item of clothing to the other as the pile dwindled. Once I tucked everything away, all that remained was a lavender-scented dryer sheet and a single rat’s nest. But when I tried to pick up the rat’s nest it moved. I froze. The mat of “hair” turned out to be a hairy basement wolf spider. I had been tossing Wolfric (my name for all the hairy spiders that live in the basement far below) from socks to underwear to t-shirts to jammies.

This spider had touched it all.

Wolfric didn’t seem amused. And I had a full-blown bodily reaction, all my muscles quivering like aspen leaves. Bravely, I scooped Wolfric into the dryer sheet and held it softly so as not to harm her. At the Rodeo Room door, I realized the wiley spider had crawled outside the sheet and was moving. I squealed, Mause came running up the stairs, and Wolfric jumped, scampering beneath a dresser in the hallway. No, no, no! Wolfric cannot live upstairs with me!

At this point, Todd wandered upstairs to see what all the commotion was. Mause shook because I did, and I pointed to the dresser and explained to Todd that one of the wolf spiders made it upstairs in my laundry hamper. Mause didn’t understand but she was not happy about the new flatmate either. Apparently, Wolfric had enough of my nonsense and headed downstairs on her own. And yes, I watched to make sure she made it.

This is why Rickety Cricket visits my dreams. The Insect Nation is calling me home. We are all interconnected beings and live in a constant cycle of life and death. We humans are good at blocking what we don’t want in our space too afraid to confront the idea that we are surrounded. Ants too close to the house? Call the exterminator. Grubs in the garden? Break out the pesticide. Spiders and flies in the house? Set off a bug bomb. Japanese beetles on the wall? Move. The Insect Nation wonders why we are so afraid of them when all they do is go about their purpose in life while we invent ways to annihilate them.

The first time I tended Rickety Cricket from dreams, I knew this insect to morph from cricket to praying mantis. In a Zoom session with Dr. Aizenstat at the Dream Institute, he had us go into a meditation and let a dream image animate. It was supposed to be a session on animals in our dreams, but I knew enough to not question why a Rickety Cricket showed up. The cricket became a bee and I grew small and the bee huge. During the shrinking, the bee asked, “Why are you so afraid when we are the ones as tiny as you are now?” The next animation was me on the Bee’s back riding through my front garden. I knew all the flowers by color and scent. We flew so fast that the hues melded into a flowing living painting. The space stretched as if I were speeding through a massive landscape and yet I never left the six-foot by eight-foot plot of garden.

Insect Nation showed me the beauty they witness in this world. Have you ever stopped to ponder what wonders they must see from their size and infiltration of spaces? What must it be to live in soil, to crawl through openings in moss, and to tuck into a flower head? Is it possible that Wolfric enjoyed my playful tossing until I realized the rat’s nest was alive?

I don’t want to shake at encounters with the insects around me. Let’s say I had the worst day because of my limitations. How do I overcome my physical and psychological reactions? Through dream tending to continue to encounter Rickety Cricket in dreams and animations. And to invite you all to write about Insect Nation to stir up the collective unconscious on what bugs us about bugs, and what beauty may lurk in our basements.

September 12, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about the insect nation. You can focus on a particular insect or all insects. Is your story one of acceptance and understanding? Scientific knowledge? Or apocalyptic horror? Get bugged and go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by September 18, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

It was inevitable. The carrot and the rabbit would join forces to do good in the world.

When I first met the artist known as TOJ, I also learned that Tammy Gajewski is a poet and was a prison guard. She owns Red Rabbit Studio and lives on Rabbit Bay on the south side of the Keweenaw Peninsula. After our first introduction and she learned of Carrot Ranch, we decided we’d “do something” together One Day.

Don’t you love One Days? Those moments when you realize that something you dreamed into existence is finally going to manifest in a tangible way?

TOJ had a heart to make nature and art accessible. Maybe it was all her years behind bars where she established a Leader Dog program and taught prisoners how to paint. TOJ kayaks Lake Superior, and bikes the backroads of the southside, something her prisoners could not do. Art and nature liberate the soul. The dual experience was something she wanted to make accessible.

Then, TOJ had a vision. Three years ago, a microburst hit the cedar bog behind her home and left a swath of downed trees. What if? TOJ began to dream about turning those trees into boardwalks across the glen. With the help of a friend who owned a portable sawmill, they worked an entire summer to clean the downburst, plane logs into lumber, and restore the bog. The next summer they built a winding plank trail through the woods, connecting her home on Rabbit Bay to a county gravel road behind her property. The trail was born.

All the time TOJ worked her land, she dreamed of an event where people would park on the county road and walk to her art studio through the cedar bog on a raised plank trail. It feels all at once, neolithic and new.

Two years ago, TOJ talked through her dream for an interactive art walk. I was excited because Canadian author, photographer, and Carrot Rancher Ann Edall-Robson had introduced me years ago to an intriguing artist collaboration in her community. In fact, her most recent submission to Voices and Visions 2023 features in a Canadian magazine. Ann put a seed in my dreamscape to One Day pair literary artists with visual artists. So, when TOJ pitched Red Rabbit collaborating with Carrot Ranch, I saw an opportunity.

Not only a chance to implement pairing 99-words to TOJ’s art but also to work with someone who shares my passion for accessibility. After all, Carrot Ranch exists to make literary art accessible 99 words at a time. Since then, TOJ and I have met numerous times to plan and implement over two years. It’s a joy to present the first-ever annual Keweenaw Interactive Art Walk.

While we are selling tickets locally to grow and sustain the event, we are also offering family discounts and scholarships so no one is turned away. We need to cover Porta Potty, signage, art supply costs, and continued development. We have local people donating refreshments, including a local Finnish artist who is famous for spreads and jams she makes from her garden. The trail will be strung with 20 works of art and their corresponding 99-word stories. Benches and stations will invite participants to reflect and create. They can submit a single-sentence reflection, haiku, or a 99-word story and paint rocks, driftwood, and coasters. All beneath the canopy of nature, surrounded by inspiration.

Where does the Carrot Ranch Literary Community come in? We get the chance to pair 99-word stories or free-verse to 20 of TOJ’s paintings. This is a community collaboration and an interesting way to involve literary artists beyond a small remote point of land surrounded by Lake Superior. Full disclosure — we are publishing a commemorative book to use to sustain the future of the walk. We plan to curate and publish the pairings, stories from this week’s challenge, and selected submissions from the participants.

If you want to participate in the pairing collaboration, please email me: wordsforpeople (at) gmail (dot) com to receive a photo of a painting to prompt a 99-word story or free verse.

If you want to submit this week’s response to the collection that will also go in the commemorative book, indicate your agreement to participate in the two temporary fields in this week’s form.

I know the Rabbit and the Carrot would be honored to showcase your writing talents in our community.

September 5, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story that depicts the painting, “Southwest Pumpkins” by TOJ (from the introductory photo). Feel free to explore the nuances — do you focus on the art or seek a story? What vibes do you get? Who shows up to enter the image? What happens? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by September 11, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

Two massive tundra swans rest upon the dark waters of Boston Pond near my daughter’s farm. The nesting parties of the northern hemisphere have ended for 2023 and migrators are leaving their breeding grounds to overwinter elsewhere.

The merlins, falcons, and osprey have left the Northwoods of Michigan and Wisconsin. The sandhill cranes, dabblers, and divers are gathering to take their leave, too. Everyone with feathers has either fledged or molted. With the birds sporting their duller non-breeding colors, it’s time for the leaves to stand out.

And celebrate. It’s festa time!

When I was a child in Old Californio — okay, I’m not that old, but I did grow up in one of the last holdouts of vaquero culture — the Azorean Portagees practiced celebrations called “festas.” They were religious festivals associated with the Cult of the Holy Spirit, a sect of Catholicism going back to the fourteenth century and linked to Franciscan monks. Today, the Azores and small pockets of buckaroo country in the western US (parts of California, Nevada, and southern Idaho), continue the tradition.

Festa foods are among my favorites, a tradition my coming grandchild will one day know. Originally, the communities gathered all their soup, sausage, bread, and milk. Cattle were butchered and the sopas prepared. In my family, the beef chunks were cooked in a vat of red wine with onions, garlic, and spices then served over chunks of San Francisco sourdough bread with fresh mint. When we lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains, I used to harvest wild mint for festa soup we called sopas.

My kids grew up on festa foods, and we all lamented when we moved to Minnesota where there is no linguica. That’s the sausage. It, too, is made with red wine and spices. While the pinnacle of best food ever has been linguisa and eggs, Vermont introduced me to linguisa and lobster. Oh…my… Another festa sausage remains rarer — we called it marcella, but I don’t know if I’m spelling it correctly. It could be called marsala for (you guessed it) red wine. I recall my grandmother putting red wine in every Azorean recipe from rabbit marinade to jerky. My grandparents made marcella, using fresh pig blood. It’s blood sausage made with wine, garlic, and spices. My eldest daughter, Allison, will get to try it when she visits the Azores in November.

November will be the month of festas for my family and we kicked it off in August.

Allison and I drove to southern Wisconsin this past weekend for a baby shower my son, Kyle, and his wife, Leah, hosted. It was an elegant affair and they were the fashionable couple, the mother-to-be in a Grecian seafoam green dress and the father-to-be in a buff linen suit with matching green gingham shirt. It was a luncheon with an open bar (my son bartender through six years of college) and neither parent had anything alcoholic. Which might be why we didn’t have festa foods.

What a joy to be in my son’s life as he’s embarking on fatherhood. I’m excited, but I’m more excited to watch my son grow with his child. It feels like a gift. Driving back, I realized it was also a gift to have travel time with Allison. We did arrive home to the Keweenaw late and she was expecting to harvest her flowers for markets. I told her I’d help her if she delayed. The next day we harvest flowers together. Her husband, Drew, who had been in the fields or pack-shack all day took a break by grilling and reading. I was invited to feast, or festa, with them afterward.

And yes, there was red wine served with zucchini, poblanos, mojo peppers, tomatillos, and local beef sausage.

I’m wondering what you dreamers and writers will catch from “festa”? What celebratory foods or rituals do you still find comfort or delight? What are the origins of festivals you’ve attended? Go tend your stories and if you chase a white calf down a rabbit hole, remember, it’s all about connecting to your creativity as literary artists.

August 29, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about a festa. It can be any festival, celebration, or use of the word. Is it food-related or an event? Is it an object or a shout-out? Who is involved and why? What happens? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by September 5, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

The weather arrives. And she’s not who she used to be. She reminds me of a place who reminds me of a woman who reminds me of a Dream.

The Dream opens like this: a woman has dyed her hair red and the color has not yet set. She rubs her hair across the floor and leaves wispy streaks of rusty dye. She wakes as if in a stupor, surprised to learn that she left the ruddy trail.

The Dream shifts.

I’m in a truck, driving across a parking lot. It’s snowing lightly and the other vehicles have left tracks ahead of me. The pattern of these tracks mimics that of the wet streaks of colored hair. I wake up, inwardly hearing a Dream title: “Bad Hair Day.”

A Woman presumably having a bad hair day is a dream image I decided to practice with. She discomforted me and when I thought of her I chilled, thinking of creepy-crawly humans-like creatures from scary stories. I wanted to practice with an “intolerable” — a nightmarish image. When I got into an imaginal space, I held the Dream image and then let it live on its own. The woman appeared, her hair still wet.

Other images intruded over the woman like full head-to-toe masks — the moment you learn the John Saul ghost is evil; the creeper from The Ring slithers; the story you overheard one traveler telling another about a slasher movie. Dreamers have a Dream Council, though — protection. And Dreamers cultivate safe space within. Think of it this way — if you can conjure up the scariest character imaginable, you can call forth the Hero. So, instead of seeing snakes grow bigger in your dreams, imagine your pet mongoose feasting on snakes.

Once I caught the vibe of the image and my associations, I ask, “Who are you?”

“The Woman who doesn’t want red hair,” she responds. “It’s dangerous. Dangerous times.”

The Place. Two weeks later, as I’m waking up from a Dream listening to, “Sister Golden Hair” and looking back at a stylized hot pink scene completely unfamiliar yet I know it. I delay waking up to hang with the image. The band, America, continues to sing, “…when a woman sure can be a friend of mine…” Inwardly I feel like I’m squinting and losing the idea of this place. Then it comes to me, Carson Valley. I’m now standing in the vista looking down the valley from the Nevada side toward the towering peaks of the Sierras. Even though the image is like a work of art, I know each peak, slope, and river.

That’s when a big wind blew from the pass to the west. A slow-moving mammoth mass of hot pink air. It gathered forces, rose like a thunderhead, and rotated before punching past me in a blast of wind. The last thing I heard before waking was, “The weather has arrived.”

On August 20, 2023, I wrote in my Dream Journal: “The Woman Who Does Not Want Red Hair is the coming weather.”

Then I wrote:

The Weather
The weather forms terrain.
Geology exposes rock --
            wind & sun
                 water & fire
                     shapes mountains
                             valleys
                                  forests
                                      deserts

Water gives life
Carves a cradle for humans fresh from the cave
Slowly, shyly, a world takes shape.
The weather is Sister Golden Hair before she lost her daughter
       known to the gatherers of wheat
             known to the cattle, sheep, and goats
                      known.
     
Fire scorched, the weather goes mad when underground technology steals her daughter
      Nabbed in broad daylight
              Taken to restore balance from what the earth has lost in diamonds and die-outs of species

Crazed, she dyes her hair red, scared to be seen 
Changed, she hurdles down corridors
    And it begins
          a geological transformation

Who will pick my fossilized bones 900,000 years from now?

It surprised me to realize the Woman Who Does Not Want Red Hair is the weather. It felt like a weird artistic, poetic, mythic moment when hurricane winds blew across the mountains where I grew up. I wondered how the change in weather patterns was going to impact the shapes and sizes of land features which would change where water flows. I’m not one for watching the weather, but suddenly I became interested in Hurricane Hilary. I realized it was projected to make landfall in California as a tropical storm and sweep across the deserts bringing a year’s worth of rain to those dry regions.

Then I saw the eye of the storm was to head over Nevada. I began watching the areas where Todd and I have family. Last night, I went to bed and instead of dreaming, I woke up. This is rare for me. I usually sleep like an old greywacke. I tried to go back to sleep. Then I sat up and could feel a change in the air. It felt heavy and damp. I got up and looked at my phone to see where the rain was falling. What I saw was a rotating mass that not only stretched across Nevada and Idaho, but it had arced through Montana and Canada and was circling back stateside.

At that moment the remnants of Hurricane Hilary’s front had reached Lady Lake Superior and was engulfing the Keweenaw in mist. The same winds that stoked the deadly fires on Maui like a dragon and spewed rivers over deserts now evaporated over me. The Greatest of the Lakes received the rain clouds and sucked them dry.

The weather has arrived.

August 22, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about the arrival of the weather. It can mean any kind of weather event meteorological or mythological. Is the weather personified, random, or calculating? Where does it arrive? Is it typical or epoch-changing? Who is involved? And if the Womam Who Doesn’t Want Red Hair shows up, well, ask her what’s happening. Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by August 28, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

Flowers and cattle call me to a home where I have never been. I miss the smell of the sea, the slope of steep mountains, the tremors of the earth. I miss how companionable a herd can be. I miss the home where I have never been.

Fial is called the Blue Island of the Azores because my people planted hydrangeas that spread and bloom among the cattle paddocks. My people? Two Fernandes brothers married two Pivia sisters in the 1870s and landed in San Fransico Bay.

Growing up, I embraced my Portuguese heritage — linguica, pinto beans with cumino, sopas, tending cattle, and growing flowers. Old timers who still spoke the language taught me to swear and called me “Portagee Red” because of my auburn hair coloring. The hair, it turns out, was not an anomaly. Years later I’d discover I’m only 4 percent Portuguese by DNA.

Mostly, I’m Scots, Irish, and English with a smattering of Basque, Danish, Portuguese, Norwegian, German, and 1 percent unexplained Russian and 1 percent Balkin. I don’t even know what a Balkin is. Clearly, I’m your typical Heinz 57 mutt of an American. But as a child and teenager, I identified strongly as an Azorean buckaroo. That was my heritage; the Azores my homeland.

And that’s not all. Throughout my life, I’ve known suadade — what Brazilians often refer to as the melancholy of the Portuguese, the wayfarers who often grew homesick and passed down that feeling to descendants. I was taught that suadade was specifically homesickness for the mountains. The Azores are a volcanic archipelago thus the entire nine islands rise as sea mountains. Along with cattle and flowers, it was home.

Where is home? What makes a home? Is it a place or a relationship?

I’ve often encountered this question, having moved 22 times in 35 years of marriage. I’ve been without a home, welcomed into the homes of others, and watched my children create homes in different ways. One lives on a mountainous arctic island (how very cold and Azorean); another farms and tends flowers; another is following a more traditional path making home with a baby on the way. There is no one way to “home.”

Yet, we humans have so much heart and brain-space dedicated to home-space.

My eldest, is going back to the homeland. She’s the first De Abreau to return to the Azores since my mother’s mother’s mother left. No one on my father’s side has returned, either. In a lovely twist of serendipity, a local restaurant is so happy with my daughter’s farm-fresh triple-washed salad and edible flowers for fancy cocktails that she and her husband are invited to spend a foodie week abroad with the owners. It just so happens to be in the Azores. Allison is going home to see where her ancestors once grew flowers.

This week, over at the Dream Tending Institute, Dr. Stephen Aizenstat discussed the collective psyche of home. Home is like a call, a journey. What if what we call the hero’s journey is really a path to find home, or to give us meaning? I think of the Portuguese melancholy, suadade, as a similar call to find home. A call to journey. A call to find something more than past flowers, cattle, and mountains — to find something meaningful about our lives.

You can tend a story the way dreamers tend dreams. Start by making associations. Allow your imagination to create an image of home then allow someone (a character) to step into that place. Ask if you have permission to work with them (yeah, dream tenders ask permission and it seems foreign to us creative writers who apparently kidnap characters who show up to use them in stories). If you want to learn more about dream tending, anyone can join the Tending Tuesdays sessions. Dreams, like stories, appreciate community.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the chickadees. They’ve returned home to Roberts Street.

August 15, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about the journey home. Who is going home? Or are they in search of a future home or ancestral roots? Think of home as a life lived — adventures, relationships, accumulations. What makes home worth the journey? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by August 21, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

Three crows boss-walk across my neighbor’s yard, their black bodies swaying from side to side like inspectors in charge. I’ve heard them caw-cawing all afternoon, and I’m curious about their return and their scrutiny of the nearby lawn.

Typically, a murder of crows hangs around Roberts Street year-round. I know when fall migration ends because it’s me, the neighbors, some pigeons, chickadees, and crows. The crows act as though they own the ‘hood once the songbirds, raptors, and waterfowl leave for winter grounds in warmer places.

To me, August is early for the crows to be, well, crowing about.

Then I remember the nesting merlins and search for the sounds of their songbird-killing cries. It’s quiet. When did I last hear the merlins or spot them diving from the sky? Last week, I watched an incredible sight where a corvid battled a merlin above the Hancock treeline. I stood at the raspberry patch, eating red fruit like popcorn and watching the big black bird flip on its back to grab at the swooping merlin. The merlin cried its monotone call and the corvid screamed. Was it threatened or the one threatening? Clearly, the corvid’s claws were bigger than the small falcon’s.

Maybe the corvid was a passing raven; maybe a crow daring to come back (merlins often take over established corvid nests). Mostly we all share space when the migrators and tourists arrive, but the experience of summertime population increase can feel like a displacement. It’s harder to get campsites and all the best places to eat require advanced reservations. I can understand how the crows have felt while the merlins ruled the roost on Roberts Street.

And, I think the crows are right — the merlins have moved on.

Roots are a funny thing. The first time I heard my grown daughter answer the question, “Where are you from,” shortly after she and her husband moved to the Keweenaw (and I was visiting, thus before my relocation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula). She said, “It’s complicated.” My daughter was born in the same Nevada hospital as my husband Todd and his father. We soon moved to Montana and when she was eleven we moved to Minnesota. As a family, we all yearned for Montana, felt rooted there. But Montana University grad school cut the roots for my daughter; going back only made her feel like she didn’t belong.

I was surprised to hear her answer. My initial reaction was that I was clearly rooted in the West but my children were less certain. Allison accepts her complicated sense of roots; Brianna identifies as “from Montana” and yet is receiving her Norwegian dual citizenship this year; Kyle has firmly planted Wisconsin roots with a ‘Sconie wife and baby on the way. My grandchild, I suspect, will know where they are from, even if her parents move to Europe or Seattle.

After leaving Idaho, I’ve felt rootless. Not only did Todd and I tumble like the iconic western diaspore — the tumbleweed — we ended up in a hard-to-define place. The U.P. of Michigan is not truly midwestern nor is it eastern. Northern Michigan is below us. Wisconsin makes a good argument for the UP belonging to their state. Some think we can be a Superior state of our own. Tourists think we are Canadian, eh. Maps forget to include the region. Even though I’m surrounded by Yoopers who know their roots, I feel like this is a place where it’s okay for me to have divergent roots.

In fact, living on the Keweenaw has allowed me to feel roots in many places while being present in this one. Does it make me a merlin or a crow?

Actually, I’d like to think I have the roots of mountains.

Born in California’s Gabilans and raised in the Sierras, most of my familial roots took hold there from places like the mountainous islands of the Azores, or the Pyrenees. My ancestors from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England knew good granite if not old mountains. I’ve lived in various ranges of the Rockies and traveled up and down Nevada’s basin and range country. The only ancestors I had “out east” made their homes in Appalachia. My roots are rocks.

Here’s something you might not have known — the Canadian Shield is a vast expanse of ancient mountains and the core that remains today are the roots of those long eroded ranges. Geologic forces pushed those roots to the surface and glaciers sheered them. Lake Superior slowly chews on the bones of these mountains and I walk among them, picking up fragments that came from somewhere else. Like me.

I’m a rock root. Not a tumbleweed but a tumbled stone. I’ll let the crows ponder that while I ponder their feathered takeover of Roberts Street. We are but a blip in the scale of time. But oh, what a beautiful time a blip can be.

August 8, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about roots like a mountain. Feel free to play with both concepts of roots and mountains. How can you create a story from the combination? What character (or traits) come to mind? Where and when does the story take place? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by August 14, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, strident calls remind me that it’s the immature season — big ugly birds are fledging. A pair of merlins acquired a corvid nest one house down from mine and they’ve raised a squawky bunch.

Barely a week ago, the youngest merlins left the nest to perch on neighboring rooftops. The din brought me outside to witness falcon surround-sound fledging. Todd joined me, wielding a spotting scope for long-range shooting. I held my binoculars and breath, feeling awed at the moment. It was like watching a baby’s first steps.

Immature merlins have scraggly brown feathers so puffy, they look bigger than their parents. They hunch up, uncertain of their ability to fly. They lift their wings into imitations of caped vampires. And sometimes, they slide off a gable.

By the time the third wave of kin arrived, the merlin family encompassed the entire Roberts Street neighborhood.

The week caught its own moments with immature birds, while out kayaking. First, we encountered a winding slough off the Portage Canal where red-winged blackbirds had just fledged. It was a rare moment to see juveniles and females flying and perching along the wooded edge. Had we kayaked here any other day, we would have missed the fledging.

And at another lake on another day — we rose early, grabbed coffee and breakfast burritos at Krupps, and hit the water at Twin Lakes. By the time we meandered a waterway between Lake Gerald and Lake Roland, a baby eagle took flight, chasing down a parent. We arrived at the precise moment the eagle clumsily flew from one side of the lake to the other.

Yet, there are some juvenile birds I’ve never seen — swallows, road runners, cedar waxwings. We did see adult male cedar waxwings though and they behaved nobly except for when one landed on a branch too thin and he bobbed in a silly way. We saw Anne Goodwin’s kingfisher, but no princes. We saw numerous sandhill cranes, but no teens. One of our best sightings occurred along Misery Creek — the opposite of immature — an old age of a wood turtle.

Wherever you are, take time to notice who takes to the air where you live. Consider how the seasons change the bird-scape. Maybe the immature can teach us writers something about transformation.

Immatures make a lot of noise and fuss. Its an image easily transposed to characters under development. What does it mean to be immature? What do immature people look like, act like, and speak? It can be a character trait that informs or colors a story. Go ahead. Play, and have fun this challenge!

August 1, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about something or someone immature. Is it a wine not yet ready to uncork or an adult not ready to adult? You can follow the flight of immature fledglings or come up with something unexpected. Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by August 7, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.

It’s not every day I meet a strawberry farmer on Roberts Street. I’d seen the man walk past my home dozens of times. When I was outside weeding and trimming my overgrown tarragon forest, he stopped to chat.

He looks like a farmer who tinkers with tractors. His jeans and plaid shirt with snaps were brushed and cleaned but stained. The man’s hands were working mits built over decades or turning tools and coupling plows to tractors. He smelled faintly of industrial grease.

He’s Chuck, the Keweenaw strawberry farmer who taught me about commitment in a can.

Chuck has farmed strawberries on High Point Road for more than 30 years. He thought he might retire, but then he started repairing some of his old tractors. Chuck even went into the bush to retrieve an old bailer that folks from the 1940s left behind. Fixing the tractors made him realize how much he loved growing Copper Country strawberries. Come next spring, he’s going to start with new plants.

Chuck told me he found commitment in a can. He’s reviving his tractors one can of paint at a time. Each new can, he recommits. After he finishes painting one tractor red, he’ll count the cans to measure the work. It made me wonder, where do writers find commitment to their craft?

What’s your “can”?

I think of the can as a container and that connects me to images, which are the containers of dreams and stories.

It’s a quick post this week because rumor has it, Kid and Pal’s creator was seen in the Wisconsin woods. Maybe it was just a Bigfoot sighting, or an optical illusion caused by the Paulding Lights. But I have to go check it out.

July 25, 2023, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story based on the phrase “commitment in a can.” What is the commitment and to whom? Describe the can. How does it expand the story? Go where the prompt leads!

1. Submit by July 31, 2023. Please use the form below if you want to be published in the weekly collection. The Collection publishes on the Thursday following the next Challenge. Stories must be 99 words. Rules & Guidelines.
2. Writers retain all copyrights to any stories published at Carrot Ranch.
3. A website or social media presence is not required to submit. A blog or social media link will be included in the title of any story submitted with one.
4. Please include your byline with your title on one line. Example: Little Calves by Charli Mills. Your byline can be different from your name.
5. Please include the hashtag #99WordStories when sharing either the Challenge or Collection posts on social media.