Ann Marie Gamble

One Block East of a Large University Campus

Friday, May 2nd, 2014

Our street sign is gone again.
“We live at the corner of Hope and Midterms,”
I’m going to tell the next guy who asks
Although hope is frequently disguised as beer pong
Shirtless baseball in the street
This time with a real ball
And at home base–yes–
My bag of recycling
Wine bottles and vegetable cans instead of beer by the case
I go outside to mow
But my deadlines aren’t clustered in April.

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Big Snow

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Kid the Elder, the one who can do some serious yardage with a snow shovel, and I just devoured lunch. Central Missouri has had its second big snowstorm in less than a week, and we’re dancing out that “Food is fuel” tune. I’ve cooked for every meal, baked cake and panettone, in part to have an excuse to turn the oven on but also because my usual strategy–leftovers for lunch–doesn’t work when you don’t have any leftovers. That’s one part kids home all day due to canceled school, but the other part snow shoveling is hard work–even more effective than standing by the open oven door.

This second snow was not as thick as the forecasters thought it could be, but it’s at least as heavy. The storm started as rain and switched to sleet, then to big gloppy flakes; in the early hours of the morning the temperature was 32, and during my first round of shoveling I was enveloped in a thin Scotch mist. We share a driveway with college-kid neighbors who have had classes canceled today as well. One was up to clear their back stoop–as it turns out, so she could get into the downstairs apartment. (more…)

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Data

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

With the help of a coupon, I ordered a sampler of different-flavored macarons for an after-school-snack adventure.

We have a household of three in a two- or four-per-box world, so we have tactics: I cut everything in half so everyone gets “one,” and then we can negotiate for the leftover halves. Invariably someone likes one better than the other, or isn’t that hungry, or is willing to trade for other goods. I started carving and told the kids to notice which color macarons they liked: they were all different, and we could look up what flavor each color was–did they really taste like that, and we might want to try making some.

While I’m trying to remember if the green ones are pistachio or the yellow ones are mango (I knew there was one in this mix I was allergic to), the chart to the right is going up on the new chalkboard wall. The younger has just started middle school, and they’ve been learning about the scientific method and recording observations in lab notebooks. Have data? We’ll collect it.

Exasperatingly to the data collector, older brother liked them all.

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A Great Idea in Theory

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

One of the fearless adventurers got an underwater camera for Christmas. We’ve been seeing pictures like this and this around, and we go to a lake every summer, so we thought we’d come up with some tableaus of our own.

So color me utterly impressed by everything those guys could do. File under “great in theory, extremely difficult in practice.” (more…)

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An Amended Plan

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Steam coils from the bath

Befogged glasses slide tubward

The book is reshelved

Tags: haiku
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Mother’s Response

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Time to sleep. The night is well started; she reads her daughter’s letter with worry, care, hope, bracing herself against the rushing in of shapeless fears. These, she admits, are grown colts. The pasture is no longer mine to guard, my watch as mare shadowing the leggy, tipsy foal is over. This foal stands strong. The son’s letter is harder to parse. Reading in dim light, she wants to know the ends of both stories, impossibly: those sections haven’t yet been written.

Dogs breathing, fridge purring, a squeak from a bird and a click in the heater sound the broken gait ending the day’s action. Corralled in her kitchen, she reads. Night hours are the hardest, the anguish rides in on the backs of old memories or sticking to still-fresh details of today. She rises and knocks around boxes and jars of verbena, spearmint, slippery elm, lemon balm, some she picked leaf by leaf and dried in the still atmosphere of her cellar, knowing she would concoct the sleep-gift combined from these. She searches for an herbal-induced calm. Through the window she lists the colors in the halo of the streetlamp; she rereads the letters; she remembers wind in her hair, a gallop, the free rein she believed was her automatic gift to her offspring. She knows there’s no open range, there’s no grassland, there’s no herd.

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Reply to “The Storm” by Julie Youmans. Read other responses to the prompt.

Tags: it's just fiction
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The Storm

Friday, October 28th, 2011

The words of the title of a horror movie appear in this story somewhere. If you can guess the title (and win a prize!) or you want to read more short short fiction (you can vote on which you like), check out the Friday Flash site.

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The air hung heavy, portentous curtains muffling any activity but watching. Occasionally there was a push of wind—a practice gust, directed and forceful instead of the random zephyrs and eddies of a sunny summer day, but enough to flatten grass and churn dust. It wasn’t sunny. Wispy puffballs of clouds had scudded east to more congenial regions and our sky was blanketed with gray and grayer coils and snarls out of a sheep’s nightmare. Somewhere, the wind was moving fast—we’d been under a tornado watch for hours, finally upgraded to a warning—but these same globs simmered over our street, blotting out all the blue. (more…)

Tags: FridayFlash
Posted in Play, Prompts | 5 Comments »

Kids in the Kitchen

Friday, August 12th, 2011

We went blueberry picking with the gang: a reluctant but competitive crowd of teenagers, toddler, non-fruit-eaters, and adventure buffs, plus a few adults who compared the prices of already-picked berries at various stores around the Midwest.

After an hour or so, we had 17 pounds of berries. (We should have weighed a couple of the kids before and after.) We’ll freeze most of these, but for the rest of the weekend, blueberry everything. One of the kids suggested blueberry pie, and I suggested this recipe. (more…)

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Letterboxing

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

I’m posting about a vacation activity, whether you’re at home or on the road, at the Pop Culture Divas.

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