Raquel Martina Martinez

1)     Because my muse has a wicked sense of humor and visits me at odd times and in inconvenient places, I have learned to record inspirations/ideas immediately before I forget them or they dissolve into nothing. I carry small notebooks, own a digital recorder, and have been known to text messages home. I will scribble on anything – old napkins I find in my glove compartment or old receipts. I even pop out of bed in the middle of the night to jot things on sticky pads. 2)    Calendars are great places to find topics. I use important dates, seasons, and upcoming holidays to plan blog posts. I can also go back into my work calendar to refresh my memory about meetings, conferences, or books I have read that might be worth sharing with others.   3)    I will sit with a good cup of coffee, pen and paper ready, and read the newspaper searching for topics, interesting characters, or modern trends.  News channels and other newsfeeds are just as good.   4)    I love to read the TV

My favorite season has always been summer.  If you have been to my part of the world (south Texas), you would understand why. No matter how much everyone romanticizes all the other seasons, for me the only one worth mentioning is summer. In the fall, everything turns gray and brown and stays that way for nearly eight months, none of those beautiful russets and crimsons one sees in other parts of the United States.  Winters are more of the same except our Winter Wonderland is not snowdrifts and crystalline icicles.  It is bitter cold weather and clay mud.  Unlike all the gobbledygook put out by Disney or the Lifetime Channel, we spend the majority of our spring waiting for the first Bluebonnet to bloom, and that usually doesn’t happen until sometime in May. Summer is the only time we get to enjoy a storybook season.  We finally get to play with the other colors in the Crayola box.  For a brief period in time, our trees leaf, our flowers burst, our fruits and vegetables flour

Even after thirty years in a dysfunctional relationship, I missed being married. I was sad, lonely, and lost. My kids were all grown and gone, and even the family dog had died. I was in the middle of teaching a poetry lesson to a group of high school juniors when the teacher next door came running into my classroom, yelling for me to turn on my TV.   A plane had just crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City. Our country was being attacked by terrorists. For the rest of the school day the whole school, the whole nation, watched as all hell broke loose on our safe, complacent world.   It was Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Purgatory all rolled into one. I don’t remember getting home, but I do remember assuring my three kids (all in their early twenties back then) that if worse came to worst, we would all gather at my house, we would all live under one roof, and we would all look out for and protect each other. I remember checking on the two useless

When my kids were little we would make a big deal of Grandparents’ Day.   We planned our weekend visiting and delivering tokens of our love and appreciation to the grandparents - small plants or flowers for the grandmoms and great-grandmothers, cards and a candy bar for the grandfathers.   Only one on that list is still with us.   I became a grandma in 2001; HB acquired the prestigious title of grandpa when he married me in 2006.   Since then we have “titled” him seven more times. He is tickled pink (but mostly blue since seven of the eight are boys) and takes the title of Grandpa HoneyBunch seriously. He’s built furniture, toys, and playscapes.   He’s repaired hundreds of store-bought items not meant for the rambunctiousness of healthy and curious hands. He’s hiked, fished, and roller skated.   He has cheered at t-ball, baseball, and soccer games.   He’s dried tears, fixed boo boo’s, and given advice.   Nothing makes me smile more than to watch him go about his chores