{By Heather Baird from Sprinkle Bakes}

Oh, January. You are a chilly month.

Yesterday we had the kind of snow that makes mighty tree limbs bow in submission. On days like this I’m perfectly content to spend long hours in an oven-warmed kitchen, and that’s just what I did. Many treats were made; some for the book and some for the blog. I’m still determining where some should reside. After much hemming and hawing about what to make for this entry, I decided to revisit an old recipe.

{by Mary Murdoch of Wild Tigers Have I Known}

(photo credit)

In order to accumulate a soul, you have to suffer.

As if, once enough suffering has tumbled down upon you,
building up like a mountainside,
your second life will begin.

Like Athena you will sprout from Zeus’ head and appear in a ball of light, naked and red.

Love is what brings all the suffering.
Love is watching everyone you love leave, die, perish- each person wilting slowly.
Like day old geraniums in a Mason jar that sat on the kitchen counter when I was eight years old.
They dried and mummified like King Tut wrapped in cheesecloth.
Carelessly, I knocked over the glass jar and at once, everything fell to the ground.

Two weeks later my dog died, and I was convinced the falling jar was an omen.
A sign from the other side that death was creeping over into the living’s territory in a dense fog
(like there are chalk outlines dividing space between life and death, war zones, agreed upon plots of land.)

{by Whit Honea of The Honea Express}

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray. The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line. Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance. There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire. Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in. I hadn’t been listening. I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down. Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect. I watched her watch the ground. She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead. Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own. We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave. Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl. It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started. But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed. All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

{by Alyson of New England Living}

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Alyson is a mother of four and former California girl living in New Hampshire. She shares gorgeous pictures and words on her blog, New England Living. Alyson is newenglandliving on Instagram.

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Color Bleed features images captured on mobile devices (phones, iPods, iPads) and shared via social networks (Instagram, twitter, twitpic, Facebook, etc.). Story Bleed consistently insists that art is made and shared online every day. Often casually. Phone photography consistently reveals itself to be breathtaking and insightful.

{by Rhonda Stansberry}

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Rhonda Stansberry is a photographer with a passion for history and architecture.
See more of her photography on her website, Stansberry Photography, and on Flickr.

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Featured by Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle | @playgroupie

{by Sarah Bloom}

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{by Beck from Frog and Toad are Still Friends}

(photo credit)

Once there had been a mother.

He remembered her, a bit – her breath that smelled like communion grape juice and cigarettes, her harsh laugh and her sudden rages, the way he was frightened and small and hiding underneath his bed, in his tent, under the slide at the playground, hiding from her giant hitting hands and her loud voice.

Ruby made her go away.

He didn’t remember much of that night – nothing much more than Ruby giving him warm funny tasting milk at bedtime and then his sleepy awareness of raised yelling female voices and a sudden loud noise and then silence. Then he woke up the next morning to Ruby bright and extra cheerful and the kitchen extra clean and a new vegetable garden in the backyard.

He likes working in the garden. He likes putting his hands in the dirt, likes watering the fat jolly vegetables. Ruby smiles and brings him lemonade and they have picnics for lunch and sometimes he sits on the swing even though the swing is getting smaller and smaller all the time.

He keeps forgetting to ask Ruby about the shrinking swing. He forgets sometimes that Grandma went away a long time ago and finds himself standing in front of her house where strangers live now. He forgets that Mom went away, too, and hides under the piano bench, hides under the front steps, until Ruby lures him out with gummy worms and trips to the ice cream store.

“Ruby,” says their neighbour Mrs. Huffington over the fence. “You’re doing a wonderful job looking after him, but your whole life is passing you by.”

He remembers that sometimes, the way he remembers the surprising bits of red in the kitchen, the loud sound, his mother’s sharp breath and giant hurting hands. But then it’s time for a picnic and the sun is bright and it’s time to work in the garden again, their special garden where the vegetables come up so big and ripe.

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Beck has even more spooky Halloween stories with some of your favorite characters, like the one featured here. She also writes with wit and compassion about her life and family. She just started a new blog, check it out.
Subscribe to her blog.

{by Jenica McKenzie}

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{by Valeria from The Red Balloon Photography}

A SOMETHING in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon,
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstacy.
~Emily Dickinson

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{From Deidra at Jumping Tandem}

Remember those boxes of 64 Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener?

In my world, it didn’t get much better than that.

I could spend hours with a box of crayons and a coloring book. My grandmother or my mother would color one page, and I would color the page next to it.

As the years went by, I took pride in my ability to stay in the lines.