Summer Time

 

Summer time starts with flowers

 

Tea time starts with flowers: Gerbera Daisy.

Celebrating summer with nostalgic floral display.

Delicate, bright and bold;

pretty and delightful summer-in-bloom

will enliven any room in someone's home.

Ishtaboli or Lacrosse Game

The Choctaw men (from southeast Native American tribes) loved to play Ishtaboli, a stick and a ball game that the French colonists renamed Lacrosse. The game was so violent that the Choctaw called it "the little brother of war." The Choctaw built huge playing fields that could hold up to seven hundred Ishtaboli players at one time.

To play, warriors and nobles would wear loincloths with fringed belts and elaborate structures covered in egret feathers that stuck out behind them like tails. They carried long sticks made from wood with webbed ends woven from strips of deer hide.

The Ball Game: The Historic Aspect

Many Mesoamerican societies played a ball game that held great significance, no just as a sport but as a ritualistic way of setting disputes. The Maya inherited this game from their predecessors the Olmecs, and they considered it so important that they built ball courts in all but the smallest towns.

Players were divided into two teams, and the game involved hitting a large, heavy rubber ball across the court and into high hoops. To play, they wore a loincloth with a thick padded belt to protect the waist and hips. They also wore padding on their forearms and knees, at the sides of the body, to protect themselves from injury when diving to the ground. Players also wore large headdresses and decorative chest ornaments.

To the Maya, the game represented the struggle between the forces of life and death, and the losers were often decapitated.

The Boring Book

There's a book I keep on my bedside table
for when I can't sleep. It never fails,
half page and I'm gone. My friend
who wrote this book should be pleased.
Not everyone can sit by his reader
like a father singing to a fearful child,
and summon the moon for her
and turn her pillow soft as the sea.

 (Lola Haskins. 92017) - New Letters, Vol. 83, Nos. 2 & 3, p.125)

Common South Florida Lizards

Florida is a home to at least
thirty species of lizards.

 

Common little brown wood lizard of South Florida.

Lizards often loose their tails,

but they have the ability to regrow them easily.

 

 

 

Cuban anole poisonous lizard 

 

"Study of Lizards"

Photographer: Ida Tomshinsky (South Florida, 2017) 

 

Little Lamb

Here is a little Lamb -

Its fleece is white as snow,

And everywhere we go

This Lamb remains us

Of winter's winds and cold.

The May rolls on,

And summer is near

Like this little Lamb so dear.

 

 

Lyrics, photo, and articraft: Tomshinsky, 2017