Sandra Rose Hughes

Putting on a high school play has many unique blessings and challenges. As far as blessings go, the students are usually very enthusiastic about the show. They are willing to put in long hours after school and on weekends. They are full of inspiring creativity and energy and are often capable of solving problems that crop up in the show by themselves. By the end of the rehearsal and performance process, the students have become a tightly knit group of performers and as their director, I am included in this group. These are the blessings of putting on a high school show. But oh, the challenges. As I mentioned before, the students are highly creative. However, their sense of the resources available to our program sometimes seems slightly impaired. “Mrs. Hughes!” They will say, convinced that their idea is the best ever conceived, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we ended the show in a gigantic display of pyrotechnics?! We could have rockets shooting from the stage and the characters flying in ...

Three of my sunflower seeds broke ground yesterday. I planted 14 seeds 2 weeks and 2 days ago. It felt like so long since I had planted them that I was beginning to believe that they would never grow. If you read my post " Building Camelot " you know what the sunflowers mean to me. In the weeks after my Grandfather died, ordering those seeds and digging the beds for them brought me great comfort. These are not just flowers to me. These are Hope in seed form. Somehow, with water and dirt, these tiny seeds have grown into a living thing. It's such a miracle. In a few months, they will be taller than I am- and they live off of sunlight! It sounds like a fairy tale. Sometimes I marvel at the world God has made. I wrote a Haiku to honor the tiny sunflower plants' birthday. I read it to them and sang "Happy Birthday." Sunflower Hope. A bursting green bud Breaking through the dark wet soil My sunflower seed grows hope. I have to resist the urge to help the seedl...

I think enough time has passed that I can share "The Green Man" poem with you. This is the one that was published by the literary magazine, "Midnight Screaming." The Green Man “Run away with me,” said the spirit of the wood as he whispered down my neck through the trees. I shivered and shrank, wishing I could, And leaned into the breeze. “Why won’t you come?” he asked in my ear, as he warmed my back with the sun. I stretched and arched, but still had fear, Oh, I wanted to succumb! “Just join me now,” said that cheery sprite, as he caressed me with cloudy shade, and how, oh how, I wished I might give up this earthly glade! My poem, "Housework," was accepted by a British Literary magazine called, "The Blinking Cursor." To date, that means I've had four poems accepted at various places. Thank you to all those editors willing to give me a chance! Photo Credit: Green Man by Alexi Francis, Tree Trail Artist

I believe that most educators go into teaching because somewhere along the way, they really enjoyed being students. If you ask a teacher why they went into it, they will usually tell you something about a teacher or a class who once meant something very special to them. I loved my education. I wasn’t always very happy with my fellow students, and there were a few teachers who I didn’t care for, but on the whole, I truly enjoyed my teachers in elementary school, high school, and especially college. English teachers were usually my favorite. They took the literature so seriously, and they would use big words like, “epiphany,” and “epitome,” and phrases like, “but I digress,” and “bear in mind.” I had one high school teacher, Mr. Richmond, who constantly spoke in an East Coast accent and was completely obsessed with Hester Prynne, the anti-heroine from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He spoke about her as if she were some actual living, breathing woman who he was in love with...

My last post, the poem, " Grief " was my 50th post on this blog. I feel like that is an accomplishment. Huzzah! Another source of pride is the Prolific Blogger award I recieved from Ryan, the writer of the blog, "Scotland Here and Now." The originator over at Advance Booking has attached the following rules... 1. Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love! 2. Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award (see above). 3. Every Prolific Blogger must link back to This Post , which explains the origins and motivation for the award. 4. Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name in the Mr. Linky, so that we all can get to know the other winners. So for the seven winners I'm choosing these great Blogs: 1. Carole Ann Carr - She is such a sweet, supportive blogger- thank you for all your kind words, Carole Ann. 2. L...

I wrote this poem the day after my grandfather's funeral. Grief I woke up this morning with raccoon eyes, My head heavy with the fog of the day before. In my closet, I glanced at my winter blacks, And reached instead for bright blues and reds. I am tired of the blackness, darkness, grief. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and my flowers are growing. I want to shed this sadness like an old snake skin. But the scales still remain around my heart.

Someone Unpredictable Wandering home late from the club one night, Pollyanna found herself in a maze of dark streets and darker alleys. She should never have been out so late alone, but none of the handsome men with whom she had danced had really interested her enough to let them walk her home. The truth was, she was bored of them all. She was tired of Mark with his rugged good looks and reliable dependability. Whenever they went bungee-jumping together, he insisted on following all of those pesky rules and regulations, and the last time they had gone lion-hunting, Mark had practically forced her to keep her gun on safety unless she was planning to shoot something. Boring, dull, hum-drum Mark. A girl could never really feel alive around a man like that, she mused. And Luther, well, Luther was only a little more daring than Mark. He had taken Pollyanna base-jumping off the cliffs in South America a few times, and she had found it interesting, but only vaguely. ...

I got a call last Tuesday from the Kern Valley Library. Their librarian, my dear friend Adriane Holguin, called to tell me that my poem had won our local poetry contest. My writing has never won anything before! I posted about the contest at the beginning of April, because I was unsure about even submitting a poem this year. Last year, they weren't impressed with my poem one single bit, but I decided to try again with a much more conservative piece, since the judges seemed to like that from the winners last year. There were fewer participants this year- only thirteen poems were submitted for my category. As a prize, I will be published in the Kern Valley Writer's Association annual anthology, and I will get a free copy. Here is the poem that won. It is a sonnet, and I thought of it one day when I saw some whispy clouds trailing across the sky. It's extremely conservative (possibly boring), and by far it's not my best poem, but I think I learned an important lesson abou...

Building Camelot The rain may never fall till after sundown. By eight, the morning fog must disappear. In short, there's simply not a more congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering than here in Camelot. If you had visited my grandparents’ property in Springville fifteen years ago, my grandmother might have challenged you to a game of cards or dominoes, and my grandfather might have taken you on a tour of his trees. “I planted this apricot here about three years ago,” He’d say. “It should start giving fruit any time now.” Or, he’d say, patting another tree’s bark so hard that the tree would shake, “Well now, this peach tree gave us a lot of peaches last year, but there weren’t many blossoms this year so there won’t be many peaches.” My grandpa planted nearly forty trees on their two acres of hillside. At the bottom of the hill, there was a pond with lots of bluegill, some bass, and a few catfish. There was usually a dog, sometimes a cat, and once, while my sister and I lived wit...