Use lines from this Shel Silverstein poem: SARAH CYNTHIA SYLVIA STOUT WOLULD NOT TAKE THE GARBAGE OUT

 

Sarah's Surprise 

By: Carrie Keiser

There was a knock on the door, ‘because the hour is much too late’, Sarah grumbled while she got up to answer it anyway. She figured they could see the light and they would know she was home. Unfortunately this had become a rather ordinary thing to her, having people knock on the door at any given moment, normal but not really appreciated. That’s what happens when you accidentally become famous because your actions. What kind of actions could make one famous…. Or was it infamous? I’ll let you decide.

Sara drug her feet as she slowly walked to the door. She didn’t want another person come to gawk at her.  Really what was the big deal, it was only one thing she didn’t do! ‘She simply wouldn’t take the garbage out.’

Slowly she reach out to turn the door knob as she steeled herself for another blow.  What she saw on the doorstep shocked her, it was not a person or several people, -as she expected- it was simply a box addressed to her, Not ‘gloppy clumps of cold oatmeal’, just a brown cardboard box of average size. Sara looked around and could see no-one, no car or delivery van, nothing.  Gently she eased the box into the house, it was surprisingly heavy and her curiosity was peaked. 

Sitting on the couch staring at the box wondering what it was, where it came from and why it was there, she thought back on all she had had to do to change her life. She was thought to have suffered death in that tower of trash and had finally crashed. The writer of her tale had been a little generous in his description of her mess.  ‘And though her daddy would scream and shout’ she finally did take the garbage out. It had taken a year to clean the mess, but she had gotten it all done and had to move far away from the neighborhood. 

Lost in her mind, she was startled back to the present, by another knock. Looking around she stood to head back to the door knowing this time there would be people pushing and shoving to see if she had taken the garbage out. ‘But then, of course it was too late….’ There wasn’t a soul on the other side of the wooden door.  While she stood there looking, eyes glazed, another package appeared on the step and she swore it had moved and that sounds were coming from the first parcel. She swiveled around in time to see it burst open! Out into her living room scurried a tiny furry creature.  The poor thing seemed scared. She snagged the new box and set it near the first one. Deciding to to wait for it to also fly open, she ripped off the tape. Intros box was a little house. Reaching into the box she carefully took out the house and set it on the floor. 

Sarah thought that maybe the poor scared creature could be convinced to come out from under the couch if she opened the door. She was taken back by the detail and beauty of the tiny home. Sara crouched down to get on eye level and take a peek inside. She felt a small rush of wind and then the door slammed shut.  How would she get the creature back out?  If only she had some ‘gristly bits of beefy roast…’ that might do the trick.

Sarah sat back on her heels and once again pondered who would send her a small person and their home.  It really was a good thing she had finally agreed to ‘take the garbage out’, or she never would have had the space for this new house mate.   

By: Ryanne Leavitt

Back when Orissa was small, there were only a few things she liked to eat. One of those was peanut butter.  Oh how she liked her peanut butter.  She used to have a very peculiar way of eating as well.  She would take the spoon or fork and first put it to her forehead and then slide it down her cheek until finally it came to her awaiting open mouth!  This created quite a mess, the peanut butter, caked and dry all down her face from that circuitous food journey.  

We have some fun videos of this time in her life and i must say, sometimes I miss it.  IT was way worse when she would eat her ice cream or oatmeal in that same fashion…i mean, you can just imagine the drippy ends of ice cream cones or the gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal just hanging from her face!           

Flynn Family Story Slingers for 1 May 2022

Prompt: two lines from Shel Silverstein’s
story poem, “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out”

Take the Gold and Run by Cary Holmquist

Back in ’13—that is, 1913, not 2013, so...more than a hundred years ago—my Grandma was born in a little mining town in the mountains of central Montana. Yes! There are plenty of mountains in central Montana, so there!

As it turned out, Grandma Dora was a middle child, having two older sisters, Leona and Beanie, to boss her around and toss her around like a little rag doll. Until her baby brother was born a couple years later—and then all the girls ganged up on him.

That’s how families generally do it and that is another story.

Grandma’s parents, Louis and Sadie Laverdure, were half-breeds—that’s what they were called back then, to their face and on official records like censuses and tax rolls and election lists.

But their heritage was very mixed, thus the translated French word Métis labeled them more accurately. They came from probably at least a couple different Native American tribes along with French, Scottish, Irish and English explorers and would-be settlers who came West. When these men encountered the tribes, they swept up the women into their lives and propagated mixed-race children as they all continued to wander along across the plains and rivers, into the mountains and forests and back again. And again.

However, Grandma’s parents did not necessarily want to continue to be half-breeds. The bison herds were long gone and little else would

support the more tribal ways of life for a growing family. It was complicated and difficult, not being completely accepted by tribal people and not being accepted much at all by European white settlers. Even though notable people of the new state of Montana such as Charlie Russell and Joseph Kinsey Howard liked them and often emulated them, the Métis were people on the fringes while the world was industrializing around them.

The wandering ways of nomadic tribes were not part of the future that the Laverdure family could see and so they tried their hand at settling down as farmers near Lewistown, Montana. When that turned out to not be quite enough, Grandma’s father Louis expanded his multi- talented labor skills. Much of the time he drove freight teams of horses, hauling wagon loads of whatever was needed for the new settlements to live on and then return to the rail lines the materials that the mines and forest produced.

To be at his starting point for hauling, Grandma’s parents moved to a log cabin that Louis built on a slope of a mining camp that was growing into a town, which provided homes for workers in the gold mine in the gulch. The town went by the name of Giltedge—as in “the edge of gold”—and was a bustling place for a number of years.

All kinds of enterprising and hard-working people came and went and Giltedge was so productive that it became the turn-around-point for a stage line run by none other than Martha Jane Cannary, more famously known as Calamity Jane. On her regular route, she drove her stage horses between Giltedge, Montana, and Deadwood, South Dakota.

Meanwhile, Dora Laverdure was growing up on the dirt streets with her sisters and brother and their other little friends in the families who were living and working along in the little mountain town. Their streets ran steep to connect other streets that ran across the slope to provide

footing for the cabins and shops and horse sheds and a couple of small institutions like the school and a church. All of it was dominated by the growing mine and its sprawling machinery and toxic tailings at the ends of the bigger roads.

Did you say you have never heard of Giltedge?

Well, as the story often went in frontier Montana...sometime in the late Teens, the mine played out. That is, the veins of gold were shrinking to less and less and then nothing. The people had to look elsewhere and else-what for their income and families were leaving, going back to Lewistown and then further away.

Probably even more quickly than it grew up into a town, Giltedge was being abandoned. Dora was still a very little girl and so she probably did not realize what was going on in front of her beautiful brown eyes. What she could see happening was fewer and fewer people. And all the neighbors moved away, and none of her friends would come and play.

And so the Laverdures left as well, going back to Lewistown, to where their farmland and other half-breed relatives were still living. And so Dora and her two sisters and brother finished their growing up in Lewistown, at the foot of the mountains, not far from where they had all been born during the hey-day of Giltedge. Which now is a ghost town, with only a few ranch houses next to the ruins of former log cabins along the steep streets and remnants of broken- down mining equipment that the earth is slowly reclaiming by default.

Story Slingers

May 1, 2022

Myrna Flynn

THE BIG FROG

Amanda was sitting at her kitchen table wondering what she should do today.

"I know, I will go see Crystal and Jonah. It has been around a month since I was them. It is time to visit my daughter and grandson," she thought. "Also, it is almost lunch time." She grabbed the loaf that she has just taken from the oven, some cookies and some ice cream.

When she got there, she saw Jonah playing along the small irrigation ditch at the bottom of the lawn. She went inside, surprising Crystal, who was starting to prepare lunch.

Suddenly, the door banged open and Jonah came rushing in, shouting, "Mom, Gramma, you have got to come see the hugest frog ever, hurry!"

They ran after him to the ditch. Sure enough, there was a very big frog. "Mom, catch him. I want him." 

Crystal said, "You are a big boy, you catch him." 

Jonah replied, "No, I am afraid to pick him up."

Gramma Amanda chimed in, "Frogs don't bite, I used to catch them all the time when I was your size."

Crystal shrugged her shoulders, and got in the water, and caught the frog. They were walking along, Gramma tried to get Jonah to at least pet him.

Jonah screamed, "Rubbery, blubbery macaroni, I'm not touching that frog. He's too slimy. Greasy napkin and moldy melons dried up mustard!!!!"

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Story Slingers Prompt: use two lines from Shel Silverstein poem

4/27/22

Daren Flynn

WHAT'S IN THE BOX?

I opened my door

And there it was

A box with my name

Covered with fuzz

I opened it up

And this I found 

A little creature

Big eyed and round

So I took it out

And turned it loose

On the front porch and

Fed it some juice 

It began to grow

But got too large

And all the neighbors

Moved away

It got so big and

It reached so high

That finally it

Reached the sky

I'm really sorry

Shel Silverstein 

Please forgive me for

Using your line

But it was the prompt

I was given

And by my family

I was driven