Forty years of 35mm slides. Fifty boxes. Five thousand slides. My task is to scan them into digital images. I have forgotten so many events and occasions that some slides seem unfamiliar, but there I am in the picture so it happened.

We are in the patio at my parents’ house. No particular occasion, just Mom, Dad, my husband and I, and the kids. Probably a Sunday afternoon. The note on the box says summer 1968. Dad is spraying the kids with a hose in one slide. In another Joe is smoking a cigar and reading. In another, Mom and I are sitting at a table snipping green beans.

the fleetness of years 

slipping by unheeded 
until they are long past 

why did I not take note, 
pause a bit longer 
and savor the sweetness? 

Over the next few months, my life is on rewind.

memories 

special days and ordinary days 
produce a smile or tears 

time travelers 
H.G. Wells, Marty McFly 
and I 

—Short-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

Adelaide B. Shaw

lives in Somers, New York. She has been creating in Japanese poetic forms—haiku, haibun, tanka, tanka prose, and haiga—for more than 50 years. Her book of haiku An Unknown Road (Modern English Tanka Press, 2008) won third place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for 2009. Her other books include these published by Cyberwit: Ancient History: haibun and tanka prose (2023); Choices: a collection of stories (2021); Travel Souvenirs: haiku from near and far (2020); and The Distance I’ve Come: my haiku journey (2019).

Adelaide’s poetic works have been published widely in journals and magazines, including Acorn, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Haibun Today, Haiga Online, KYSO Flash, The Loch Raven Review, Modern Haiku, Presence, Red Lights, tinywords, Triveni Haikai India, Under the Bashō, World Haiku Review, and elsewhere; as well as in The Living Haiku Anthology and in several annual editions of The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku.

Adelaide also writes fiction, and her stories have appeared in American Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, Bartleby Snopes, Bewildering Stories, Byline, The Green Silk Journal, The Loch Raven Review, MacGuffin, and SNReview, among others.

Some of her published poems and haiga are posted on her blog:
White Petals

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1847, ekphrastic haiku sequence in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016)