Eleven Years Later . . .

“Mom, what happened to the Twin Towers?” asked Janie at  dinner this past Sunday.

I put down my fork, thinking about how to explain, and my mother-in-law stepped in.  “They flew two airplanes into them,” she said.

“Who?”

“Terrorists,” we both answered.

“Why?”

“Because they wanted to kill as many people as possible in as big a way as possible,” I said.  “So everyone would see.”

Her eyes went wide and her brown wrinkled.  “But why would they kill all those people?”

“So that everyone would pay attention.  They blamed out country for everything that was going wrong in the world, and they wanted everyone to know.”

“That’s not . . . why didn’t they just talk to us?”

“Because they’re mean,” said my mother-in-law.  “Mean and evil.”

“But—”

“They wanted to scare us into doing what they wanted—so they would feel stronger,” I said.  “Like bullies.”

“Did it work?” she asked.

I hesitated again, but no one else spoke.

“They scared us,” I told my daughter, who was conceived in April of 2002.  “But they didn’t stop us.”

Bacon Poetry Contest Winner!!

When I was a kid, I used to go to the large pond next to our house to fish, or my version of it.  Mom would give me a hunk of bacon fat only slightly less squidgy than a worm, and I’d lock it on a large safety pin tied to a string, tie the other end of the string to a stick, and drop the bacon into the murky water.  Five minutes later, I’d feel a tug and pull up the string to find twenty or so crayfish hanging onto the bait and the string and each other for dear life.

The power of bacon, y’all.

Similarly, when I went lazy last week and dropped the idea of a bacon-themed poetry contest into a post , sixteen of you answered the call and three of you wrote more than one poem.*

That’s nineteen names crammed into the slightly squashed Pink Cowgirl Hat of Win and I couldn’t be more tickled at the turnout.

We had couplets, limericks, haiku, free verse, a tastefully lurid number, a verse that was about as free as it gets without being prose, and even one that included a pigeon and pumpkin bread.

Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun with it, and I really wish I had the funds to say, “Mugs for everybody!” but, alas, the rewards of a poetry-loving librarian, while great, are not particularly financial, so I asked Janie to fish a name from the Hat this morning.**

So, without further etcetera, the winner of the Bacon Poetry contest is:

DOWNITH

Let me know which mug you want, Downith—it doesn’t have to be bacon related—and send me your mailing address.

Thank you all for playing along!

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*No, I’m not calling you a crayfish—I’m just riffing on the Power o’ Bacon.  Promise.

**Though Sunny did it instead because it was her hat and no one has the right to pull anything out of her hat but her, and tell Janie to stop touching my hat, Mommy!  It was a loud morning, unrelieved by bacon, which might have helped, except we were already running late . . .