Announcing the May Contest Winners!

Announcing The May Essay Contest Winners!!!

The time has come to announce the winners of WordHustler’s May Essay Contest, which centered around the prompt: “What Is the Best Birthday Gift You’ve Ever Received and Why?”

It was a tough decision for the folks at WordHustler- from over hundreds of submissions, we selected three Winners and six Honorable Mentions.

Winners:

T. Katz, Canyon Country, CA

Karen Bumpus, Marshfield, MA

Orietta L’Abbate, Virgin Islands

Honorable Mentions:

Janice Moss, Albany, NY

Lea Schizas, Quebec, Canada

Donna Eggert, Tabernacle, NJ

Colleen Collins, Delray Beach, FL

Christopher Eller, Castle Rock, CO

Ruby Thomas, Gurnee, IL

If you didn’t win this time, you still have a chance to enter the Summer Poetry Contest! Look for contest rules HERE.

The three winning essays are posted below. Read on to see how these three WordHustlers shared their most memorable birthdays in an even more memorable way.

My Best Birthday
by
T. Katz

June 17th is on the horizon and that means another birthday for me which gets me to thinking about the best birthday gift I’ve ever received.  It was a waffle iron.  However, it didn’t exactly start out that way.  In fact, it led to nearly a decade of marital sniping.  But I have discovered that a waffle iron, like a fine wine, gets better with age.

I confess, I’m an annoying “landmark” birthday person.  You know, highlighting birthdays every five and ten years, then giving special attention to “Golden Birthdays” when the day, month or year numbers coincide with your age.  Irritating, I know, still it’s always meant something to me and despite floating in my orbit since 1986, my husband has remained blissfully unaware.

The day I turned 35 I was looking forward to a special morning.  Though I don’t really know why, knowing my spouse’s powers of oblivion have seemingly passed on to our two children.  Sitting down to our traditional cake breakfast (I also believe all birthdays should begin sweetly for the entire household) — I was happy to see shiny silver and lavender paper that gave the impression of something feminine and delicate hiding underneath.  It lied.  Excitedly, I tore the paper away to reveal: a waffle iron.

Don’t get me wrong, I was not totally ungrateful – we didn’t own a waffle iron and now in front of me sat an eight inch round, non-stick, easy clean grid (another lie, I found out later), compact waffle iron with a ready light.  A completely useful, efficient 24 dollar kitchen appliance reduced me to tears, as though I’d been severely poked in the nose and I fled the room.

My darling, Spock-like logical husband was baffled and remained that way for next decade, never understanding why it was always the one kitchen product that landed on the counter a bit louder than the others when I removed it from its evil perch under the knife drawer (no mistake, I assure you).  His confusion lingered, despite my many, loud and long diatribes about never giving a woman an appliance on her birthday and how it could only have been worse had it been a bathroom scale.  Repeatedly, I’ve explained it’s perfectly acceptable to give a cooking or housework gadget on just about any of the other 364 days but THAT one.  You could even wake me up in the middle of almost any night to tell me you’ve had a late-night internet compulsion to purchase the Dough-Nu-Matic that forms, fries and drains delicious mini donuts in under 60 seconds for $129.99 and I’d probably be fine with that, but not on June 17th.

Over time, the waffle iron has come to symbolize the difference between us, how we’re not wired the same and may never see eye-to-eye on many subjects but instead we compromise and move on to another day.  Making waffles now and then reminds me of that.  Just not on my birthday.

Author T. Katz, a resident of Southern California has been involved in the children’s entertainment industry since the early 80’s working on hundreds of episodes of animated television and as a music instructor to hundreds of very animated children.  She is also the honorary conductor of a four-part harmony household, consisting of her two children, her husband and Alice the cat.  The people that surround her help her to continue seeing the world with all its magic, beauty and potential.  She lives by the motto “a good book, a cup of tea and somehow all is right with the world.”

Website:  www.TKatz.com
Blog: http://tkatz.typepad.com
Book Trailer for “Miss L’eau”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coJdszEo-0o

Two of her children’s chapter books, “Miss L’eau” and “Pythagoras” are available now on Amazon.com and in select bookstores throughout the U.S. and U.K.

The Best Birthday Gift
by
Karen Bumpus

The best birthday gift of all time was unexpected, strange and reassuring all wrapped up in one mind-boggling event. In our family  six months after the “real” birthday we celebrate our “half” birthday on the same day. This event happened on my “half birthday.”

Three weeks after my birthday,  on a beautiful late spring day, my grandmother and best friend lay dying. I watched as she fought to keep her eyes open.  I cried and begged her not to go. She gently squeezed my hand and said, “I promise I’ll send you a sign.” She died a few hours later.

I spent the next days and weeks looking for a sign from her. I fantasized that she’d show up at the foot of my bed, or in my dream or a rainbow would arch over our house. Nothing. Dead is dead, or so I thought. “Come on Granny, send me a sign!” I would say to myself. Still nothing.

Then on a bitter cold, blustery November day, a freak snowstorm blew in and covered the ground in six inches of fluffy, sparkling new snow. I was trudging home in heels, totally not dressed for the unexpected storm and I was in a foul mood. Night was falling and the biting wind made my nose run. The day at work hadn’t been great and all I wanted to do was crawl into bed. I had totally forgotten that it was my half birthday.

I rounded the bend and stared at my tiny house. On the front steps were two dozen bright red roses; my favorite and they were blooming in the snow!!! Well, not really blooming, they had been left in a vase, but a drift had covered the vase and they looked like they were blooming in the snow.  “Oh my God,” I thought, “This is the SIGN.” My feet got glued to the pavement. I couldn’t move. You see, my grandmother had a favorite saying. Whenever she didn’t believe something would ever, ever happen, she’d say, “That’s as likely to happen as flowers bloomin’ in winter.” As kids we had all heard that so many times that we used to mimic Granny. “You’ll get that electric car when flowers bloom in winter!” “You’ll get an A in Calculus when flowers bloom in winter!” It was like the family joke.

I ran to the roses, knelt and smelled them. Then I hurried into the house yelling, “Flowers are growing in winter! Granny’s okay! Come look!” Everyone tumbled out of the house and dead silence reigned. I said, “Okay. Who sent them? I love you. Who sent them?” There was an awkward silence. Finally, everyone said, “I didn’t…ah sorry, just forgot it was your half birthday,” etc. etc. It turned out that no one had ordered the flowers. Somehow they landed on my doorstep by mistake. Or was it?

Karen Bumpus is a writer, a former teacher, wife, mother to five kids, artist, and a lover of the sea. She spent many years as a national writing consultant/presenter. She grew up in New England. Her novel, Silver Linings, is a romantic saga of star-crossed lovers whose eternal love proves far more powerful than the evil that tries to extinguish it. She has written a children’s book series aimed for preschoolers. It is a rhyming series that teaches how to read long vowel sounds with pictures and words. Geography of the world, endangered species and basic knowledge such as counting numbers and days of the week are also taught. She is presently seeking an agent/and or publisher to bring her books to the public. As she writes, she sits, in her cottage by the sea, writing her next novel. She believes that WordHustler will be instrumental in bringing her work to the public. For further information and to view samples of her books and paintings, go to her blog: www.karenbumpus.blogspot.com or her website: http://www.karenbumpus.com.

 Simply The Best
By
Orietta L’Abbate

The ever-present dust had settled; walking between the huts we glimpsed the sun setting over the mast of the ferry. The mast was a warped tree trunk, whose patters of blue paint peel off under the tropical sun I had admired when we arrived, while sitting on the ballast, a huge rock at the bottom of the hull.

As night fast set in, we opened the house to the evening breeze and sat on the veranda, enclosed by the typical Haitian wrought iron work. We set the fire in its corner of the floor, to grill the fish we caught a couple of hours earlier and placed the pot of rice carefully splashing it with water, a premium commodity, collected from the village fountain some few hundred metres down the road. Neither oil nor wine, of course, and my cigarettes were dwindling.

A few at a time, the children arrived like little black ghosts, climbing up the stairs, holding candles; the whites of their eyes darted above their wide smiles as if suspended mid-air. There must have been 20 of them, each carrying cutlery, and I felt sorry we just finished our dinner. Around the house there was total darkness and up there, behind the wrought iron work, with our glowing candles, we resembled a swarm of fireflies floating in the middle of the night, in the middle of the island, above the waters.

The silence of the island intimated that it was time to sleep, but no one was leaving. We had no music, as power was cut off in 1988 in La Gonave, or it came at the price of imported diesel; we chitchatted amid children’s soft laughs playing in the dark corners, while other little glowing shadows appeared and disappeared into and fro the circles of light.

It was 10:00 pm when the women arrived, almost in a queue, the first one holding a plate with a cake. They had to hire the local baker’s oven, and bake it after his day’s work at a cost, I feared, of at least a day’s pay.

The children’s joy was palpable when they tasted a cake for perhaps their first time, as flour is prohibitively expensive, if it ever is available in the village. After the last crumb and as suddenly as they arrived, the children- and their cutlery- swiftly disappeared.

We went to the local, open-air disco at the end of the village where, under the tree branches, the many hanging candles created a maze of shadows amongst which black silhouettes swayed and hustled, suggestively dancing at the rhythm of tin-can music. It was a thick human wave whose serene ingenuity was physically perceivable.

Like shadows in the night, we glided back home: in this utmost poverty and happiness, the sky above was laden with stars and, as we whispered on the veranda among sleeping bodies, the darkness around us filled with the chants of those walking along the dirt track to board the ferry before down.