CarmenJimersonCross
Bio
proper name? CarmenJimersonCross-Safieddine SHARING LIFE LIVED, things seen, lessons learned, and spreading peace where I can.
Read, like, and subscribe! Maybe toss a dollar tip into my "hat." Thanks! Carmen (still telling stories!)
Stories (113)
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from within us
THE CABIN IN THE WOODS had been abandoned for years, but one night a candle burned in the window. As I gazed through the thickness of leaves of trees over one hundred feet away on our own small wooded property, I realized that no one had been seen approaching the cabin on our webcams set around the five hundred foot perimeter of our campsite. The cabin was included in our "safe zone" because no one had been there, we would not be victims of what it held inside. But there it was... the candle, bright as day in the waning light of what remained of sunlight. The candle glimmered and cast shadows onto the outer wall of the cabin.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Fiction
ENTERING ROBOTICS
IT IS SUMMER. School is out again, and at least one grandchild is at my house. COVID has tired itself out and we are no longer locked in or locked down. The child we had so much success (?) with three years ago under mandatory pressure is that much older and a different beast. Thinking harder and more elevated for their sake, a grandparent has to accommodate the scene. Outside of ROBLOX and MINECRAFTING entertainment could easily fall to a fail. ENTER ROBOTICS.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Education
HOLDING ON
THE PAST THREE YEARS WERE TIGHT and by that. I mean heavy as the world on the back of Atlas. I toted it all in spite of my own stressors and I sound like a braggart, but it's truly steam I'm blowing off. My brother died in 2013... a marine (Semper fi). After getting thru a bout with cancer and a string of other ailments prone to men with our mother toting him twice a week to one of the larger Veterans Hospitals over sixty miles from her home AFTER his common-law wife of over ten years put him down. She would not care for him in his downtime. When mom nearly put the two of them in head-on collisions trying to enter the tollway ramp near home, I had them move downstate to live with me. They did, and for three years they enjoyed the peace and calm existence. It was as if no one had ever suffered an ailment... except for his twice-a-week doctor appointments only fifteen minutes away.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Psyche
BUT PEOPLE DIE IN HOSPITALS
AS THE CAR PULLED UP to the front of ALLEN PARK VETERANS HOSPITAL I squinted to see what and where I was going. I was supposed to walk in through the front doors somewhere amidst the blur of colors I could see in the distance. Dad's voice mumbled instructions as to where he was going to be... I think.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Confessions
THE BEST GIFT
FATHER's DAY WAS THE BIGGEST HAUNT in and around our post-Vietnam and Philippine War-era household. Men had not yet returned from overseas military assignments to which they were drafted... forced to leave home and family, to defend oppressed populations somewhere on another side of the world. Some were held in P.O.W. Camps of Cambodia. Rambo and Swartzenegger were not coming to their rescue on or off film. Some were more distanced from their family's mental stress for worries at home and in-home in the absence of "dad" where mom had to struggle alone or under the glaring of taunting eyes and smirks because "mom ain't got her man or a man," and children waiting for an explanation of whether they had a father or not. Those who were not yet born when he left under orders of the government, could never claim to know who a father was. While family wrestled at home with whichever oppression befell them, "Dad" wrestled with the likes of Agent Orange and land mines. After the Korean War concluded some were further directed to the Philipines where so many endured the Death march... never making it back home until the happenstance of that nation relented and the fathers of America were let to come back home to what was left of family... if he survived.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Serve
DRAGONS OF PAUL HILL
LIKE BIG BROTHER, the dragon's eye was ever watching from its undisclosed settling someplace in the Vulcan Mine along RED MOUNTAIN. It could see from beneath the stratified rock of kidney red hematite which literally passed as the hide from a reptilian carcass found many generations ago by children playing in the new mining settlement. The dragon's eye could see well beyond the clays beneath the Wenonah Schools, a company-owned school series for local children of miners living within company-owned mining towns established by the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) of 1917... but there weren't always dragons in the Valley. The dragons came because of the digging. Digging in the mines for so long and so deep in a widespread area that had not been cleansed of bones from eras long ago. The mines reached as deep as the Jurassic Era layers and pulled from Carboniferous Era tiles worked for decades of opening layer after layer, wall after connecting wall underground, some connecting into long closed mines. The Wenonah School, nearly complete as early as 1943, was destroyed by a fire caused by a lightning bolt in 1946. The Tennessee Coal & Iron (TCI) Company donated a parcel of land consisting of approximately 16 acres (6.5 ha) to be used for new elementary and high schools. Construction began but was not completed within its schedule due to vibrant antagonism from surrounding populations and accomplished work was repeatedly demolished. Because it had such drawn-out and lengthy channels to bypass before classes could be held within a building, alternate plans began in the fall of 1946. Students were sent to attend classes within the distant town of Galilee, Bryant Chapel, and Mt. Olive Baptist Church. They were grudgingly accommodated among populations of Riley and Powderly Schools for which materials were provided by TCI for heat and lights and construction projects. A new Wenonah Elementary School and Wenonah High School were built and completed on land donated by TCI by 1947. With persistence and determination, the education program took hold and students could attend their designated campus. In spite of the good it was doing in regard to educating the children of its workers, The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI) was and had been one of the largest users of prison laborers, mostly Blacks convicted of petty crimes... a petty crime being a classification of crime that falls mostly in the category of violations and infractions. They were put to work for whatever duration in the coke furnaces for smelting or the mines for digging red ore, coal, and limestone. This, as penalization for their convictions of petty crime.. traffic offenses, disorderly conduct, and shoplifting. Petty means of little consequence or importance; as a method for paying fines... "for their sins." Petty as it was, it was their evil met with evil done them in trade. Drawn from therein was the source for mining labor in Alabama at the close of the Reconstruction Era after the America's CIVIL WAR. The number of convicts employed increased after 1907... after the end of slavery, as did the brutality of the conditions in which these mining workers labored. In 1908, almost 60 "prison" workers died from workplace-related accidents. It was as though it were simply created as a prison and not a corporate entity at all. Prisons provoke unrecounted evil built upon evil.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Fiction
FASHIONABLE
AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE you could do it. Trusting others more than those coming up under your rule and the rule established before you, the grandparents of all American church guidance. Yet, there you sit wrapped in awe and summation of the total reunion attendees' disbelief.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Confessions
HOMESCHOOLING
Going further than homeschooling to venture into starting one's own elementary or latter year private school is a romantic thought, but oh so daunting for the mountain of work it requires. To make that homeschooling idea into something forged to gain an income by including children of others is creating that so often mentioned mountain out of a molehill.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Education
IN COMPASS
THE ODD END OF THE PARK WAS WOODED AND CROSSED BY A RIVULET which stemmed from the duck pond and lagoon. Once entering across a short arched wooden bridge it became wilderness. Wilderness is much of any overgrown space outside of a child's back yard away from home and familiar settings. Luckily, we had our compass!
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Education
UNCLE TOM's CABIN
WHILE HOMESCHOOLING DURING COVID the project of history lessons, reading and learning from stories read to him. It was an attempt at helping him adjust to being among other people in school and otherwise social structure in public spaces. For my grandson who has always lived in a one-child household, it was made to be his biggest challenge. We called it "comprehension." His storybook focus was derived from the likes of AESOP'S FABLES, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, BOYS IN THE GRAVEYARD (from the local library), and several other stories relaying social ethics and social relationships with people outside of the immediate family. His list was to include TOM SAWYER, but the antics heard in the other tales had me cut the project short. The question of where Tom's cabin was and "could we go there" caused a snag in the literary portion of the education program. For a second grade elementary literary English and social studies package, visitation to such properties as would be managed by one such as Uncle Tom was an undying question and an undying quest for "how to." I looked up the project house to discover he was very well endowed with property. There are actually several mentions of the location of an Uncle Tom's Cabin.
By CarmenJimersonCross4 years ago in Families
