Dad or Father? Some say there is a difference… and there is. I had a father by accident, then a few years later I ended up with a Dad by luck. But you can’t always blame the Father for how they are. Doing ancestry research, over the past however long I’ve been doing it, I’ve seen patterns along that paternal side. I think as the years pass, as the generations pass, we’ll have more Dads. There was a time when men who became fathers didn’t always have good examples to go by, sometimes by circumstances. My, what I call, donor was born back in the 1930s… my mother wasn’t, she came along a decade or two later. His parents were farmers during the depression and basically all their time was spent surviving, and before that their parents were doing the same after the Civil War. They had a lot of kids to do a lot of work, and let’s be real… there wasn’t exactly TV back then to pass the time. They had to do something for entertainment. I feel sorry for the women of those days. It seems as though that’s all they were for… a baby at least every other year.

My Dad grew up on a farm during the same time, but he was fortunate that his grandparents at the time were at an age they could focus on nurturing their grandchildren rather than working quite as hard to survive.

Most people, when they would see us together, would think my Dad and I were biological. When had the same speech patterns, same mannerisms, and things like that. Nurture of nature is a thing, if it begins early enough.

So did you have a Dad or a Father? And did it matter which one you had in the end?

OVI POETRY

Ovi is a syllabic/metre poetry form. In this case, Ovi is from India, originating in the Marathi language. The Ovi  has been in use in written form since the 13th Century, but the women’s ovee/ovi predates the literary form by at least the 12th Century.

The Ovi are in general, lyrical folk songs expressing love, social irony, and heroic events. They are written in the following scheme.

4 line stanzas, as few as one stanza and up to as many as you like.

8 syllables or less per line

Rhyming is AAAb. The second stanza would be CCCd. The third, EEEf. And so on. Meaning nothing in one stanza must rhyme with anything in the previous stanza. The fourth line does not rhyme.

Example:

Roly Poly by Judi Van Gorder

The big toothed tot with golden hair
picked up a bug on Sister’s dare,
it rolled into a ball right there
and won her springtime heart.

Notice the rhyming pattern is AAAb or
A
A
A
b

My Attempt

Blue flowers continue to grow,
with the shadow’s making them glow,
giving life to darkness and woe,
dying each year to yet return.