Monday, August 24, 2009

This past weekend

Karen's family held their 2nd annual family reunion on Saturday. Most folks come from north, up around Indianapolis, but we have to drive up from Bloomington, so it's been held at a location in between.

About 25 people were there this year, ranging from Karen's 81-year old mother to a 3-month old baby...Karen's mother's greatgranddaughter in fact. Not a lot of kids but lots of kid-energy, if you know what I mean...yelling, running about, saying "NO!" a lot, whispering and giggling in the corners. I enjoyed myself and the day was splendid - not too hot, not too cold, surprising for Indiana in mid-August. It sprinkled about for 5 minutes then stopped.

When we got home, there was a card from one of the friends we'd made when we visited other friends who've retired to central Mexico. Chris & Kimberly live in San Miguel de Allende during 8 or so months of the year, and have a cabin on Olympic peninsula in Washington for the summer months. Kimber's young cousin was visiting when we were there last fall and we became fast friends: the card was from her, Hannah.

While in Mexico, we attended Kimber & Hannah's writing group. The process of this group is that one person thinks up 3 words as "prompts" for everybody to write a short story about while you're with the group. Didn't have to be that long, just had to incorporate the given three words. It's best not to overthink it, just write as the story flows out of your imagination. Sometimes the words coax the story out, sometimes you have to put some thought into it. But back to the card: I used Hannah's prior set of prompts to create a single-sentence story. In yesterday's card, Hannah gave us "lilac," "alphabet soup" and "static."

I love it when words have multiple meanings -- static, for instance, has four or five that come immediately to mind. We wrote our stories Sunday evening, and I think both our stories were good. Karen's story was so different from mine, and so funny I laughed out loud! I sent the stories off to Hannah (California) and Kimber (now in Washington) w/ their next prompts: basalt, birdhouse, ballerina. We'll see what next week brings.

Ravens speak Spanish
that far south of the border
What did you think? French?

1 comment:

  1. The three-word game sound much more fun that even the Dictionary game. Great haiku by the way.

    "The single birdhouse the ballerina made was constructed entirely of basalt."

    Bro

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