It’s all about the troll who lives under the bridge; the girl without a father; the boy with a third eye hidden in his forehead, a radiant liquid gem, the color of rubies.
It’s about the black bear by the bloodroot on Sunday: the moment of revelation in the rainy garden, right next to the sagging tomato cage and just behind the single aisle of shaggy sunflowers.
It’s about wanting something you can’t have, and about wanting nothing much at all.
It’s about the secret recipe for catfish chowder that came out of that August day on the hidden lake, two generations ago, when the big whiskered fish gave himself up and throngs of hungry people ate for days.
It is, in fact, about being fed, and about feeding the hungry.
It’s about the dispensation of clues without coercion, the unspoken urgency in how things might have been but never were.
It’s about getting off the country road and pulling in behind that old sedan with blue steam rising from its continent of hood, and then about what happens next: kindness, conversation, redemption, a shift : a chance to tell a different story, later, this time.
--©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved
This is a version of something I wrote in 2007 when I was in graduate school and planning a research project on the importance of narrative writing in the middle school curriculum. I am far from satisfied with it, but I think it contains a seed or two I may be able to use.
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