Taking a Detour

I’ve decided to do something different this week.  As I foolishly announced when I first began this blog last December, I am writing a novel.  Well, was writing a novel.  Between one thing and another, the manuscript has been untouched since last fall, and I’m trying a few things to find my courage and get started again.

This week I began a six week online course (a MOOC actually) entitled How Writers Write Fiction 2015, offered by the University of Iowa Writing Project.

Today’s post is my response to our first writing prompt.  I hope you enjoy it; I’d love to read your comments on what works and what doesn’t.  I’ll post my responses to the second and third prompts, both related to this one, later in the week.

Prompt: Find an ordinary object in your home that you like looking at. This could be a sugar bowl, a crooked lampshade, a spoon with a bent handle, a tiled coffee table with a matador theme, a remote control … the choice is yours, but choose something that stirs your wonder. Write a description that brings it to life: show it to us as if it were the main character in a new story.

The Owl on the Mantel

The owl perches on the end of the oak mantelpiece, wide eyes facing front. No more than three inches tall, it patiently monitors my activity, and inactivity, on the sofa across the room. I sit on this sofa way too much. Years of morning coffees have stained the wide armrest; the center cushion permanently tips downward to accommodate my broad rear end. When the sofa was new I would curl up with a blanket, legs under me, to watch the evening news. Arthritic joints prevent that posture now, but the blanket, hand-woven in Ireland and evoking memories of a long ago journey, is still nearby, draped loosely over the back of the center cushion.

I have no idea where the owl came from. When I retired from teaching, it was one of the objects on a shelf in my office; I dropped it into a box, and eventually noticed it sitting on the fireplace mantel in my new home, staring at me from its lofty perch.  It is a niggling reminder that I am frittering away my time, watching the Today show in the morning, British mysteries at night, talking on the phone to my children, reading to my granddaughter, paying bills. But definitely and definitively, NOT WRITING.

I also don’t remember putting it on the mantel. My four adult children each had a hand in unpacking my boxes, helping to frame the environment in which I would spend my latter days. It might have been Deborah, whose own mantel is starting to collect strange objects as she and her husband travel the world. Or it could have been John, who like me appreciates handmade objects. I think the owl is hand made. It appears to be carved from soapstone or something of a similar nature; it’s black, with tooled white markings — those eyes, piercing black pupils surrounded by white circles; the pointed beak above a ring encircling what I suppose to be its neck. There is a suggestion of wings along its sides, and spiky feet poking out from under another band of white at the base of its body.

It is an inartistic carving, not something one would bring home from an Alaskan cruise for example. It’s actually rather crude.  But my granddaughter loves it.  Sometimes she asks me to get it down for her, and she incorporates it into whatever game of make believe she has going at the time. A stuffed cheetah may be stalking it from behind the rocking chair, or she may assign it the role of babysitter to the five tiny penguins we brought back from the Denver Botanical Gardens. The steadfast plump owl makes no complaint.  When the game is over, Stella respectfully returns it to me and reminds me to “put the owl back where it belongs, Grandma, so it can watch us.”

Watch us? Oh no – it only watches me.  And it does so all day long.  I wonder what it would think – and do — if I actually began to write?

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