IT

As I grow older, really older, I find my mind doesn't  want to be my friend.  IT loves to wander.  IT sees no reason to remember where I put the scissors.  IT doesn't think it unreasonable to look blankly into the pantry wondering what I was looking for.  I want to disown IT.  I will swear IT doesn't belong to me when and if I remember.  

But in IT's devilishness I can remember the time sixty years ago in high school when with my first boyfriend,  we drove his jeep up and down shallow creeks splashing water and bumping back and forth against rocks.  I can even remember his name.  How profound has that been in my lifetime? Doesn't match not being able to find my scissors.  I chastise my mind. I must have a heart-to-heart talk with IT.

As a writer, I challenge myself to look each day for something unusual, out of place, or just different.  Today I saw a neighborhood man on a steep -pitched roof, two stories up, with a kitchen broom furiously sweeping stuck-on leaves to the ground (just as if he were sweeping a kitchen floor.) The slope pitch was almost ninety degrees. He wasn't holding on to anything but the broom. It was probably only his faith in a higher being that kept him from falling to his doom. IT easily saw his logic. Foolhearty?  No. Leaves.  Broom. Yes.

To find a useful  purpose for this amazing fete, all I have to do now is to develop somewhere in my story an old ancestral grandma character and put her on a steep roof with a broom, and describe her struggle to sweep the leaves strewn from an overhanging oak tree. Maybe in the background  an old bone dog barks and chickens scratch near the rustic old door held shut with a worn leather-strap latch.  Of course the broom is wheat straw tied to a nubby stick. A fierce gale from the north tumbles her ruffled dust cap to the roof's edge. The suspense grows. I catch my breath fearing her peril.  She reaches.  She loses her footing. The bent figure is sure to fall but for the strings on her apron catching in the nick of time a protruding rock from a crumbling, smoky chimney.  Suddenly, there is a sound of strings tearing.

The chapter ends.

Get the picture?  If so, beware of your IT.  You are a writer!