A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words

Yes, I know, it's a overused phrase, but I'm using it in a different way. What I mean by that is. Instead of saying something like "when you look at this photo it brings back so many memories, ones that took place before it, ones that took place during it, and those after it. That's definitely a thousand words isn't it? Whether it's a picture with your Grandparent's taken exactly two months before they passed, the quirky snapshot of you with your boyfriend smiling next to his car that he crashed a week later and totaled...or that old, grainy black and white photograph of your Great-Grandparent's house perched upon the flat countryside of the Plains. You'd never been there, but had seen many pictures of it and a myriad of stories woven with mystery, love and nostalgia. With that said it would seem that each picture is worth a million words! Or perhaps an infinite amount. In any case, I believe none of us can look at family photos, present and past, and not feel something, whether it be good or bad.

There's another side to photographs, as well as paintings. The reason I bring up paintings is in lieu of my latest assignment for my online Creative Writing class. The assignment was to find a painting and write a short prose piece about it, or in other words, create a short-short story behind the painting. Prose is the ordinary language people use in speaking or writing. But before I get into that, let me for a moment talk about the relationship between photographs and my own writing.

Whenever I write a short story or novel you can bet that it's origins originated from a photograph. Which is most often a house! Take a current novel I started roughly last summer called Ties That Bind. It's a supernatural-based mystery that I based off of a picture of a c.1899 Victorian Second Empire cottage I found on oldhouses.com. Now with any Second Empire home, in my opinion at least, they give off that haunted house aura. Perhaps it's the curvaceous mansard roof, the elegant gingerbread molding or the mere fact that they stand out from the myriads of look-alike houses. Whatever the reason, upon the seeing the photograph of the house, with its own mansard roof and dark and light green paint job, my mind started concocting a story behind its historic walls. The story ended up being about a girl around my age who looses both of her parents in a horrific accident, only to be beckoned to her old Great Aunt's bed side where she unknowingly encounters the supernatural and is given a cryptic skeleton key and an even more portending warning from her Aunt's dying lips.

Agnes Blackwell, or Aggie, the story's main character, leaves her parent's modest bungalow in the quiet cul-de-sac she called home and arrived on the doorstep of the abandoned Victorian cottage where the threads of her past all come together to weave a web of deceit, lies, horrors, undiscovered sins...and at the heart of it...a century's old curse who has haunted every female member of Aggie's family since her 5th Great Aunt, Virginia Blackwell, started it all in that unassuming, dilapidated cottage. The curse began there, and it will end there...with Aggie. Can she break the curse and save future female Blackwell descendants? Or will she become another victim and bring everything full circle? Forever expunging the Blackwell name?

I'll admit, although that particular short story that I started was largely inspired by the c.1899 Victorian cottage on oldhouses.com it was also inspired by my favorite TV show, Supernatural.

As another example, take my current project, a short story series called Wide Open Spaces. In which five friends live in a fictional rural small town called Templeton located in Oklahoma's panhandle. The town is stricken by severe weather, mainly tornadoes, and the five friends have to learn to live in harmony with them. The town has never been industrialized. They are at the heart of Americana, clinging to a quickly expiring way of life. If you want a clearer picture of just what kind of life I tried to portray for them look up a song by Mary Chapin-Carpenter entitled I Am A Town. It perfectly captures the essence of Templeton, and that of the five main characters. The inspirations behind this particular story? For once, it's not a house I found on oldhouses.com but rather a fictional bungalow! Granted, yes, the bungalow closely resembles one of my favorite homes to ride my bike past in Sheboygan, but for the most part it came from my own imagination. Whenever I talk about houses they always take on human qualities, or what's known as personification. There's something about them that causes me to habitually put them at the center of my stories. Or it could just simply be my obsession with them!

As always, I digress, but as I've said many times before, even though I sometimes veer far from the tracks which I first set out on with each blog post, somehow the path I end up and the beginning path are linked. Whether that link be inconspicuous or obvious is up for discussion.

With that said I can return to my latest assignment for my online Creative Writing assignment. Just as I showed you I can create in-depth stories behind a single photograph of a historic house, so was I asked by my Professor to write a prose piece about a single painting we found online or in life. While first meeting the project with trepidation, thinking to myself...how am I going to do this? How will I create a believable story behind a singular painting? Most of all what I found most intimidating was the fact that I had to write in third person. Naturally - and as perhaps a direct consequence of reading so many books written in first person growing - I've always written my short stories in first person. For me, it seems the most natural and the best way to convey my "writer's voice" onto the paper.

Albeit, once I finished the assignment I realized my trepidations were ill-placed. I had no problem writing in third person, and in fact found it a refreshing change. Also, writing the prose piece wasn't hard either. It was basically like writing a condensed story which led up to the point of the painting. For my prose piece I chose a Norman Rockwell painting entitled Family Grace. I've always been intrigued by Rockwell's paintings, they portray such simple moments in life that appear to be amplified snapshots of Americana and favorite past times when captured by his brush and deft hand. Below I've posted my prose piece, which carries the same title as the Rockwell painting. I'll see if I can post the painting as well, so you can get a better picture of where my story is coming from.

I've enjoyed posting my writing for you all to read, and look forward to the comments you may post. My Creative Writing class has been one of the best college classes I've taken so far!

Family Grace

The look on their faces belied their words; didn’t they know he wasn’t a little boy anymore? “Thomas,” they had said, with voices overly cheerful, stretched like thread barren clothes on the line, “Daddy and I are going to take you to your Grandparents. Would you like that?”

On ordinary days, yes he would have, but not now, not when the sky is blotted out, or when pale, relentlessly moving drifts of sand roll across the land like prehistoric creatures. Through cracks in his shuttered window Thomas saw old Model A’s abandoned in those haunting drifts, some swallowed whole; while others were stripped clean by thieves.

Grabbing his hand, his mother tugged him along anxiously. They yearned to escape this place, he could feel it in their touch, in their words, even on their lips as they kiss him goodbye on his Grandparent’s doorstep. With what child-like youth that still clung to his bony frame he held his mother’s hand a moment longer, relishing the feeling of her smooth skin against his. Her green eyes lifted to his, cast in shadow beneath the tattered rim of her straw hat.

“Thomas,” she whispered, her voice reaching out to him like the sand-choked wind scrapping against the wooden clapboards of his house, stripping it of paint, trying to get inside. “You know Daddy and I have to look for work. We agreed a long time ago, before any of this began.” She flung a gloved hand behind her, as if to encompass the ubiquitous storm layered upon the Great Plains. “That we wouldn’t take you with us; it’s no life for a little boy. Shhh,” she whispered when Thomas opened his mouth to object, pressing a finger to his lips.

“You’ll have a good life here. I know I did when I was growing up.” His mother attempted a laugh but it tumbled from her lips like a hurricane lamp pushed to the ground by a gust of wind. Thomas feared his mother would dissolve into broken shards right there on the doorstep so he wrapped his arms around her, trying to ignore her trembling shoulders.

“Be good now.” Each word tickled his ear, but stung his heart like the particles of sand whipping against his face. “We’ll return for you, I promise, all of you.” With a rustle of muslin skirts and short sobs she was gone, pretending to fumble through her purse as the Model A drove out of sight, Thomas’ father at the wheel.

A gruff voice welcomed Thomas into the Colonial style home. The Palpable scents of dinner drifted to him from the kitchen, which was tucked into a nook at the back of the house. A rough hand fell on his shoulder, hardened by years of farming and working the land. Now the land is rebelling, Thomas thought. How ironic.

“We’ll wait in the keeping room for dinner,” his Grandfather said, steering Thomas into the small area off the vestibule. Crackling flames lit the fireplace, their heat reaching out, beckoning him to an antique Windsor chair near the hearth. According to the myriad tales his grandfather told about his beloved home, the keeping room was originally used as the main heat source since it was located directly off of the kitchen. Nowadays his grandparent’s used it as a parlor of sorts, a place to seek respite from the day’s grinding pace.

Everything about this house is comforting, Thomas marveled. His Grandfather sat down beside him on a pockmarked settee. As if all the years his Grandparent’s had lived in it the house had emulated their personality, or became a living thing.

Living, the singular word halted his thoughts. Just moments before his parents had been alive and well. What if they became another statistic, another victim of the pale, towering clouds that rose on the horizon to bury entire cities?

He was too young to be contemplating such things, his mother had chided him many times, but what was he to do? Even in the shelter of this house, in the protection of his grandparents, he could not escape from the tumultuous wrath of the dust storms. It was inside him, as if he had swallowed a handful of that dust.

The muted clank of dishes drew him outside his head. In the large chair he turned, looking up at his grandfather’s weathered face. “Time to eat son,” he announced, turning slowly towards the kitchen.

Ladderback chairs scraped, three pairs of hands folded in tandem. His Grandparent’s exchanged soft smiles. Their eyes sparkled, as if indistinguishable candles flickered within them. They had always lived simply, working and living off the land. It hadn’t given them much, and now seemed intent on taking it all away.

Still they prayed, to a God they loved dearly, and knew wouldn’t betray them. Grandfather’s rough voice spoke slowly as he prayed, as if walking a familiar path.
Thomas thanked God for this moment.