By: Marlene Oxender
If you were given the assignment of writing a fiction story with the opening line: “He thought he was alone in the house,” where would you go with the story?
Think about it for a moment: A guy believes he is alone in the house. Something is going to happen. You are the author.
You decide where the story goes from there. It could be a comedy. Or a mystery. It could be a short story or the beginning of a novel.
Fiction writers often say their characters start doing things they didn’t plan for them to do. That’s because they’re developing the story by being still. By thinking. By letting their imagination take off.
Years ago, a friend gave me a copy of a poetry book she’d written. I didn’t know I liked poetry until I read a few pages. Funny how an author takes words, lines them up in a particular way, and the reader sees the world with a slant they’d never seen before.
I wrote my first poem, “A Baby Toes Prayer,” after finding a black-and-white photo in my parents’ estate. It was a photo of my dad, my brother Don, and me, taken in the summer of 1963 when I was a baby.
Dad was on the living room floor playing with us, and my baby toes were in Don’s face. Thankfully someone grabbed the camera, and sixty years later, I am the baby girl who’d grown up and found the photo in a cardboard box. It was a photo I’d never seen before.
Back when I was employed as a hospice nurse, I spent time with those who knew that heaven was just around the corner. It’s a time in our life when we naturally have mixed feelings about being on the home stretch.
Although most of us look back at days gone by and think we’d do things differently, we probably would not. We were just living. We were just being.
We had hobbies and interests, so we bought and collected worldly goods. In the end, the items we collected are simply part of our story.
When we are children, it’s easy to see earth as a place to explore. A place where our imaginations take off. A place where we watch the sun rise and know it’ll take most of the day to get its work done – warming things up and changing the brilliance of the landscape. Making things grow and thrive. Deepening the color of our skin. Lifting our mood.
And the moon, the way it lights up the nighttime skies. Not only here – but there. We may think the moon and the stars were placed in the sky just for us, and they were. But do we know what they’re up to? There’s no doubt the stars are twinkling, but how do they do it?
We honor life by slowing down. By noticing things that have been here all along. By finding joy in the way a flower moves when a butterfly lands on it.
By listening to the birds who seemingly take requests. By humming a favorite tune, simply because humming really does make us feel better.
Life is always prompting us with beautiful things to notice and write about. In all genres. And we need not wait for life to send us an invitation to start living. We’re already invited, and everyone’s invitation reads the same: The date is “Today.” The place is “Here.” And the time is “Now.”
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Marlene Oxender is a writer, speaker, and author. She writes about growing up in the small town of Edgerton, her ten siblings, the memorabilia in her parents’ estate, and her late younger brother, Stevie Kimpel, who was born with Down syndrome. Her three published books, Picket Fences, Stevie, and “Grandma, You Already Am Old!” are available on Amazon. Marlene can be reached at mpoxender@gmail.com