Today’s Auto Writing Prompt: Featuring at least one example from each of the five senses, describe a small town.  It is helpful for me to force myself to do a sudden descriptive writing piece since this is the type of work I demand from my students.

The town marches straight up the hillside. Walking up Main Street from the River, you feel the weight of gravity pulling you backwards and downwards.  Perhaps it’s the weight of the town’s own defiant history, furtively harboring the desperate people who followed the River northward to freedom and burning the bridge across the River to keep the southern armies from marching on their neighbors to the east.  Brick and stone and wood–your fingers can almost trace the layers of history, read the stories of rebellion and desperation in the walls of this town.

On a clear breezy day, you will just catch the briefest whiff of the metallic tang mingled with rot (almost more a taste than a smell) that comes from the dump high on the ridge, and the town is daily filled with the rumble of trucks from many parts of Pennsylvania and her neighbors on their way to unload their burdens at the landfill.

Gratitude List:
1. The heart-filling gratitude of students.
2. Little naps
3. Nailing it, but also trying again when I don’t nail it. So, second chances.
4. Being part of a team, a net, a compassionate web–knowing that others are also looking out for the ones I feel troubled about
5. Snowy mornings.  My favorite thing, besides a little extra time in the mornings with my family, is seeing the tracks in the snow.  Cat feet. Squirrel feet. Bird feet.  Wingtips.

May we walk in Beauty!