Response: September

I'm interested in seeing what makes this story a personal narrative, about what this means to her. It's clear that she's drawing some connection with the small animal and herself and her own experiences, but it's left open and ambiguous. Perhaps the purpose of that is so that we can relate it to ourselves and feel a sense of connection with her, because we feel like we understand what she was going through, when in reality, we don't know.

To me, it speaks to a sort of sadness, to a willingness to be that cat and just sink back into the earth so that we don't have to feel anymore. It's quite a bit of emotion packed into just one paragraph, into a lot of what seems to be non-emotional sentences like "I learned it takes only days for a small animal's body to decompose at this time of year..." which is very try. It just states the facts. But when you put it together, there is a lot of imagery there, "To press its outline back into the soft earth..." and it is full of double meaning and hidden motives.

Gidget

When we first got my dog, my brother and I were terrified of her. There is no mistaking now that she is anything but vicious, her paws aching with arthritis and sores, and she spends most of her time lying in her dog bed and being picked on my the bigger, younger dogs of the house. She's just a small, plump, old pug, but when she was a puppy, she had boundless energy.

She would chase us up the stairs of the condo, leaping with her little legs over the gaps in the stairs. That was something else we were afraid of: those gaps. We thought we'd fall through and die, that Gidget would slip through and her teeny legs would snap in two. Because we were children, these were just the kinds of things that we spent our time worrying about. It wasn't as though we knew any better. We thought that was all there was to fear; nothing scarier than that played a role in our lives.

We feared puppy bites at our ankles instead of starving to death, something that our own relatives had dealt with. We feared unrealistic plunges into the basement, but we didn't think about being kidnapped, because we were optimistic and young.

Eventually, that real fear grew into a game of fear, a joke because how could we have been afraid of something so small and harmless? We started pretending to be afraid of her, but it wasn't real anymore. We would dangle our feet between the gaps in the stairs, pretending that it made us brave when we knew that it didn't. And my puppy grew older and fatter with time, two surgeries, and a broken leg. We looked back at her and thought of how silly we were to be worried about her jaws when there was so much more out there to be afraid of.

Response: Those Who Stay and Those Who Go

Something that happens in this particular piece is that the writer, Ann Daum, uses a certain, more clipped, blunt sentence structure. The effect that this has is that it lends itself to a more 'matter of fact' tone. She is, in fact, just stating what happens, and then elaborating very little on that. "Joy comes in small, daily pleasures. The incredible colors of the sunset here. Watching your son win a buckle at a 4-H rodeo. Neighbors helping your husband harvest wheat when he's laid up for a week with kidney stones. I could go on." She's explaining things in a very short tone, but rather than it seem emotionless or dull, it just comes off as run-down, like bleak acceptance of the fact that this is how life goes here. She still gets the idea across: this is the way of life, and it's either this way, or not at all (not at all being not the option that you die, but rather the option that you leave because you can't live there if you're going to live a different way from the rest of them.)
It works for when she continues to say that she doesn't fit into this dichotomy. She's in between, as she says, and the beginning helps set up the tone so that you know what that means for her, that you get the feeling about how it works out, or how the people of her community view her. That is also when the structure of the sentences changes; they flow better and it reads in a stark contrast to what she was writing before. In short, she accomplishes making you feel that same outsider's status that she did, and that's effective.

I Remember

(I kinda wrote a scene, but here it is anyway.)

I remember the burnt down farmhouse in the field behind my mother's house that my brother and I would climb out to. It's captivating, and it's crumbling. All of its majesty is in the past, in its broken, brown bricks and in the root memory of plants growing between the cracks. The wind hits often when we wander out, casting a howling in our ears and the strong scent of burning in our noses, so fresh it's ad if it's happening now. The floor is now all grass and weeds, littered with bones--from what, we don't know. They just are. Pieces break and crumble in our hands like sand between our fingers, plants bend and break and crack beneath our heels. Sometimes, if the wind hits just right, we get a bit of grainy brick dust in our mouths, and it tastes like something old that we don't understand. Perhaps we're drawn to it, my brother and I, because it's like us; all that force trying to knock it down and it still has one wall standing. No one bothers to ask how it got that way, and no one cares, because we can make up our own past if we want to.

Scene Add-On: Casper

"In the winter, my mom's van (named Casper for its coloring) made the loudest noises that it ever did. It stuttered and whined and echoed around the garage before it was too filled with clutter to fit the vehicle. I don't think that we ever really liked that thing; my mom regretted needing a mini-van, and it filled the garage and entryway of the house with the terrible smell of rotten eggs. But it was the way that I got to school and from my father's house in the afternoon after I walked home.

That van was always a mess, but in the wintertime it was even worse. The cold air of Ohio made the metal creak and groan even when it was completely safe, and my stepfather worked on it at least once every two months, or so it seems in retrospect. I liked to close my eyes and listen to it when I was having a particularly fantastical day. I daydreamed a lot, got called the weird one in the family, but I liked to get lost in my mind.

My mind could turn the engine noises and hissing exhaust pipe into something different if I just subjected myself to the back of my eyelids. I pretended that I was somewhere else to escape where I really was. As long as I couldn't see the dank garage and dirty silver paint of the van, I could be anywhere, from a spaceship to a rickety, old boat. I made up elaborate situations to go along with these sounds, to supplement this fictional reality that I had created.

But then I would always hear the sound of my mother beckoning me into the house and I would leave that world behind."

 It was often that imagination that saved me, in the end, from some of the horrors I would rather not have faced. Everyone has a sob story; I am no different. I don't really think that anyone wanted to focus on their family's shortcomings. Mine was simply this: my two younger half sisters were loved more than my brother and I were. I know that was how our stepfather felt, and it was how our mother acted.  It was just something that we learned to live with.

Even though she probably loved us all the same, I think that the reminder of who we were and the past mistakes that we'd come from were often too much for her. I stayed out of her way; I took to my room, to my journals, to my solitude of the mind, where I could just relax and let be. It was so much easier to focus on someone else's problems, particularly if they were fictional and I knew that they would win in the end.

It can be funny, though, the want to reflect only on our best moments, but finding ourselves drawn only towards the worst. Pain can plague you, twist the figments of your imagination into twisted caricatures of themselves.

And those worst moments aren't always as bad as they'd seemed. I had it better than some people; we actually had a vehicle, even if it was clunky and obnoxious. But pain doesn't work relatively, does it? There's no way to compare it like a sandwich at elementary lunch, no way or exchanging your problem's for someone else's.

Response to: Signs and Wonders

The wonder of this story is that it's written in the first person, which is so unusual for nonfiction, or I would assume it is. It flows and ebbs and she doesn't end talking about the same thing she began, because we ended up taking a journey with her. It's raw and real and about discovering things--about yourself, about others, about the ecosystem that we live in--and figuring out what they mean, if anything. It's a ramble, but it's one that comes together and has meaning, and in the end, you don't feel like you wasted your time. You feel more like you've come to know the author and you feel like you understand something more about yourself, even if it's only in the most vague of senses.

Casper

Inspiration: Night Song

In the winter, my mom's van (named Casper for its coloring) made the loudest noises that it ever did. It stuttered and whined and echoed around the garage before it was too filled with clutter to fit the vehicle. I don't think that we ever really liked that thing; my mom regretted needing a mini-van, and it filled the garage and entryway of the house with the terrible smell of rotten eggs. But it was the way that I got to school and from my father's house in the afternoon after I walked home.

That van was always a mess, but in the wintertime it was even worse. The cold air of Ohio made the metal creak and groan even when it was completely safe, and my stepfather worked on it at least once every two months, or so it seems in retrospect. I liked to close my eyes and listen to it when I was having a particularly fantastical day. I daydreamed a lot, got called the weird one in the family, but I liked to get lost in my mind.

My mind could turn the engine noises and hissing exhaust pipe into something different if I just subjected myself to the back of my eyelids. I pretended that I was somewhere else to escape where I really was. As long as I couldn't see the dank garage and dirty silver paint of the van, I could be anywhere, from a spaceship to a rickety, old boat. I made up elaborate situations to go along with these sounds, to supplement this fictional reality that I had created.

But then I would always hear the sound of my mother beckoning me into the house and I would leave that world behind.

Response to: Brief History of my Thumb

I was pretty amazed just by the experience that this author had. It's so different from anything that I was taught to do that it was captivating. The use of language, also, just pulled me in, because it just showed the reader how casual it was to them, how little they thought of it, and how routine it was. She writes with incredulity of how it changed, and seems to miss the fact that people used to do this. It ended on a strangely touching note; her trust of a stranger, and how that trust meant something to him. It's at the same time a personal story and a common one. She mentions that a lot of other women have similar stories, but it's unique because it's her story.