The day has been a squirrel-fest (a thing, I promise you) of emotions, ideas, and adolescent brains - never dull, that’s for sure. I love my job for many reasons, but one of which is that I am never bored. And so, I’m setting myself a slice challenge as time is short. Five words, pulled at random from the dictionary: playbook, medley, dump, treat, and sultry, and used in a ten minute quick write. I'll try it tomorrow with my seventh graders.
She’d walked past this dump a million times on her way to work, the streets of her town unchanging in all the years she’d lived here. As long as she knew where to get her coffee and mango tart from each morning, a gift that the couple from Rhinebeck brought with them when they moved here to open their bakery, she was good. Her days rarely veered from the playbook she’d written in her mind. Up with the sun, take the dog for a walk, head off to walk the seven blocks to work through the center of town and the quaint shops, stop at Sun’s Bakery.
The only blight on her morning was the shop with it’s windows boarded up. It stood next to the bakery and needed a loving miracle to shine again. If she wasn’t such a creature of habit and had to have her daily treat from Sun’s Bakery every morning, she wouldn’t pay it any attention. But the morning pastry coupled with dark roasted goodness was one of the things that made life great, and could even perk up a trash day, bringing it up to bearable.
Today, though, as she left the coffee shop, she noticed that something was different. She heard a medley of tunes seeping out from the doors of the dump, sultry and inviting. She had to investigate. Pushing the door open, she gasped, spilled her coffee on herself and thought, And I thought I knew this town inside and out...
She’d walked past this dump a million times on her way to work, the streets of her town unchanging in all the years she’d lived here. As long as she knew where to get her coffee and mango tart from each morning, a gift that the couple from Rhinebeck brought with them when they moved here to open their bakery, she was good. Her days rarely veered from the playbook she’d written in her mind. Up with the sun, take the dog for a walk, head off to walk the seven blocks to work through the center of town and the quaint shops, stop at Sun’s Bakery.
The only blight on her morning was the shop with it’s windows boarded up. It stood next to the bakery and needed a loving miracle to shine again. If she wasn’t such a creature of habit and had to have her daily treat from Sun’s Bakery every morning, she wouldn’t pay it any attention. But the morning pastry coupled with dark roasted goodness was one of the things that made life great, and could even perk up a trash day, bringing it up to bearable.
Today, though, as she left the coffee shop, she noticed that something was different. She heard a medley of tunes seeping out from the doors of the dump, sultry and inviting. She had to investigate. Pushing the door open, she gasped, spilled her coffee on herself and thought, And I thought I knew this town inside and out...