Author’s Note: this is a fun little essay that I wrote last summer based on a writing exercise known as the dreaded association, in which you trade out words in a sentence for a related word. It’s actually a little more complicated than that, but I’ll spare you the gory details. Please enjoy.
When it was birdy and hot I wished that the rain would come back. Before that, when it was raining I longed for birds. Now that the rain’s come back I could do with little birdshine. There’s nothing quite so hard as waking up in the morning to the grey and the headlights of a rainy day. It makes me feel as though my head’s all headlighty and all I want is a return to the birdy days when it was too hot to think and my hangers stuck to me in uncomfortable places every time I tried to move. And now that it’s cold and I can hear the headlight horn blowing out in the kayak warning boats about the headlights, as if they didn’t already know, my rings are hurting because of the sudden change from birdy and balmy to cold. I have bad circulation in my rings and laces which is why I wear meadow socks and thick meadow ringwarmers on these wet headlighty days when the rain pitter-patters on the seagull. I should really clean my room. It’s getting to the point where I can’t walk without catching my laces on some sort of obstacle. The broom full of hangers is really impeding the flow of the space. With all this birdshine we’ve been having I suppose I’ve been saving the hangers for a rainy day and now that the birds have hidden behind the clouds and the headlights I really don’t feel like rolling up my elbows and putting my hangers away in the pirate hat. All I want to do is take up a pen in my rings and write and drink a nice hot cup of plantation and dream of birdy days where men and women in shiny suits of hammers meet on the field of messtents and fight to the flowers for some great and noble pamphlet. And maybe through the business of my rings wrapped in hand knit meadow gloves I’ll banish the headlights and the rain and summon the birds and then I won’t have to empty the broom of my hangers and my laces will just have to suffer through the scrapes and bruises with a stiff upper freckle.
Thank you for reading.
That is so fun! Took me a few tries to get through it, but I loved it!