Word Count: 296
She chewed deer tendon into string, wove wood fiber into paper, and spun cottonwood seeds into fabric to make aprons and jeans. She’d become a saver of the earth through little choice of her own. She couldn’t afford to live any other way.
She was sixty-three, jobless, and her husband had died last year. She paid off the mortgage then sold the house and bought a few acres of land up in New Hampshire. There she lived in a small cabin she built with the help of her brother over the course of the summer. There was a great room that held a huge kitchen table hand-hewn and splintery, two couches she recovered in flax, and no TV. A small bedroom and bath were at one end and a loft over half the living area was an office and den. She worked day and night saving the earth making fabric and string. Dust didn’t settle long enough to be picked up.
The one thing she’d insisted upon was the internet service to connect to the outside world. She wrote stories she called fiction but each held more than a seed of truth. Friends, family, the apricot-haired lady who ran the small general store in town all wandered in and out of her narratives. She plucked the peccadilloes from their personalities and fed them and grew them into commanding and troubled but very likeable protagonists.
And the stories with their vaguely familiar but creatively enhanced characters struggling to find resolution by page four piled up on her hard drive like carefully shelved macaroni boxes. All wondrously original retellings of the human trials of daily living. All sadly unread.
When she realized that she stopped writing but she learned to braid cottonseed fabric into rugs.
This is beautiful, Susan, as always.
Oh Katie, thank you so much! The story ideas are coming a bit slower now but I’ve got some one liners started to catch up.