The Daily Tiller & Toiler building, Larned, Kansas
Welcome to Day 10 of Writing Our Stories – or, How to Become a Writer Without Really Trying
Several of you sent me your kitchen stories yesterday. I’m happy to hear how your mind is stretching out to grab memories and that you’re writing down these stories. Keep your stories in one place and before long you’ll have 20, 30, 100 of them!
Today, let’s talk about commuting – to school, to work, to run errands. There are stories embedded even in the most ordinary of daily happenings.
The photo I’ve posted is of the Larned Daily Tiller & Toiler which is where I worked as a reporter/photographer during the summer after high school. While that would be a personal/life story in itself, today I’m thinking about commutes.
What I remember about being 18 and driving the eight miles to Larned is that I had to be there at 8 a.m. I had timing down to an art. I would get out of bed at 7:45, comb my hair (probably), brush my teeth (probably), get dressed and dash out the door. The drive took me 10 minutes, so I didn’t have time to consider breakfast. How I made that work, and why, what I thought about on the drive, would be something to write about.
There are other topics that I could write about on the “commute” theme:
*Riding to high school, 23 miles each way, with other teenage drivers. (What could possibly go wrong?)
*Walking to grade school every single day of my life, meeting my friends at the post office so we could walk the three blocks together. There was no way on earth our mothers would drive us to school. I would write about observations along the way, conversations, how much louder and more relaxed we were on the walk home.
*Riding with Mom to Larned weekly to go to the library for books and to buy groceries at the Jack & Jill. I would write about how I memorized each tree (this is western Kansas, there weren’t many) and how I studied sunlight landing on the power lines and railroad tracks nearby.
Go forth and write your commute stories! Give me a shout if you’ve written one.
Go get ‘em. Cheryl
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