Have you ever visited a house you used to live in or a place you used to visit as a child?
Does it seem smaller to you or different in some way?
In this passage from “Remembrance, Ohio,” Ray Bradbury describes what it’s like to go back to a familiar place after a long time and find that it is not quite what you had remembered:
Someone with a big hand had scooped up the entire known familiar town of her childhood . . . and poured it into a glass oven, there to know a fever so intense that everything melted and warped. Houses expanded a little too large or shrunk too small from their old size, sidewalks tilted, steeples grew. Whoever had glued the town back together had lost the blueprint. It was beautiful but strange.
Now it’s your turn: Choose from one of the following prompts.
- Write about a time when you found something very different from how you remembered it. Describe the experience and how it affected you.
- Look at a picture of a house, apartment, or trailer you used to live in. Write your recollections about it and how it felt to live there.
- Think about a place you used to live or visit. Use one paragraph to describe the location as you remember it. Then use a second one to describe it as you’ve seen it recently.
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Are your writers struggling? Do you wish you could figure out why your children won’t write? Would you love to have a peaceful writing class experience?
Help your struggling writers—and you!—by identifying five hurdles to writing. Then learn practical actions you can take against those hurdles.
This article by me in The Old Schoolhouse magazine is also loaded with links to other helpful posts that will give you and your writers some welcome relief.
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