Sometimes a Picture Tells You the Story

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Welcome back to the Front Porch.

You have probably heard the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes a picture does something else. More than that.

Sometimes it tells you where to find the words.

That thought came back to me recently while working on something you may never think much about when looking at a finished illustration . . . . Just what should a steam locomotive arriving at a small Ozarks town in 1904 actually look like?

Seems like a simple enough question, doesn’t it?

Put a locomotive on some railroad tracks, add a station, maybe a few people standing around, and there you go. Well — apparently — that isn’t how things work around here.

Because once I started looking more closely at the trains that would have traveled through Honey Hill Country at the beginning of the twentieth century, one question led to another. And another. And another . . . . And then another.

Before long, I was looking into steam locomotives and passenger cars, freight cars and railroad crossings, station platforms and loading areas, horse-drawn wagons and mule teams, and the wooden water tanks that stood alongside railroad tracks all across the country.

All of this, mind you, because I wanted to create a true-to-the-period image of a train.

Funny thing is, I had been down this road before — although the first time, there wasn’t a train anywhere in sight.

 

 

 

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Thinking About Butterflies & Fireflies

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There are certain things that simply belong to summer.

Fresh tomatoes still warm from the garden.

Homemade ice cream.

The happy sounds of children splashing in the water.

The crack of a bat at a baseball game.

Sweet tea and watermelon on a hot afternoon.

The smell of freshly cut hay.

Honeysuckle drifting on the evening breeze.

Backyard barbecues.

The distant hum of a lawn mower somewhere down the road.

And, if you ask me . . . .

Butterflies and fireflies.

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Life Between the Dates

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A Front Porch Reflection on the Little Dash That Holds a Lifetime

The other day I came across a simple thought that stayed with me much longer than I expected.

It wasn’t complicated. In fact, it centered around one of the smallest marks in our written language — a tiny little dash.

You know the one. The little dash between the dates.

Every life can eventually be described by two dates. One marks the day we entered the world. The other, someday, marks the day our earthly story is complete.

Between those two dates is a simple little dash.

But when one thinks about it, that tiny dash mark somehow has to represent an entire lifetime.

Not just the years . . . . the life. The living in between the dates.

And that got me thinking.

Perhaps the most important part isn’t the dates at all.

Perhaps it has always been the life between them.

 

 

 

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The Day the Outdoors Introduced Itself

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Thanks for stopping by to visit. I was thinking about something the other day . . . .

When I was about six or seven years old, our next-door neighbors invited me to spend the weekend with them on a little farm they owned near Florida, Missouri.

It wasn’t a working farm in the sense I imagined farms to be. Someone else did the farming, and they simply shared the harvest. And by city-boy standards, it was primitive, like a trip back to the wild west of my imagination.

A well for water and no indoor plumbing. There was a chamber pot for doing necessary overnight business behind a pulled back curtain in what used to be a closet because outside there could be roaming bobcats, coyotes, and foxes. They didn’t mention bears and wolves, but my imagination soon caught up to include them, too.

But for me, though, and how it all turned out, it all might as well have been Yellowstone National Park.

I had no idea one ordinary summer Saturday was about to introduce me to a whole new world and life

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What the Grasshopper Already Knows

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Every summer, there comes a day when I notice the grasshoppers again, with their buzzing and whirring in the tall grasses and weeds along the fence lines. Together with the cicadas droning in the afternoons, it has all been the sounds of summer for me.

One afternoon not long ago, I was walking along the edge of a nearby field when something sprang out of the tall grass ahead of me. It landed on a weathered fencepost just a few feet away and sat perfectly still. It was a grasshopper. Mottled olive-green in color, perched motionless on the grey wood.

Most of us don’t give grasshoppers much consideration. They hop out of the way, disappear into the weeds, and go about whatever it is grasshoppers spend their summer afternoons doing. We notice them for a second or two, then we continue along on our way.

This time, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I didn’t.

I stopped.

 

 

 

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On Fiction Writing and the Art of Respectable Lying

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Welcome back to the Front Porch.

Please pull up a chair for a few minutes and make yourself comfortable. Today I’d like to make a confession — one that may permanently damage my reputation as an honest fellow.

I’ve been lying to perfectly nice people for years.

Professionally.

Now before anyone becomes too alarmed, I’m talking about the respectable, old-fashioned kind of lies. The harmless sort that begin with, “Once upon a time . . . . “ and somehow end with everybody smiling.

Mark Twain is often credited with saying that if you want to become a good fiction writer, you must first become proficient at the art of lying. Whether he actually said those exact words or not, I’ve never been entirely sure. But I’ve always had a difficult time believing he’d object to the sentiment, and cannot argue with it myself.

The longer I’ve been writing, the more I think there may be more than a little truth hiding inside that mischievous observation.

After all, I’ve spent years convincing otherwise sensible people that a talking bear in the Ozarks backwoods wears overalls, a bloodhound interviews a talking mule, a goat develops an unhealthy appetite for hats, and somewhere in a fictional place called Honey Hill Country there are folks who seem just a little more interesting than anyone has a right to be.

And the surprising part?

People keep believing every word.

The curious part isn’t that writers tell these respectable lies.

It’s why perfectly sensible people keep smiling . . . . and asking for another one.

And well . . . . that’s where the real story begins.

 

 

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