Many years ago, on a very cold November evening, I happened on a scene similar to the one described here. That experience was the eventual inspiration for the following narrative essay that I have used as an example of both narrative and descriptive writing in my writing class.
“To Each His Own”
After the supper hour on a late December evening, the small Iowa town was winter dark. Leafless trees reached to one another for warmth and companionship across a silent street on the edge of town. At the end of the lonely avenue, a single streetlight struggled against the darkness. No moon silvered the snow-laden clouds. Flickering shadows cast by a front-room television were ghost dancers on the dirty snow in front of the single house in the middle of the last, long block.
I was out for a walk, believe it or not. I suppose I was young enough then to ignore the cold. For another fifty yards or so I would have the taunting north wind at my back, but soon I would have to turn around and force my way home against its frigid hammering. The wind shouted at me, deriding me for my foolishness, cutting through the seams of my heavy coat, snatching at my wool cap, pushing me, taunting me, daring me to turn and face it. It wasn’t the wind that was making me shiver, though. A desolate, despondent loneliness assaulted me there and chilled more deeply than the icy wind.
I had driven this street before, but it wasn’t a neighborhood that invited site seeing. I felt a stranger there. Despite the temperature and the wind and the occasional needle sting of driven snow or dust, I found my steps slowing as I carefully took in the details of the small, one-story house that was the last evidence of the community. Just beyond the streetlight’s dim glow, barbed-wire fences and corn stubble also marked the city limits.
Since there wasn’t a garage, there was no need for a driveway, but a rusted-out Duster sat forlornly near one corner of the house. Without wheels and nothing else to support its sad weight, the hubs were buried in the old snow. The car seemed to be sinking into the earth. In contrast, a companion pickup truck faced the street nearby. A heavyduty electrical cord ran from under the front door of the house to the grille of the truck, a life-sustaining umbilical in the cold. Nearly new, the monstrous F150 must have been recently washed despite the weather. Not a speck of dirt marred its glossy black finish. Although I couldn’t see into the cab—the headlights were almost to my shoulder height, the body elevated on oversized tires and lifts—I assumed it would be spotless and state-of-the-art. The gun rack in the rear window was empty but ready.
The house itself must have remained upright through stubbornness alone. It seemed to lean into the wind in old defiance. Tarpaper shingles clung desperately to the roof. If the clapboard sides had ever known paint, it was a vague memory. One ill-fitting door was centered in the porchless front. I did not need to move any closer than the curb to see inside. A window, curtained by streaks of dirt, showed all of the single room. Only the television provided illumination, but the huge screen seemed to fill an entire wall. Next to it, like the trophy case of a perennial champion, proudly stood a gun cabinet even larger than the television, its prizes gleaming: an assortment of shotguns and rifles, scoped and strapped and, no doubt, lethally effective in the skilled hands of their proud owner.
He was seated close by, feet raised high in his La-Z-Boy, a magazine—Field and Stream or American Hunter most likely—open across his wide middle. Head back, eyes closed, mouth open in a contented snore, he was unaware of my impolite observations until I coughed.
He couldn’t have heard me over the noise of the television and the wind whistling through the doorframe and around the window, but the dogs did. I moved on as their clamor rose against the gale and discovered their kennel on the other side of the house. Almost as large as the master’s home, the doghouse was a spotless palace with walls so thick they must have been insulated, a well-maintained roof—unlike the house nearby—carefully drained away from several runs and doors that provided at least half a dozen hounds access to their warm beds or their exercise yard. They bayed me on my way. As I walked into the shadows a few yards away, I heard them quickly silenced with precise commands shouted from the door.
I turned to face the remaining distance home. At my own fireside would be my loving family and pampered pet, probably oblivious to the wind and cold. I wondered, as I battled on, at the priorities I would have if circumstances forced me to choose between necessity and appearance and what impressions I would give to the world peeking in my windows.
01/18/04
