Daily Themes Week 4 Prompt 4
Prompt 4A: Using any selection from this week’s handout as a model or as inspiration, craft your own theme in which modifiers figure prominently (either by their presence or by their absence).
Model: Hemingway, opening paragraphs of A Farewell to Arms, Didion writing about copying Hemingway.
In the late summer before starting high school I sat in my room above the valley and its crops of dry brush. I learned that they call the valley a true chaparral, and that families of sparrows live in the brush, and they chirped and cheeped through the year. Most afternoons that summer I sat at my window, and I could see my neighbor running.
The street that led to the bottom of the valley was steep, and he would run up and down it, and he would carry ten pound weights in each hand. The entire street had sharp rocks on the asphalt, so the car tires could bite into the hillside and not slide down into the valley brush. The neighbor ran everyday, but he sweated and heaved the same way every time I saw him. He just never seemed to get better at running up the hill.
He kicked the street’s rocks as he ran and they would fly onto the sidewalk, onto the surrounding bushes, onto dogs and passersby, and once, onto his own head. The rocks settled into their new places, and I never saw anyone pick up the rocks to put them back on the road. But the road never ran out of rocks.
On the day before my first day of high school, they cleared the road. The city decided that the rocks were not needed anymore, or that they were hitting too many neighborhood pets. A truck must have come in the night and swept them all up. I saw the street for the first time as a smooth river, clear water over granite, no sinkholes. And the summer left and I never saw the man running again.