A Writerly Friday Afternoon ~ 1

Yesterday’s blog post - An Awakening - was my completed assignment for our November Writer’s Ink group meeting. The topic - ‘the missing month’ - was suggested by one of the members - oh, yes that would be me - as our topic. As usual we each created a different, and entertaining, scenario for this topic.

Yesterday afternoon, our small group of five friends gathered, assignments in on paper or computer, for our November Writer’s group. We wrote just a bit more following our discussion of the upcoming Writer's Festival. Each month, the host of our group chooses a timed writing exercise. My piece, which I’ve edited for the purposes of posting tonight, was written over four minutes with the parameters below:

The required theme for this exercise was 'Nature' with the direction for the use of the following list of five words in the timed piece -
Hard drive
Stapler
Phone
Car
Billboard

Technology and Nature

Morning walks in Beacon Hill park seem to be a thing of the past. The past summer at least. My faithful phone has always come with me. In the beginning it was just to keep track of the time. To set my timer to see how long and how far. If the morning was still dark to turn my flashlight on. No phone calls though. The camera feature I did use - pictures of squirrels, morning fog, deer, playgrounds  - and anything natural came zipping into my phone’s photo albums. Walking home, waiting for cars to pass before I crossed the street, I fed said photo’s onto my hard drive, to be used later on for attachments to letters, notes, and emails. If I sent an actual paper letter to someone, I could print out my pictures and use a stapler to attach them to the letter. Billboards are another issue entirely. I have taken pictures of them on my phone from my car but billboards are the only thing missing from these morning walks, and one not terribly missed at all. There are  the bill boards that line the highways coming into Kelowna, B.C, or on the way home to Victoria from the ferry. The vitality of both nature and technology are mated and married on a walk to the park, down a street or driving in the car from one place to the next. Technology, ever growing, as weeds and flowers in a fertile land, comes with us wherever we go so trips come home with us, whether walking or riding. When will technology bring us the smell of the flowers in spring, or the lovely aroma of curried chicken floating from a kitchen window? I suspect this technology has already been invented, just is not in my hands yet.

“Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”

~ Laurie Anderson