WEP: Long Shadow

-

  

 

The WEP posts every second month with a prompt and a bunch of short stories or other creative writing. This month's prompt has inspired me to something a little less conventional, but I'm feeling ready to write a little about it. This is non-fiction, and personal.

 291 words; Comments only.


 LONG SHADOW

A small decision can cast a long shadow. The choice to go for an evening bike ride. Or how far back do you trace the decisions? A move to a new town? The refusal to give night rides after one accident? Or can we blame it on COVID? Because if not for the pandemic, we would have been deep in training for a strenuous July trip to the Swiss Alps. Or was May 8 too early to have shifted from bikes to trails? I can't be sure now.

The decision he made was to ride his bike after dinner, when it was a little cooler, and the sun was no longer beating down on everything. It seemed like a reasonable choice at the time. As far as I know, it was the last decision he made, and the shadow it cast will last the rest of my life, and our sons' lives.

The consequences of that decision reach out into every part of our lives, and the long shadow feels like a good metaphor for it. There is still life and love and joy, but everything is a bit dimmed by that shadow. At first, up close to the source, the shadow makes everything so dark you can't see anything else. Time moves us farther out, and the shadow thins, is less total, but it never goes away.

But there is another long shadow, that cast by the love and generosity and the giving heart that was stilled that night. The hundreds of lives he touched in a 29-year teaching career. All the people he listened to and cared about and swapped stories with all over the world. Some part of him lives on in all of them.

Every life casts a long shadow, and every loss casts a long shadow. The same metaphor, but almost opposite meaning: the gift of self, and the loss of half my self.


 All images and text ©Rebecca M. Douglass, unless otherwise indicated.
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Comments

Post a Comment

Let us know what you think! We love to hear from our readers!

Popular Posts

#WEP--The Scream

-
Image
WEP challenges are FREE and open to all. On the 1st   of the challenge month, there will be a   get-your-thinking-caps   on post. The badge will include the dates of the challenge and the winner’s   prizes. The InLinkz sign up will open on the third Wednesday and close 3 days later. It will contain no news, just the sign up. Participants link up with their DLs (Direct Links to their entry).  Learn all about it here .    My entry this time is based on an actual incident. Mom and my brothers will recognize it. My apologies to them for the non-trivial liberties I took with history and their personalities. We are now also meant to provide a tag line for our stories, so here's mine: What terrors lurk in the root cellar?     The Scream The house we lived in that year wasn’t much. The wind blew in everywhere you could imagine a draft, and some places you couldn’t. The old enclosed porch we used as a root cellar was worse. It wasn’t just the win...
Read more

Non-fiction Audiobook Review: Falter, by Bill McKibben

-
Image
Important stuff, but hard to hear. Title: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Author: Bill McKibben. Ready by Olivery Wyman Publication Info: Macmillan Audio 2019. 11 hours. Hardback by Henry Holt & Co., 291 pages. Source: Library Blurb: (Goodreads): Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And t...
Read more

#WEP: December Flash Fiction Challenge

-
Image
This December challenge wraps up the year of artistic inspiration from some great works of art. The WEP is open to all, following the simple rules: 1. SUBMIT your name to the list below on December 1 thru the 15th . Add your link (URL) 2. POST your entry, put WEP is in the TITLE along with The Narcissus badge within your entry. 3. STATE feedback preferences and word count at the end of your entry. 4. READ other entries, giving feedback if requested. 5. SHARE THE CHALLENGE on social media. Tweets are ready on the WEP blog. PLEASE NOTE: ENTRIES CLOSE Dec. 15th @ midnight (NY Time - check WEP blog clock) ALL GENRES WELCOME except erotica - 1,000 words maximum My story for this month's challenge is maybe cheating a little--I didn't write it for the challenge, but I decided that the common understanding of Narcissus and narcissism fits well enough, even if the story doesn't relate to the painting. I wrote this while trekking in Nepal last month, highlighting a character w...
Read more