Day 521: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: wild
I visited Puerto Rico once, a big reunion with my family of origin. We shared a big house on the beach together and I learned a lot on that trip.
When the plane landed, all the passengers applauded! I really loved that, that we celebrated having arrived safely. It seemed a kind of giving back, that eruption of joy and gratitude, and boded well for the trip. My nuclear family of five then drove four hours in the middle of the night to get to the large house on the beach near Rincon that my family of origin would be spending a week together in. (I apologize for ending that sentence with a preposition but this is a freewrite so it's OK. Maybe I will finally do @jayna Monday contest and fix it)
I learned a lot of things about my family of origin that still pain me to this day, but that's not what I want to talk about today.
The biggest thing I learned was about dogs, wild dogs. There are a great many of these in Puerto Rico. They are all happy, gentle and friendly. I fell absolutely in love with one of them and brought her home with the help of my brother, who was living in PR at the time. He shipped her up. She was a really great dog!
But I came to question whether or not all of the human attempts to improve the lives of wild animals were improving anything at all. Are these animals better off with our "help"? Is their living more as we do - confined, spayed, neutered, vaccinated, tagged, and socializing mostly with humans - really better than the lives they have running wild with their canine friends on the healing beaches of PR?
This is my entry to @mariannewest freewrite challenge https://steempeak.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-521-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-wild
The image is mine, a detail of a portrait by the stupendously gifted Lydia Viscardi. Lucky me, she is a very good friend of mine.
Never apologize for ending a sentence with a preposition - and my degree is in English teaching, but I agree with one of the world's great orators: When criticized for occasionally ending a sentence on a preposition, Winston Churchill replied,
"This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."
hahahahahaha!!! I had to read it a couple times! He was good, very very good!
I just went to your blog to check in on Kris et al, and I see you resteemed my "wild". Thank you!
I'd resteem all your stuff, and a lot of other posts, but I had to stop doing so much resteeming -- now that one can hide resteems, it would solve the problem of my own posts being buried deep, but why resteem if you hide the resteems????? So much I'll never understand. (Like what it was I did to violate Amazon's guidelines, and why they flushed me without warning and without explanation.) Thanks for checking on my story. I'm not sure I ought to post any more of it, given the disclaimers people have about publishing an already published story, and how a serialized first draft, even just the first one-third of a novel, is enough to make it "published" - I disagree! - but I don't make the rules. I just break 'em and suffer the consequences.
Hey I just came across this. I assume that when I hide resteems, they are hidden only to me for that one time. What is this about publishing? If you post on Steem it's been "published"? So much I do not know! I'm with you on breaking rules.
I wish I knew who to believe. Some say if you publish your fiction on Steemit, even partials, even first drafts vs final drafts, it is PUBLISHED and nobody else will touch it, and Amazon has a price-match policy that guarantees everyone will download your book for free because you could read it for free, one chapter at a time, 50 chapters in all, never mind how cumbersome that is, somewhere online. Gaaaahhh!!!!!!!
As for resteeming, we are advised not to do too much of it, or own content gets lost among all the resteems.
I resteem contests I want to enter so I can more easily find them again. Sometimes I resteem stuff I love, mostly for the same reason. I nearly always have both steemit and steempeak open because they do different things. I'm looking into esteem as well, still trying to find something that makes navigating the blockchain less cumbersome. I guess there are still many glitches to work out here on steem.
I also resteem things to make it easier to find them again, like contests, but I haven't managed partiko or steempeak, and everything is cumbersome and glitchy to me, on Steemit or Facebook or anywhere! My age (more than 55) is no excuse. You go!!!!
That, as usual for most policies and laws, is only going to harm the little guys - the likes of us. Gaaaah! is right.
I will forever be a minnow, not a whale, at the rate I go. Just not into the promos and number and competition. Even at the grocery store, I let people ahead of me in line if they have little kids, or an armload of stuff and no cart. Not a born fighter. Happy to be on the sidelines while others do the tackling and jockeying for position!
Good news! Ending a sentence with a preposition is not a grammatical error. If you Google it, you can find plenty of information from authoritative sites. Unfortunately plenty of people think it’s a grammatical error, so you have to deal with that. 😁
Thanks for the mention and I hope you do join the micro-fiction contest! Maybe turn this into a story by making the observation come from a character’s point of view.
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Congrats!! You won a 100% upvote from the Freewrite House for recommending your favorite Freewrite. Also, the new post is up. Please participate again.
https://steemit.com/contest/@freewritehouse/winner-week-3-19-2019-recommend-your-favorite-freewrite
Why thank you!
I love that picture. Is that the same dog you speak of? That is such a hard question, of whether it was better or not with bringing them home to be surrounded by humans and the insane way we live. I agree with @jayna that this could turn into a great story.
yes that is Solimar, Sun and Sea. She was a wonderful companion, but then she was already wonderful when I met her on the beach. So did I bring her to NYS for her, or for me?
Oh so many many things in one post! Family of orgin is in Puerto Rico - love it. Passengers applauding the safe landing of the plane: how un-American but how fitting and right. Wild dogs that are happy, gentle and friendly? We're told feral dogs in packs become hostile and dangerous. Above all I love your question on whether it' right and just and helpful to take dogs from their natural habitat and assume they're "better off" confined to indoor lives like ours. This would make a great children's book if you felt the Call of the Wild (Jack London!) to write it. :) Thanks for this freewrite. I love it.
Oh, and I love Lydia Viscardi - love that "excerpt" from the portrait you posted - had to look her up:
lydiaviscardi.com/ - Visual artist, Professor of Art, Gallery Curator in Connecticut
This image in particular speaks to me (my little sister, #5 of 5 daughter, comes to mind):
Lydia was next to youngest of four daughters! I have a beauty of hers depicting the four of them. I'll have to use it soon. I'm going to use it today actually so keep an eye out for it - it is perfect for what I just wrote!
She is amazing.
This period of hers was right when I fell for her.
Thank you for looking her up
I'll have to tell her.
And thank you for loving my freewrite! It was one of the personal ones, that always feel so iffy to me.
Your personal freewrites are fantastic! I almost said The Best but your others are just as good. I love Lydia's artwork - thank you for introducing her to us!
Great free write, great details, and I love Puerto Rico. I've been there several times, first in 1985 for three weeks, then on a couple of cruises in 2000/2001.
I didn't know that the feral dogs there are all friendly, but it doesn't surprise me much, as that was what I found in the people there . . . friendly, full of joy, willing to help when needed, and just plain nice to be around. Great folk.
I'd move there in a second if I could talk Marek into it, it's absolutely gorgeous, and has a lot to commend it, though we'd definitely have to improve our Spanish.
And sometimes ending a sentence with a preposition is entirely warranted. I do it occasionally, though some of that might be laziness. ;-)
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I say end with a preposition and start the sentence with a conjunction (But, And, etc) if it sounds better, and especially if it's fiction. And that's that. Bad advice is what I'm here for.
;-)
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