Celebrating Imagination

Our local writers' guild presents us with a writer's challenge every month--a little exercise to get our writer muscles moving and defibrillate our imaginations.

This was my entry in April. I'll know if you send me nasty notes about my family members that you didn't read the "imagination" part. It's--for those who might wonder--fictional.

Although, don't we all know people who COULD have used it as their personal testimony???

I never win anything. My great-grandfather played Bingo against Great-Grandma’s wishes which explains why he lost the family farm. Not at the Bingo parlor, but because after Great-Grandma and her serrated tongue got done with him, he was never quite right in the head.

Some family members speculate she made him lick lead paint and told him it was a fudge pop. But when you think about it, if he fell for that ploy, he wasn’t all there to start with.

So no. I never win anything on account of we Clearwaters have always understood gambling to have ruined our chances to own property. So we avoid it. Gambling, that is. And raffles. Contests. Any games of chance.

I don’t count winning the prize for the word unscramble at baby showers. I kind of have a corner on that market, but I suppose a case could be made that a dyslexic has an unfair advantage at word scrambles. We’re used to reading words that way.

You can imagine my chagrin, then, when the phone rang and it was some New York-sounding dude claiming I won the HGTV Dream Home in Key West, Florida. That’s in the United States. But just barely.

I only entered that contest because it gave me extra credit in my night classes for interior design. After that fiasco with the feng sooey assignment, I needed more than a little extra credit. And wouldn’t you know? I up and won. Now what am I going to do? It’s probably a nice enough house and all, but it’s…you know…property.