Characters, Dialogue and Setting - Journal Assignment (Five Potential Characters)

I can distinctly remember several "characters" whose idiosyncracies have stuck with me for decades.
One of our neighbors was a woman who felt that every square inch of her rather large yard had to have a piece of junk on it. She must have had thirty or forty garden gnomes, dozens of plastic animals (none of which would be native to the area-these included tigers, gorillas, even a blue giraffe,)and innumerable pots of plastic flowers. My father could not have been more meticulous with the care of our yard, so the "Mason mess" as he called it caused him no end of annoyance. Mowing the lawn, which was done maybe two or three times a year, was a huge undertaking. The lawn was broken into quadrants, and each item in the quadrant was moved to a temporary location. That section of lawn was then mowed, and the items were then replaced. I was always amazed that she seemed to remember what went where.

Another character from my youth, was one whose eccentricities ultimately caused a two alarm fire. This woman absolutely hated the house they lived in. Yes it was old and in need of repair, but she would constantly scream at her husband about how awful the house was and question why he couldn't get a better job so they could "move out of this dump!" Finally, she'd had enough. I can remember coming home from school one day, but not being able to get on our street. I saw numerous fire trucks and was immediately scared that our house was on fire, and that something had happened to my parents (or more upsetting to an 8-year old, my dog.) It turned out the the women decided the only way to get out of the house was to burn it down. She took old rags, doused them with gasoline, lit them, and then sat on the front stoop waiting for the house to burn down. While the house didn't burn down, she did get her wish-they were out of there by the end of the week.

My father was the town veterinarian, and one of the houses that was just around the corner from us, provided my father with much business. The reason, they had over 20 cats. The reason they were so memorable, the cats had full run of the house. In fact, the elderly couple didn't even live in the house, they lived in a barn behind the house. Granted, the barn was refurbished and was actually quite nice, but it was still a barn. We had a farm near our house and between it and the cat house, there were warm summer days when you did not want to be down wind under any condition!

When I moved into my first house, the first Saturday I was there, I was awakened at 6:30 a.m. by the neighbor across the street mowing his lawn. I thought, "all right, I don't want to make a bad first impression, so I won't immediately question why he is mowing at the crack of dawn." Unfortunately, Sunday rolled around and he mowed the lawn AGAIN. This time he waited until the far more tolerable time of 7 a.m. The following Monday I asked one of my neighbors how they put up with this and was informed this happened every other weekend. When the neighbors had asked the guy to wait until later in the morning, they were told that it's best to mow before the dew has evaporated from the grass. None of the neighbors seemed to question the logic in mowing the lawn two days in a row so I finally had to ask him why myself. The response was that he wanted the grass to stay short as long as possible, and since he didn't mow it during the week, he decided to mow it twice on weekends-I literally laughed in his face; I thought he was kidding. I lived there for 3 years and he never talked to me again.

The house I moved to next had several young couples who seemingly didn't have enough money for things. One couple had a unique way of saving on draperies. Every night, they would tape pieces of construction paper over the windows. Each window had different colored paper and it was very colorful. One time I actually went in their house. I was expecting to find a mess of construction paper all over the place, but instead next to each window was a neat pile of construction paper and a roll of tape. They had lived their about two years before I moved there, and when I moved out two years later, they were still using the "construction paper curtains."

Instructor Feedback

Characters: be sure to identify when you're generalizing or summarizing because those are sections where description can be developed