Five Words: Persnickety Britches

This is a fun way to slip out from under the editor's watchful eye.  Use a method to select random words: if you are writing solo, you could find six words on page 6 of the sixth book in your stack, for instance. In our groups, everyone contributes a favorite or compelling word.  The challenge in each case is to use all of the welected words in a piece of any kind - a poem, a mini-story, something stirred up from memory.  Here's something I wrote that arose out of the five words from last Tuesday's Jumpstart in Petaluma class.

The words : britches, persnickty, authentic, tantalizing, meditative. 

The britches were tantalizing, no doubt about that, but waaaaaay off limits. Wearing them too early would imply that I was too big for them. As the littlest tyke in a long slew of siblings, I already knew that would not be a good thing.

But I yearned for them: hand-me-downs from my next oldest brother, they now hung in the closet we had once shared, left behind as he had been hurried into the waiting truck, tailpipe steaming in the pearly dawn, his clothes gathered in a rush by my oldest sister and heaped into the battered tan and brown tweed suitcase. She was not at all persnickety about what was chosen, how they were rolled, folded, squeezed. I watched, hunched on my lower bunk, quilt bunched around me. The suitcase had the authenticity of distance and the authority of loss - it gathered him up and took him away to his father's house for transgressions I couldn't yet fathom. Even now, decades later, sitting in meditation and recollection, I only feel the hole, the gap of space that he had once inhabited and which I then proceeded to fill, transgressions and all.