Space aliens are always good for the start of a story. Even if they come in the form of teenagers running through cornfields wearing green and purple bodysuits.
Yes, I saw these adolescent aliens on a recent trip around the countryside not far from my home. The best part is I’d gone looking for them. Not actually the teens in bodysuits, but the ones that supposedly had visited a rural town downriver from my place.
This day had started like many others. Nothing special planned, just a trip with a good friend on a Saturday morning for some sightseeing and lunch at an undecided destination. Our road trip would carry us to a cow-chasing alien town just far enough from the main roads that enough believable truth could ring from their tall tale of cow abductions.
The best part is that the legends of alien activity had originated in the 1970s, and we all know that if you can find an urban legend from before the great expanse of the internet, it must be truth.
As my friend and I wandered the downtown streets, she turned to me and said, “I know the tarot card reader.”
“Of course you do,” I replied. My friend is always one layer deeper with a surprise. She’d lured me out under the pretext of aliens and now she knew the folks who dealt in fortunes and fates.
I nodded at a sign announcing a garage sale a few blocks away. “Is that our fate for today?”
Garage sales are good for a story, so I stepped off the curb and we set out in search of archaic deals. It wasn’t long before our garage sale quest had us hopping back in the car and cruising the countryside in search of whatnot. Corn and cattle traded sides of the backroads as we followed the river toward civilization.
Around noon, we stopped at another sale. A couple of women sat in lawn chairs chatting about children and took turns swatting at a lonely fly. Half tilted and covered with dust, a galvanized bucket filled with vegetables rested against the leg of the table holding the cashbox. A hand-scrawled sign read, “Fifty cents each.”
I eyed the eggplants and cucumbers, fetched a couple of coins from my pocket and paid the woman as she paused long enough to drop the coins into the till. As I walked back to the car, I wiped most of the dust from the cucumber onto my shirt.
“What ya’ got there?” my friend asked as I climbed into the car.
I peeled the cucumber with my pocketknife and offered her a slice. “I think there’s a story in here somewhere,” I said. “I’m not sure where, but maybe about the cucumber.”
We spend a lot of our lives looking for adventure, expecting the cosmos to open and deliver something to spur us forward. We look for something interesting, something different, something that alights the brain and gives us a story to tell. Sometimes we find it. Other times, it’s sitting in a rusty bucket beside a rickety table at a garage sale. Or maybe it’s the process of doing nothing and letting the story find you.
Big stories are built piece by piece from small happenings and observations. They are rusty buckets filled with garden vegetables. They’re pocketknives and country roads. They’re the person sitting beside us when we hand over a slice of cucumber without thinking much about it.
Most of these moments disappear because we decide they aren’t important enough to remember. A journal gives us a way to see how much the small happenings in our lives can matter.
Today’s Journaling Prompt
Note the small things you do throughout your day. Baking cookies, driving to the store and putting on a pair of shoes can all be adventures if you choose the right words.
John Wilkerson writes a monthly column for MNN to share his love of journaling. According to John he “works most days writing and fiddling with his computer. His new, old, home in Menomonie is constantly subjected to DIY mayhem. His background includes ghost writing, newspaper reporting, and a stretch in marketing and advertising.” He may be contacted at [email protected]
