I have resigned myself. I will never be a writer. A writer must create beautiful grammatically accurate sentences with all the words spelled correctly, on purpose. They care passionately about prepositions at the ends of sentences, starting sentences with “so”, pronoun agreements, and gerunds (which I spelled gerands before the spell-check wiggly-line alerted me to my error: I am hopeless.) So I have resigned myself to becoming a story-teller, because no one cares if a story-teller screws up the language a bit. Sometimes it even makes the story better. Case in point, the Afthead household had a bag of pears going bad, so my husband and I were removing the moldy bits so we could feed the brown and mushy bits to the chickens. (Chickens turn rotting food into eggs, which is magic I’ve come to appreciate in our months of ownership.)
I scooped the pears into a bowl and said, with delight, “Now I get to hear my favorite chicken eating pear noise.”
My husband looked at me with that you are a doofus look he reserves just for his beloved wife and said, “I think you mean pear eating chicken noises.”
I was horrified. Pear eating chicken noises sounded like the noises giant pears would make as they ripped my poor unsuspecting chickens to bloody shreds. “No,” I insisted, “that’s backwards.”
Leave it to my mom, the retired English teacher, to show me the error of my ways. “Think of it like a hyphenated phrase,” she said, “Pear-eating chicken noises is what you love. Chicken-eating pear noises are the terrifying ones.”
Once again my grammar savant engineering husband and English degreed mother found the errors in my word choices. If I wasn’t so stubborn I’d stop disagreeing with them and just accept my ignorance. There is a reason I make them read everything I write. They are good at this English language stuff.
But I am good at the creativity stuff, so I hauled out the fancy markers, grabbed Afthead Junior and said, “Let’s draw pictures of chicken-eating pears!”
My daughter, having witnessed the pear-eating/chicken-eating argument, asked for clarification, “You mean scary pear drawings?”
“Yes.”
Behold, the chicken-eating pears. They are terrifying. They are chicken-eating. They are bloody. Keep your chickens locked up safe, folks. You don’t want to see these monsters in your coop. Nom nom nom,
Yes. Thanks. I know. It goes without saying. I am a story-teller, not a writer. And I am DEFINITELY NOT an artist. No need to point that out. It’s just rude.
Now off to go create the world of the chicken eating pears and how they wreck havoc on unsuspecting small farmers and backyard chicken enthusiasts. Beware the pear!
Just in case you are wondering, the video below shows Rosie making the pear-eating chicken noises that I adore. Listen close — it’s a subtle sound.
Afthead 