What does a photo of myself at eight years of age … displayed on a plate from the set of dishes that my Great-Aunt Ida used daily on her farmhouse harvest table … have to do with the novel Watership Down … have to do with a bowl made by Malcolm Stanley, a well-known potter on Prince Edward Island?

Perhaps the connection lies in the words of Richard Adams, penned as an Introduction to Watership Down: “Whenever our family had to make a long journey in the car, I used to tell stories to my two little girls. Some of these were stories that everyone knew, like Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer, but a lot of them were stories that I made up myself, and my daughters particularly liked these, because they felt that they were their own stories and no one else’s, made up for their own enjoyment. One day, when we had to make a journey of over one hundred miles, they asked for a long story ‘which we have never heard before.’ Such a story could only be spontaneous. I began improvising, and started with the first thing that came into my head. “Once upon a time, there were two rabbits, called Hazel and Fiver … .”

So, this is the thought that came to me on Day #14 of National Novel Writing Month after I wrote 1440 words as spontaneously as possible: I want to write a story that I would have loved to have read when I was eight years old, a story that captures a reader’s mind and heart in the same way that Watership Down captured mine, and, a story that incorporates just a little bit of wisdom that I’ve gained (I hope) by having lived almost seven decades within and around the Circle of Life.

Again, the words of author Richard Adams: “I want to emphasize that Watership Down was never intended to be some sort of allegory or parable. It is simply the story about rabbits made up and told in the car.”

#NaNoWriMo18