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India landscape, copyright (c) 2011 by Laura Deutsch
The white Ambassador sedan wound from the Arabian Sea to India's Cardamom Hills, past cocoa, pineapple and tea plantations, an elephant with his mahout, and sacred cows lounging in the center of the road. We paused on a bridge overlooking a vast plain with a river running through it, where village women kneaded their laundry on broad, flat stones. Two girls, balancing bundles of twigs on their heads, scampered barefoot along a stream that split like the veins on the back of my hand.
The road darkened when we entered the shadowy forest of a rubber plantation. The word "sentries" sprang to mind, as I observed the trees, straight and watchful, planted in rows. The smooth trunks wore sky-blue plastic skirts, short and flared, like young girls twirling at an ice skating rink. These wraps hovered over the wounds where sap had been tapped.
I could have simply written: "We drove through a rubber plantation." But what would a reader see? So I looked carefully at the images and details. How would I describe this to someone who had never traveled to such a place?
In my notebook I wrote: "White sap dripping down smooth tree trunks, rows of silent sentries in the shadowed woods."
When I write I pay attention not only to the facts, but also to the rhythm and sound of the words. In this case, I liked the visual and tactile image of white sap dripping down the smooth trunks, and felt the alliterative image "silent sentries in shadowed woods" added a poetic quality to the scene.
Writing exercise: Choose an outdoor scene and describe it with such specificity that we can see it, or even feel we're there. Try to come up with at least one simile.
Copyright © 2011 by Laura Deutsch (Text and photo of India landscape)
