Gladys

At my free writers’ group a couple of weeks ago, only two of us showed up. We still quite enjoyed ourselves. One of our prompts was to look at one of the customers where we meet and then take ten minutes to write what she thought about that morning. I could only see the back of her head, but I instantly had an image in mind. As I sat down to write, I heard “lattice, lattice” over and over in my head. I thought, “That’s not a name.” Then, “Oh, Gladys!”

I put pen to paper and wrote about how Gladys spent the morning sipping tea in her comfy kitchen and planning her garden for the year.

At the end of the ten minutes, we always read our free-writes aloud. My writing companion shuffled her papers, straightened in her seat, and offered to go first. She cleared her throat and said, “I’m going to call her Gladys.”

O_O