FROM WHENCE COMETH INSPIRATION

I've already touched on one way I get inspiration for a story, and that is to be assigned a topic. I like those assignments, and I like the end result of multiple authors being assigned the same story line. It's a little like giving the recipe for funeral potatoes to five different cooks--and ending up with five dishes, all delicious, but difficult to tell who followed the original recipe. 

I have no problem coming up with ideas, but I have a special affinity for old abandoned homesteads.

If only walls could talk. Can't you imagine the once-upon-a-time beauty of this home? Built, perhaps, for a new bride brave enough to venture onto the unknown prairie and all that life ahead might hold? 

If I sit long enough, and listen to the walls, I can hear the whispered words of love; the shouts of anger and/or joy; the first cry of a newborn; or the brokenhearted weeping because of a loved one's loss. 

And because we become good friends--this grand old lady, and because I, too, am old--she allows me to tell her story. The story of those lives she once embraced. The story of the Kansas wind that never stops blowing; the tall grasses that undulate like waves; the rich grasses that provide sustenance like a mother's milk; and the flint hills that dip and roll over landscape that outsiders proclaim is flat.

My heart is in these hills, but it will stop beating long before I run out of inspiration they offer. 

That's okay. Because I know that I have a mansion just over the hilltop! 

And it will never be abandoned!