Writing Prompts and Challenges

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From a writing class long ago dealing with writing good description, the class was given this challenge:

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Describe an object showing loss of a loved one without mentioning the loss or the person lost. Show these feelings in a description of an inanimate object or a place.

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   The grayness of the day settled like a thick blanket over the landscape, its weight increasing with each step I took toward the old barn. The shadowed recesses inside that always beckoned with the promise of the comfort of the animals, were, today, foreboding. The deep layer of wood chips under foot felt like a thick bog sucking down each boot step. The weathered hard wood half-doors, softened from several lifetimes of use by humans and beasts, lined up ten on each side down the wide breezeway and conjured in mind a bleak tunnel of hard, endless work that left the body as fatigued as the timbers holding up the roof, as beat up as the tired pickup that went once a month into town to haul back a ton of hay.

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