Today’s Challenge from WordPress

December 27, 2012.

Your personal sculptor is carving a person, thing or event from the last year of your life. What’s the statue of and what makes it so significant?

Has Michelangelo come back to life or is it another sculptor  as gifted as he is? Under the hammer and chisel is a statue coming into being, but what is it?

Ah! I know now what it is. A child. The curls sticking to his head under a hot sun. No wait, it’s a little girl. See her delicate nose and ears. The child leans down, intent on what she is doing, focused on something under her hands.

As the sculptor works, chopping away here and chiselling there, I see that the child has one hand on a toy as if she is pushing it. The other hand is flat on a surface. A tractor is released from the stone, body, tires, even a steering wheel.

I walk away and come back in awhile and I see the great block of stone under the child has turned into a box of some sort. A sandbox. Child playing in a sandbox, pushing the tractor through sand. She’s imitating her father driving a tractor in the field, but there’s no motor sound. Only concentration.

An image cast in stone of a child—me, at an earlier age—and representation of my book, Once Upon a Sandbox, that was shortlisted for an award earlier in 2012. An exciting event in my life this year, celebrated at a gala awards night, in the newspaper, and by appreciation of my friends and readers.

book cover