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Laurel Anderson's avatar

Okay here's my next section incorporating People and Personality:

Reaching for a photo of my newest granddaughter I fanned scrapbook pages searching for the perfect one to showcase her delicate features. Perhaps my recent flight to meet her was his choosing Seattle for me and Mexico for him. She was tiny, precious, with my mother’s dark eyes and olive skin.

A few years later she asked me, “Granny, where did I get my skin again?”

“From your Great Grandmother,” I reminded her, hoping she would forever remember she’d inherited something from our beautiful matriarch.

“Everybody wants my skin,” she announced. I smiled, pulling her on my lap to smell the sweetness of her freshly washed auburn hair.

It was extremely important for him to make this annual January trip to the sun and sand. After weeks discussing the lack of funds required to go together, promises he would miss me and efforts to gain my support, I’d finally caved and encouraged him to book his flight.

I watched his tall, thin frame travel from room to room as he gathered items for his trip and organized them into neat piles in the corner of our blue velvet sofa. Guitar pics, extra strings, a capo, T-shirts, shorts, underwear, Flip Flops, a ball cap and favorite hoodie lay next to packages of instant noodles and a carton of Player’s cigarettes.

I was beginning to feel nauseous as he stopped to check the darkening tan line at the waist of his jeans for at least the hundredth time. Almost daily trips to the tanning salon had browned his skin, discovered blue in his dusky grey eyes and uncovered blonde highlights in his otherwise plain brown hair.

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Laurel Anderson's avatar

My answer to Number 3. I was hooked at:

A bristle of pine needles streaked past the window behind him. A shock of green, clawing open the mist ...

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