Finding Details

As an author, I have to make choices in a story that are important to me, but I also have to make a lot of simple choices that don't matter very much.

I needed a teacher's last name in the chapter-book draft I was working on and nothing that I liked came quickly to mind. There's a small cemetery down the road from the cottage where I'm staying, and when I had driven by, I had noticed a mass of irises in front of two small graves. I thought of someone kneeling there with a trowel years ago, putting in bulbs. Plants that would come back every year, that would multiply on their own, that would last.



Teachers are a bit like that, nurturing children and hoping they continue to bloom and grow beyond them. So I decided if the last name on those stones was phonetically regular enough for a chapter book, I would choose their last name. When I walked down to see, the name was Cole, so that was perfect.

But I was glad I wasn't choosing first names.



The teacher's first name never comes up in the story. But in my own mind, I think her first name will be Iris.