Personification - where the world turns human

Take that clock over there, the one up on the wall above the table. It’s been hanging there forever, staring at me with that blank look on its flat face as it ticks away the seconds of my life with its right hand, the hours with its left. Damn thing, sometimes I’ll glance up quick enough to find it smirking at me. Then it’ll catch itself and wipe its face back into a mask of unconcern. But I know. I know that it spends whole days just staring, judging, tapping its fingers as I take way too much time writing.

Anyway, I like personification. It can be an interesting way to breathe life (real life) into a scene or story. Take for example:

A Possibility

Earth mother spins lazily on her haunches allowing her occupants equal time with their father. Some of them suffer, wishing to remain in the dark where they can enjoy the tranquil beauty of the niece rather than be subjected to the hotheaded fury of the father. He’s always had such an explosive temper!

Earth mother knows all about her husband’s volatile moods. And yet sometimes even she loses her cool, becomes angry at the behavior of the occupants. Like the time when the carnivores had gotten the upper hand and were bullying the rest into extinction. Look how she handled that! All she needed to do was let her guard down just a bit and glance the other way as the meteor hurtled toward her, hitting her midsection with the ferocity of . . . well, a meteor. That had certainly stirred the pot, hadn’t it?

But now it looks like the same thing is happening again, the need for intervention, a wakeup call to the new inhabitants. She needs to let them know that they are overstepping the boundaries of their pants . . . or is it “getting too big for their britches?” Ah yes, it’s the latter; she’s always liked that phrase, happy she’d picked it up one afternoon as another mother stood looking up into the face of her teenage son, shaking her finger and scolding.

Too big for their britches indeed. It’s time for some lessons, lessons from a mother who knows no language, one who communicates through action. So she’ll intensify the fury of the storm god Baal, melt the polar caps, raise the tides and reduce the value of beachfront property. Then she’ll wait patiently to see if that gets their attention. It should. After all, these inhabitants seem much wiser than their scaly predecessors.

Earth Mother hopes she’s right. She hates the idea of having to start all over - again.