I share these prompts to encourage writers and creatives of all ages to journal uninhibitedly on a daily basis. No marketing, just prompts. 

Don’t feel compelled to spend days or even hours crafting the perfect response. Write, sketch, paint, or compose your response wildly in words or colors, musical notes or dance interpretations, and then share it with the world, in all its raw beauty. 

If you do share your writing to the daily prompt, please feel free to leave a link in the comments or use the hashtag #RVWritingPrompts wherever you might be posting your response. 

Writing Prompt #2: Write, reflect, or create an original work based on a time when the weather changed your life.

My Response: Specific weather events have changed all of our lives. Here in the Mid-Atlantic, hurricanes and nor’easters are common life-changers for most of us. But for me, it was never a named storm that changed my life (agreed, though, that Super Storm Sandy in 2012 was pretty bad); instead, it was the weather that blew off the Susquehanna River – a trib of Chesapeake Bay – and found its way to our small cabin in River Hills, Pennsylvania when I was a child.

And, just as powerful as the storms might have been that moved in, keeping us tucked in on the long screened-in porch as the rain moved through the heavy leaves like a steady chorus of soft, melodic rain sticks, the memories we made as a family were what really changed me.

Everything was different at the cabin. It was my father’s haven away from the world of work, the mundane grind of suburban living. In that small plot of land between a bass-stocked pond and acres of corn fields, the rains that kept us inside did not matter to me at all.

The cabin’s interior was one large, “great room” divided thinly by a half-wall that separated the living and sleeping spaces. In the front, facing the woods that filled the sloping hill that led to the large pond, was the porch; in the back was a small dining table and kitchenette that looked out over the fields harvested annually by local farmers. It was a simple space, but rainy days brought us closer together playing cards, building fires in the fireplace, and just listening to the storms roll in and roll out in a seamless peace that could not be found at home in Baltimore.

[Quick Reflection: I’ve never written about this before and will definitely expand on this later in a stronger draft. I never realized that the storms that forced us inside actually created an opportunity for us to be a stronger family in a way that never really seemed possible in our home in Baltimore. More to come for this one, for sure.]