Inspired by my parents, tonight I made up a story to entertain the girls, while I scrambled some eggs for them and chopped up vegetables for my wife to turn into dinner.
My daughters used to love hearing stories about two little girls who were their middle names, so I made up an account of how Antonia Julianne and Isobel May lived in a house in a forest, and could never get any peace because of the incessant woodpecking.
So they constructed a 30′ tall effigy of a woodpecker and painted it red; intimidated, the woodpeckers fled and the girls got a good night’s sleep.
But then they were awoken the next day by a combination of buzzing insects (no longer eaten by the woodpeckers) and grumbling humans, who had come to see the enormous wood woodpecker but couldn’t get a good view because of the crowds.
It’s important to have unintended consequences.
Eventually the girls entreated the woodpeckers to help out (my girls didn’t notice the obvious plot hole that they were talking to the birds now, when they hadn’t before). The woodpeckers returned and ate all the bugs, then tied string to themselves and lifted up the wood woodpecker high enough for everyone to see it, mollifying the crowd. Then they stayed and slept in the wood woodpecker, and by then I think I was sick of saying wood woodpecker, but the eggs were cooked by then and I went for a short run. So all was good with the world again.
2 responses to “Wood woodpecker”
Love the story.
Not necessarily a plot hole. Making the not talking intentional could turn it into a story with a moral. Take time to talk to woodpeckers.