Fort Messages 1

I opened the tin can I’d stowed inside the driftwood fort. It contained paper and pencil and an invitation to write a “Message to the Fort.” The can had been there for a week and no one had yet taken up the invitation.

The paper had writing on it! Joy! Over the years, I had places similar invitations inside driftwood forts and had received some truly incredible messages, such as the one from a woman who wrote that she took refuge in the fort because she was on the, “worst date in my life.”

It appeared as if three different people had left messages. I read them. They were all about the weather and there wasn’t a trace of any poetry or metaphor or confession in them. Still, one was from a tourist from Hawaii, and that proved interesting to me. I wasn’t disappointed at all. In a remote part of a beach, three people had wandered inside the fort and evinced enough curiosity to open a tin box and look inside. Furthermore, they took out the paper and pencil and took the time to write something, perhaps even sitting on the cedar round writer’s seat I had positioned for a superb view of the ocean.

I will return soon to see if visitors to the fort left behind additional fort messages. It occurs to me that I need to write a more creative invitation to participate. The better the invitation, the more the curiosity is stirred, the more incentive to participate. Think about that in terms of writing…and life and love.

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