The Power of Description

    Not long ago, my dad finished his most elaborate tool of death yet. A cannon. He built a nineteenth-century cannon. From scratch. It took two years.
    My father’s cannon is a smaller replica of a cannon called the Big Horn Gun in front of Bozeman’s Pioneer Museum. The barrel of the original has been filled with concrete ever since some high school kids in the ‘50s pointed it at the school across the Street and shot out its windows one night as a prank. According to Dad’s historical source, a man known to scholars as A Guy at the Museum, the cannon was brought to Bozeman around 1870, and was used by local white merchants to fire at the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians who blocked their trade access to the East in 1874.

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Sarah Vowell's Shooting Dad, 16th and 17th Paragraph

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     For a moment, I thought that he was being caring with his kind words and innocent looks. He wasn't. He was just lying to me. Like always. I should know better.
     His eyes are a deep blue like that of a dangerous sea which a person should be wise and never go near, but they are also so enticing. I have always loved the thrill that adventure gives me, ever since I was in kindergarten where we kids would be all competitive and try and climb up higher than anyone else could on the club house on the playground. According to my teacher, a woman full of Godly principles, we were being rebellious by not listening to her, and were going to get in trouble if we kept climbing so high on the structure which was rather old and rickety. 

~Alayna~