Semicolon

I’m a writer. I don’t know when I first began writing. I must have been about ten or eleven. I loved to write. I wrote stories all the time. I wrote in my journal. I wrote on anything and everything. I didn’t know much about grammar and syntax back then; I just wrote what I felt like writing. Whatever was in my heart or in my brain just oozed out onto the paper. Sometimes I was surprised by the content.

When I started high school, my English teachers were amazed at my creative writing skills. I won awards for my work and had several teachers encourage me to pursue writing as a career. I didn’t have much faith in myself. I didn’t think my work was good enough, so I never pushed forward.

Throughout my years of child rearing, I continued to write. Instead of writing short stories or novels, I concentrated on poetry. Several of my pieces were published and I was so honored. My love of writing grew even stronger.

After my children grew and began having families of their own, I began writing children’s books for my grandchildren. I’ve never had any of those published, but perhaps one day I will submit them. In the meantime, I just wanted to write in the hopes that one day, my grandchildren might enjoy my stories. It doesn’t take much to inspire me to write a children’s book. I can see something in nature and immediately a story comes to mind.

Writing. There are a lot of details involved in writing a good story. There needs to be a great plot, interesting characters, beautiful scenery, descriptive dialogue, and the proper use of punctuation. Periods end things. Commas make way for other things and help to separate them. But semicolons, semicolons help form a bond between two independent clauses. I like semicolons. If I have two sentences that can stand on their own, I could choose to end them with a period allowing them to be two totally separate statements but, if I choose to allow them to co-mingle, I insert a semicolon. As the writer of the story, I get to decide.

My life could have ended with a period. It could have been complete. I could have died from breast cancer and that would have been it. Finito. My life would have been history, but, God, in His omnipotence decided to give me a semicolon in writing my life’s story. When breast cancer came onto the scene, He didn’t insert a period….He inserted a semicolon! That meant there was more to come…my story was not over. When a semicolon is used to join two or more ideas (parts) in a sentence, those ideas are then given equal position or rank.

So, as I was thinking today about my life’s story, the semicolon became huge to me. In my mind’s eye, I could almost peek over God’s shoulder as He was writing my story and read the following: Some people, when diagnosed with breast cancer, receive it as a death sentence; but others, for different reasons, choose to accept it as God’s perfect will for their lives. Isn’t that amazing? I love semicolons!© bonnie annis all rights reserved