Chronographia (chro-no-graph’-i-a): Vivid representation of a certain historical or recurring time (such as a season) to create an illusion of reality. A kind of enargia: [the] generic name for a group of figures aiming at vivid, lively description.
Every direction I look there is snow–heavy, wet, incorrigible snow. As I pull on my giant black rubber boots, I’m glad that all I need to do is shovel the porch and make a narrow path the the garage’s back door. So, I plunge in the snow shovel.
I hit something softer than the hard-packed snow. I dig it up.
It is a now-headless toy mouse: one of my cat’s many toys. It is leaking catnip; sort of seasoning the pristine snow with the catnip’s dark-greenish-brown flakes. I plunge my hand into the snow to find the toy mouse’s head. I stir it around. I can’t find it.
I look up and see the cat looking at me through the back door’s window. His yellow eyes widen as he surveys the cat-toy carnage. I put the decapitated toy in my jacket pocket after dumping out all of the catnip.
I finish the path to the garage. I go inside and deposit the headless toy in the trash.
I head back inside the house & there’s the cat still sitting there: eyes wide, back straight, black tail twitching.
Nervously, I open the back door and try to explain what happened as I’m coming through the door into the mud room. I don’t even finish my first sentence when the cat walks three feet and flops down by the heat duct blowing nice warm air.
“Why do I even bother?” I say to myself. Some day I’ll get the answer, but until then, I’ll just keep asking the question, the question with no readily available answer: “Why do I even bother?”
Maybe I should ask the cat.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text added by Gorgias.
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