Foreshadowing

Last year, I was in Albuquerque visiting my daughter, staying in a little one bedroom AirBnb filled with antiques. The owners called it the “Casita.” One morning, my daughter and her fiancé came to pick me up for the day’s adventures, and brought their two dogs along. While we were packing up to leave, the dogs were sniffing around outside. Somewhere in the bushes, they found a tiny baby bird, no feathers, dead. They dropped it by the front door.

The day before, another of my daughters had texted us with the sad news that during a wind and rain storm, the hummingbird who was sitting on a nest in the front yard had left her perch in the tree when the branches were lashing around in the storm. She had been sitting there for days, caring for two navy-bean size eggs. When my daughter peered into the nest the next morning to see how the eggs had fared, she saw two tiny, inch-long baby hummingbirds in the nest, naked and still. 

My daughter came into the casita after seeing the little bird on the doorstep and said soberly, “If we were in a book, this would mean something.”

I was so proud of her. My love of foreshadowing must have rubbed off.

My favorite thing to read is a novel. I love long stories, full of characters whose lives intersect and diverge until all the plot lines are tied together at the end. The resolution only works for me if it makes sense for the characters and their situation, and the trick that makes it all fit together is foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing makes it possible to have plot twists. It holds the story together when the plot is pulling it apart. Without the twists, the story is boring; without the foreshadowing, the narrative is a string of disjointed, disconnected action. The puzzle pieces of the story have to fit together and make a complete picture when they are assembled. One without the other feels either shallow or false.

Sometimes foreshadowing is obvious and you know something is coming. Sometimes, it is subtle, or even mysterious. My favorite kind comes in the little details–maybe they tug a little or seem a little odd, or maybe not–but when the big twist comes, they take on a new meaning. Flipping back through the pages, it all makes sense. What was an offhand comment or an insignificant fact at first reading becomes the clue that ties the story together.

It doesn’t ruin the surprise; it makes the surprise richer because it was there, hidden, all the time. It is satisfying because it is consistent. The puzzle piece snaps into place. I’m not talking about predictability; that’s almost as bad as complete randomness. The fun comes from discovering a pattern or a plan that was there all along.

When I am immersed in a novel, sometimes the suspense is too much. I am so worried about what is going to happen that reading isn’t enjoyable anymore. Will the character I love survive? Will what’s lost ever be found? I can’t read fast enough to outpace my anxiety.

True confession: When it’s too much to bear, I turn to the last page to see who is still there.  It doesn’t ruin it for me; it gives me courage to go back and live through whatever is coming with the characters, even if the ending isn’t happy. At least I know what’s coming.

Life isn’t a novel, though. I can’t say that a strange occurrence means that some plot twist is about to happen in my life. I’m not able to relieve my anxiety by checking the ending. The closest I can come is looking back after I have some distance from a situation and finding some understanding. Looking back, events and problems seem clearer, and there is a sense that what seems random at the time is leading to something.

Hindsight.

When my children were babies and young children, I learned their likes and dislikes, their patterns and how to respond to their needs. I memorized their sweet faces. But who they would grow up to be was a wide-open question, a mystery. Now that they are adults, I look back and recognize them. They were exactly themselves from the beginning, but I couldn’t project into the future to see it. My imagination wasn’t big enough.

As a young girl, I sat in my big, comfy chair reading for hours. I wished that there was a book that would never end; a world full of characters I love that I could stay immersed in, never reaching the last page. With a little hindsight on my side now, I can see that my life is my great story, full of plot twists, true love, adventure and comedy. No foreshadowing, but I think it will somehow make sense in the end.