From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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British novelist Julie Myerson, author of the nonfiction work Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (HarperPerennial, 2004), writes a weekly column for the Financial Times. Here, in the concluding paragraphs to one of those columns, Myerson relies on polysyndeton to re-create a moment that "ought to have been . . . significant."

from "A Sad-Grand Moment That Never Came"

by Julie Myerson

On the afternoon we moved out of our house, once the removal men had taken everything and all that was left was fluff and dust and picture marks on the walls and the place was so echoey that even our own voices didn’t really sound like ours anymore, on that afternoon my husband and I walked around those empty rooms one last time to say goodbye.

It ought to have been a significant moment, a sad-grand moment, a moment of closure. But it wasn’t, not really. Instead what I now most remember is glancing down out of our (already old) bedroom window and seeing our children standing down in the street. And they were chatting and laughing and messing about, our youngest bouncing a basketball and having to chase after it every so often, our eldest telling the middle one something funny or rude or both, all three of them robustly oblivious to the drama of leaving.

And finally Chloë glanced up and saw me standing there and frowned. “When are we going?” she mouthed impatiently. “Now,” I told her as I moved away from the old sash window for the last time. “Now.”

"A Sad-Grand Moment That Never Came," by Julie Myerson, was published in the "House & Home" section of the Financial Times on January 5/6, 2008.