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For example: (From My fic, Autumn.)

   The rake pulled smoothly through the grass,
the leaves bunching and spilling past the sides.
The tines hissed through the grass, the leaves
crackling with each stroke.
         "Every year?" Ranma called across the yard.
         "Every year." Akane replied, pausing to remove
some leaves that had stuck in her rake.

         The tines of the rake hissed through the grass.  With
each stroke, leaves crackled and bunched and tumbled to
the sides.
         "Every year?" Ranma called across the yard.
         "Every year." Akane replied, pausing to remove
the leaves stuck in her rake.

	Hmmm... Not bad. Not bad at all.
	For myself, I prefer not to start a sentance
	with a preposition, ("With") at least not that close
	to the beginning of a section. Deeper into
	a story I use them all the time, but to me there is
	a softness or weakness to the way a sentance feels
	when it begins (or ends) in a preposition.

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Well, I'm a different writer than you but that might be how I'd do it.  ^_^
I'm actually temped to play with the snake image that "hissing through the
grass" conjures, but I'd probably only mess everything up...

What about my own stories?  I've only published one so far to the FFML:

>From "Monkey Head Butting"
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"Oh!  What's this?"

Kasumi set her laundry basket down on the grass and picked up the strange
object lying at the edge of the stone path.  She turned it over.  It was a
metal broach of some sort, of a dull gray metal, perhaps pewter.  It was
covered in dirt, but from what she could see of it, the front depicted a
rather amusing little monkey's face.

"How cute!" she exclaimed.

	I think this is a really good opening.
	The first line of dialog says a lot in just three little words,
	and contains surprise, curiosity, and an inferance that there is
	the object of those emotions within view of the speaker.

	I like the mix of the sentances too, one long, one short, a medium
	and another long. This really breaks up the cadence that can creep
	into a paragraph.

	The word "Rather" sticks out a tiny bit, but that could just be me.
	I find "rather' to be be too ambiguous, well perhaps that's not the
	word, but to me 'Rather' somehow only amplifies  or raises 'amusing',
	and it adds no cultural tilt or meaning.

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Compelling?  I don't know, but I like to open my story with dialogue,
because it helps me get right to the point.  Nothing kills a reader's
interest more than wandering and meandering for several paragraphs before
you actually start going somewhere. 

	True. One story I privately C&Ced had an opening paragraph
	that felt like the author was discribing something they hadn't
	seen. It came off as lazy.

j.
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http://www.best.com/~jpalmer