Prague, Writerly Remnants, and More Ghosts Kindnesses

Here's something I've learned along this writerly trail: Throw nothing away. Sometimes we have the words, the scene, the mood, the atmosphere, but we don't know what any of it means. The years go by and suddenly we know. Throw nothing that you write away.

Today, while working on this novel for adults, I remembered a short story I had written years ago that was based on a trip I'd taken to Prague. I'd written the short story. I'd flattened it to a poem. I'd based a (failed) novel around it. I wrote an essay. It never rooted in.

The rooting waited all these years and genres. It waited until dawn, today. It's a scene that begins in Prague, the land of puppets, where this photo was taken. It builds to something else—a winter moment between two lovers. Of course this was no cut and paste. Of course I had to think, and rearrange. But the seeds were there.

I excerpt the final moment here:

Once, when it snowed, he fashioned a sled out of handled serving trays and a piece of rope that he’d had coiled in the basement. He’d wakened her and wrapped her in blankets and carried her out into the night, where they were the only ones alive, it seemed, and the snow was new. She sat with her knees to her chin to stay afloat, which was how it had felt—like floating, past neighbors, past trees, upon the sled. He pulled her—a parade of two for no one—and the snow kept falling, all through that night, and his hair was white, an old man’s color, by the time he dragged her home. Marry me, he’d said, but she’d not answered, not then. She wasn’t ready. He left, he went away, but that time he returned. He brought her an azalea from a winter nursery. For spring, he’d said. A second chance.

On another topic altogether, I have been graced by Kathy of BermudaOnion and Melissa of BettyBooChronicles with beautiful, beautiful responses to Nothing but Ghosts. Oh, I do thank you both. I am running out of words.