Writing Boots

So my older sister who used to change my diapers and introduced the story of the turtle and the hare and sang all the Brigadoon songs to me emails to say she wishes she could get an e-mail every time I do a blog post.

I tell her I'm not sure how to figure that out, but point out that I do post every weekday. I add that I announce each new post on Facebook. (I don't bother telling her I also tweet my posts like crazy, because that could start a horrible boring conversation about why in the world people think other people care about what they're eating for dinner.)

She writes, "It's a heck of a lot easier to have it mailed to me."

Yesterday I tipped my cap to the schoolmates who remember all the quirky little things from our growing up.

You know what I remember from Hudson? Stranger things.

Like the late afternoon when my neighbors Kirk Morris and Glen Canterbury and I, maybe eight years old, were wandering through the forest near our houses, and came upon a disaster scene.

The wreckage was strewn all over the forest floor. Much of it was unidentifiable, it had been there so long. But there was broken glass, big pieces of wood, a woman's black-muddy shoe.

When we found the rusty steam locomotive's smokestack, Kirk, Glen and I knew what had happened. The train had crashed. No one had found it. And then the forest had grown up around it.

We walked out of the woods solemnly and never said a word to anyone about it.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I thought of it again and realized the preposterousness of a lost train wreck.

Which was far too late to stop believing in it.

That's the sort of thing that writers remember—and must remember to render.