Today I decided to stay in Michigan for the winter. It was a good decisions. Yes! Michigan winters are brutal, but they have their own raw kind of beauty – a sharp-edged beauty that glistens during the white months. Granted, it isn’t for everyone, but a few of us are privileged to witness it from the edge of a cliff overlooking the windward shore of the magnificent Great Lakes. The eagles seem comfortable here, and so do I. I watch them glide and soar and slip through the cold air, looking for whatever they can find on the beach. They’re likelier to go after dead salmon that wash up on the sand than they are to hunt for life food. The seagulls fly away in all directions when an eagle lands on their lunch. The eagles seem to be spectacularly bored by me. Sometimes they swing their gaze in my direction, then blink disdainfully once or twice and turn their faces south. Or north. Anywhere but toward me.
This is where I belong, at least for now, and my enthusiasm for this profoundly correct decision triggered me to hustle right smack back to the computer “garage” (known by most as my hard drive) where I park things I’ve written. I went into the documents file looking for… I know it’s in here somewhere…
Found it! “It” is several pages of copy I cut out of my novel “Deborah” over a year ago, maybe two. When I originally cut it from the novel it occurred to me that it might make a decent short story. It was rough, to be sure. It needed re-working, buffing, and nit-picking to turn it into a short story with a clean finish. But the infrastructure looked promising, and even as I closed the file way back whenever-it-was, it seemed like something I didn’t want to leave behind.
I found the file saved as “CharlesLongWalk.” I’m going to turn it into a short story.