The Lost Snowflake

When I was about 11 years old, I wrote a book of poems titled “Snowflakes.”

I had one of those soft cover compositions books, and I covered the front with black construction paper. I don’t remember how I did the title, but I cut out several snowflakes to paste on the front. My reasoning was that no snowflake is the same as another, so my poems would all be different.

The one essential thing that I thought I lacked was a poem titled Snowflakes. I just could not come up with one. I wrote a lot of poems, but none about snowflakes. I thought of maybe using the poem The Snowflake by Walter De La Mare, which I absolutely loved and was the inspiration for my book, but knew that would be cheating and that I would never really be satisfied with doing that.

I did several pages of poetry and then lost interest. Every once in a while I would see my book and lament that I had no snowflake poem. Over time the book was lost, but I never forgot about it or my lack of a title poem.

Fast forward about 30 years…

I woke up in the middle of the night and the words suddenly started coming. The perfect snowflake poem! I got up and sat at the dining room table and wrote out my poem. I worked on it for maybe an hour or so and was so pleased that I finally had my snowflake poem. Now all I had to do was get together some “real” poetry and I could cobble up a book. This was the time period when my kids were young teens though. Angst. In major portions. It’s also when my parents started really going downhill and needed more hands-on tending. Time went by. A few years went by. I suddenly realized I had no idea where my poem was. I started going through all my files (these were still the dinosaur years…no computer…REAL files in REAL file cabinets) and did get some major weeding done as far as recipes, crafts, etc…

No Snowflakes. I could see the scrap of paper I wrote it on so clearly in my mind. I knew the shape of the paper. I went through the files again and tidied up even more. No poem. Of course I can’t remember ANY of it, not even one line. I just know it was perfect and I loved it and was proud of it.

Now you can print up your own books and bind them and actually make something that looks nice on a shelf. And now that I’ve been doing altered books, I KNOW I could make a knock-out book of poems. But not about snowflakes…

By the way, the snowflake I posted here I made from a wonderful website called Make-A-Flake. Check it out! http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/