Stories happen, or they’re found, or they’re built. Harvested, gathered, collected, constructed. Sometimes there’s an alchemy of memory and conversation. 
I wrote about waterfall words–in English and Spanish–in one of my earlier blog post, Iguazú Words. I was preparing for a trip to Argentina, thinking like a tourist (what are my must-sees?) and a teacher (how can I explain this? in what language?) and a hiker. Not a memoirist, but falls-nostalgaist, if there is such a thing. A collector of sorts. When we lived in Ithaca, we contemplated a falls-photo-moratorium, but it was never enforced. When we lived in the Andes, the falls were smaller, almost imaginary, but no less powerful in the mobile, twisting, repeating shifts of water.
After the Argentina trip, I wrote about the sound of the falls.
And then Ruth Horowitz responded to my Iguazú post. She remembered her own snow globe collection and having nowhere to store it after a move. She wondered if falls might be folded and stored in a drawer.
And I went back to that memory drawer and started to sort and arrange and unfold.
“Falls Only a Collector Could Love” is featured at Necessary Fiction
this week.