Stories Everywhere

It had to happen, I suppose, although, I had never expected it to, not while I still lived. I thought I’d run out of life, long before I ran out of stories.

That is the thing about stories, they can be found anywhere. They do grow on trees, but not only on trees, they grow anywhere you happen to look and they blow in on the breezes and sail across the seas.

Stories are all around us, and they are all inside us too. We know we all are a story that begins with our birth and ends with our death, but so many other things are stories too, from the way a butterfly opens its wings to reveal all the patterns of summer to the way the frost etches its beginning on a frozen window pane. There are stories in the way your fingers take the air and shape it, and how my feet stirred up the dust upon all the roads I travelled when I was young and found stories everywhere, especially in the beds of those women willing to pay for my stories with the only coin they had.

So, when the young ones came in from the cold the other day to sit by my fire and watch the dancing flames, it wasn’t too long before those faces turned to me, one after the other, and said: ‘Tell us a story, granddad.’

So I smiled my smile of an old one indulging the young, turned to watch the dancing flames, opened my mouth and nothing came out.

For the first time ever I had no stories to tell.

It has been that way every day since then, up until I sat you down and told you this.