Pretty Lynne Writes

I don’t typically explain the thought process behind my stories, but for some reason I feel compelled to do so with my latest. It’s called “Dreaming of You.” 

Last year, I bought a small home built in 1950. The previous owner had lived there for 50+ years, had raised a family there, and then sold it when she needed to move into an assisted living facility. Her husband passed away 15 years ago. 

While stripping wallpaper and cleaning up the place, I got a sense of the family who had lived here. They wrote the events of a renovation on the plaster walls under the layer of wallpaper: mom sanded, dad took down a wall, brother helped, sister started dating a boy who she hoped to marry but they broke up on New Year’s Eve. The clues they left behind pointed to a tight-knit family. 

The backyard is treed and has a small waterfall and pond, and I have a lot of wildlife visitors here. I’ve noticed a plethora of birds, and especially one cardinal. 

This cardinal has been appearing for months at my patio door. Sometimes it taps on the door. It lands frequently on my car side mirrors, peering at its reflection. It favours a certain tree that overlooks the deck off my sunroom. 

Years ago, I worked with a woman who told me that cardinals are messengers from spirits. We were sitting in a different backyard and there were a lot of cardinals flying around. She asked me if I always had cardinals around me. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watching that cardinal tapping on my patio door, that conversation came back to me. 

I thought about the fact that the homeowner had left this home. What if the cardinal was the spirit of her late husband, and he didn’t realize she had gone? What if he’d sent this little messenger to keep an eye on his beloved? A little seed planted in the back of my mind. 

Due to some life circumstances, I’ve been experiencing waves of grief now and again. I did what I know how to do. I put that grief into writing. 

What came out was a story of a woman who feels very alone due to the death of her lover. She has begun dreaming of him; he visits her in her sleep and connects with her in the way they did when they were alive – by having sex. 

As I wrote, the words of the lover just flowed out of me as things I knew the character would want to hear. Her grief isn’t alleviated, because grief is something that isn’t lessened over time, but mitigated by beginning to live life around the grief. But she feels comforted by believing that her lover is always going to be there for her. She is reminded of him whenever she sees the cardinal in her backyard, or sitting at her patio door. 

When I asked writer and VA Benji2049 if he would voice the male character’s lines, he agreed immediately. It took me a while to be able to get the performance of the story I wanted, to have the sound right, but I am very grateful to him for lending me his voice for the narrative. It was a vote of confidence in my work I needed at the time. 

I’ve described how my writing process works as a kind of alchemy I’m lucky to be able to participate in. I usually don’t want to explain much about that process, because I enjoy just taking part in it. But this story feels different, somehow. I hope you got something from it, if you read it.

Find the story here.

Find the audio here.