Old Songs

Written for MLMM Monday Wordle;
the prompt words are shown below.
Here’s where the prompts took me.

ring, softly, fell, never, nostalgia, wrong,
pain, barrel, radio, danced, tea, only

The rain fell softly against the kitchen window, the kind of rain that makes the whole world feel far away. Midge stood at the stove, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea as she absentmindedly tapped her wedding ring against the side and the radio on the counter hummed its way into her quiet evening.

Then she heard it …. the opening bars of their song. The one from the summer they met, when she was twenty-six and everything in her life felt like a full barrel of possibilities.

“Harry, come here,” she called. Not urgently, just a request.

He appeared in the doorway in his slippers and old cardigan, and she watched his face change …. a slow softening, the way a man looks when something familiar catches him off guard.

“I remember every word of this song,” he said.

“Me too.”

He crossed the kitchen, took her mug and set it down …. and they danced …. slowly, slightly out of step, the way you can only dance with someone you’ve been dancing with for forty years. It was never about being graceful. It was only ever about this: her cheek against his collar, his hand at her back.

The nostalgia in the room was almost a physical thing, warm and bittersweet, pressing against the ribs.

“Do you ever think about the pain?” she asked quietly. The years they’d lost to stubbornness, that time they nearly threw it all away.

“Sometimes.” His arms tightened. “But I don’t ever think it was wrong. Look where we ended up.”

She smiled against his shoulder. Outside, the rain fell softly, and the radio played on, and the tea went cold, and none of it mattered in the least.

NAR©2026
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This is “Dance With Me” by Orleans

MLMM Monday Wordle #477

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}