Recently, after a difficult passage in his life, my friend Jeff bought a house in my neighborhood and moved in with his daughter, Maya, who is six. The house is on a steep hill, and last winter, when it snowed in Portland, as it almost never does, the City shut the street down, and the hill became, for a few sparkling afternoons, the best sledding hill in town. Hundreds of citizens showed up with inner tubes, cardboard box tops, and (this is a city of amateur sledders) hubcaps. My own daughter set up a hot cocoa stand and made a killing, until this dog came along and whacked his tail at her wares, spilling everything all over the snow. The whole escapade remains a happy memory gleaming white in our minds.

So the housewarming present was a no-brainer: I bought Jeff and Maya a Flexible Flyer sled—and then, just to be a ham, I left it on their doorstep without a card and wrote two words beside it, in chalk, on the concrete floor of the breezeway: OPERATION ROSEBUD. The words were a nod to the film Citizen Kane; the sled that Kane rode in the halcyon days of his boyhood had the word Rosebud painted on it. Jeff would know this (he makes films for a living) and he would, I was sure, see my hand in the wry prank. I must admit that I thought the graffiti was a stroke of brilliance.

But the problem was, the letters B-U-D jutted out from under the breezeway. They were exposed, and it rained. And when Jeff and Maya came home, they encountered chalked words OPERATION ROSE.

I didn’t know this, but Rose is the name Maya goes by at school. And so for a couple days Jeff and Maya scratched their heads, flummoxed as to which school friend had brought them a sled. They didn’t call me; I began to worry that the sled had been stolen.

Finally, I called Jeff and fished for a thank you: “Um, did you find anything unusual on your doorstep?” He laughed when I told him of the vanished B-U-D. We blamed the bewilderment he’d endured on my editor—in this case, the rain. But now I realize the story’s maybe more complicated–and not about editing, but writing.

So often when you write a word down, you have a precise sense as to what the word means. It conjures up a very particularized sea of associations, and you set it down on paper in the hope that it will plant the same associations, more or less, in the mind of the reader. But you’re throwing your words out into the world, to be preyed upon and messed with by forces you have no control over and reinterpreted by people whose lives you don’t know. How could I ever have guessed the rain would come along and change my movie reference into a kid’s nickname? Trying to communicate things in words is an elusive and abstract enterprise.

Luckily, though, there is nothing abstract about the sled. It is new and it is shiny, with red metal runners, and come winter that sucker will fly.