The box itself is cardboard – but a
lively print decorates it’s surface to fool perspective buyers.
Spread over the contents is a plastic
bag that once held a trinket I bought in Gettysburg. The trinket is gone, but the bag with colored
pictures and words remains.
There is a stack of letters tied in
ribbon. I haven’t rid myself of them yet. They are too heavy with memories for me to
lift.
There is a dried daisy chain that always
makes me smile. She was so good at
making these, then looping them around her friend’s heads. Entwining hearts and weeds in one fluid
motion.
Driftwood yes, from a beach I’ve
forgotten. How lucky I am to visit them
often enough for them to run together in my mind.
A string of yellow beads, yellow
being my favorite color once. A
thoughtful gift that lasted longer than the obsession of youthfulness.
These all tell of a little girl,
pieces from her life. She was innocent, happy,
pure. But those days are gone, forever
perhaps. Someday someone might come and
put that sweet spirit back where it was before.
Not all of these things can be erased, the ocean breeze, the thoughts
that accompany yellow. Pieces, small
and insignificant, but they are the pieces of a whole.
"Entwining hearts and weeds in one fluid motion."
ReplyDeleteNice stand-out line.
"...the thoughts that accompany yellow."
That's even better.
"Pieces, small and insignificant, but they are the pieces of a whole."
Intended or not, that line sets up reverberations in a reader. We keep wanting it to read "parts of a whole" and rewrite it mentally, and then realize that, no, "pieces" is the right word, first and last, and that the repetition is 'plangent,' a rarish word that you might apply to a lot of your stuff.
It is a rare word, so rare that I got three meanings: resounding, lamenting, and melancholy. The dictionary said it was like the sounding of a bell.
ReplyDeleteSounding of a bell was what I was thinking, but a soft bell, not a resounding one--an echoing, lamenting, and melancholy tone. But without ever getting maudlin.
ReplyDeleteThat's good. I'd hate to think that I get all foolish with the melancholy tones of my writing. I think that having "melancholy" in your writer's arsenal is useful, but not if it gets whiny.
ReplyDelete