Thanks to my sister - in - law Marion for filling this beloved kitchen cabinet with living history for all of us to admire and enjoy -- some old, some new, some American, some German, some daily artifacts, some treasured heirlooms -- all pulled together by Marion with her special skill and artistic eye.
It gives me as much joy as an adult to stand and admire Marion's fabulous display of collected treasures on these shelves, as it did when I was a child and Grandma Lindsey would let me pull open the drawers and sort through all of the writing paper and cards and address stickers that she kept in there.
Old Furniture
I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers.
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.
I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:
Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.
On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.
On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.
And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.
Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one today
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)
Marion's Beautiful Bay Window
Looking in at Dusk
No comments:
Post a Comment