Number Thirty Eight

Objects link us to the past.  They are alive with the souls we love.  They let us travel back and forth between here and the time we come from.

The voices of my parents, at the moment of a gift -- this desk -- do not reach here.  There is no way to keep them except through the weight of every object we have in common.

I ask them to come to me -- in the table and the dresser, in the candlesticks and the yellowed papers.  Do I recognize their handwriting -- yes.  Do I see their pain -- yes.

Let me gather these things and live among them.  Quietly.  With love.  So I can hear what they are saying.