Keepsakes

I wonder how many of you will hold up your hands, and admit to keeping items that come under this label? I can think of a few oddities I've squirrelled away over the years: a recipe written out by an aunt on a tiny page torn from her pocket diary, and slipped into my cookbook for 'safe keeping': an icing sugar rose that adorned a chocolate Easter egg, given me by my first boyfriend: petals from a bunch of anemones given me by my brother, just before he sailed to New Zealand with his family.

Sometimes, these morsels of tactile memories, after being cossetted for years in various nooks and crannies of cupboards or drawers, one day elicit the response 'Why on earth did we keep that?', and get unceremoniously consigned to the scrap heap. Other times, we smile fondly at them, and return them to their hiding place, still looking upon them as treasured keepsakes.

Those faded anemone petals fell into this last category. I had originally pressed them between layers layers of paper, not in a proper flower press, but simply between the pages of a weighty tome on my bookshelf. I'd intended to use them, once dried, in a collage, but needless to say, this turned out to be another 'roundtuit' pipe dream. They got transferred to an envelope, and spent many years in a box file with receipts, agreements and other legal 'stuff', only coming to light intermittently.

Eventually, their fragile, veined paperyness, had me inspired enough to write the following lines as a more lasting memento of their original glory.

Retrospect

Dreams of youth
become faded with age,
like bright flower petals
that dim as they dry
between interleaved paper
meant to preserve them.

And yet those pale petals
live on in the mind
to bloom again,
as memory recalls
the hour of their plucking.