Circle of the Remembered

Dictionary Flowers

My grandmother
kept her family history
in a dictionary,
because Webster's stirred less controversy
than her mother's Protestant Bible
in her stepfather's Catholic household.
She pressed flowers between its pages,
mementoes she kept of her wedding,
and my father's christening,
and maybe her mother's funeral.
She never said which blossom
marked which event,
perhaps because she couldn't remember.

I don't touch them.
They might crumble.
Even the dictionary's pages
are brittle and likely to shatter.
I breathe gently when I look at them.
I don't want to sneeze
and scatter her memories
and the old definitions
among the dust mites
in this room she never saw.

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Updated last on:  2001/05/24