I walk by with another armload and watch you scanning papers for signs of life. This life that passed. It’s funny how something like a postcard scribbled against the gunwales of a sloop off Wanganui can come to mean so much.
Vague hieroglyphics cast from the hands of an unknown people, place and time and distance referenced by what’s implied and not by what you know, a connection you only feel as paper in the hands. Still, you plumb each line and image like a sounder reading the depth of unknown waters, breathless for the tale born by echo. There’s a lifetime in these boxes, and in their faded inks and snapshots running to opaque, your father’s world fills itself in hint by hint, line by line, detail by detail, until finally, as the boxes disappear you assemble a keepsake, a shrine they so inelegantly call a ‘scrap’ book that’s become the only treasure you can take away.
They are the sum of us, the things we keep and in the hands of loved ones once we’re gone, these paper trails of living, retain their sense of self, sit there squarely in the palm, crooning old jazz ballads, moaning a particular blues, singing their histories.
