shelf

This new thought. It entered my mind after vegan chocolate chip cookies and a mug of soy milk for dinner. Two cups of tea. The sky coming down as snow. I'll collect people on the shelves of my heart. Building bookcases with wood gathered from the swollen rivers the beavers helped raise. The rivers they raise after collecting trees, dragging them to the trickle of water, packing them together with mud. The trees that gathered sunlight in the summer, leaves in the fall, snow in winter, the pungent white flowers in spring. Where they sprouted from the earth. The earth that gathered their ancestors, turned them back into soil. I'll gather the sturdy, chipped branches gnawed to points at the ends and hammer them over the edges of two by fours. Varnish. Let dry. Fill my shelf full of people and trees and small mammals changing geography. I'll thumb through their pages. Understand them. Never forget them. Collect the profound details scattered in their lives and make stories of my own. Put them in a book. Pass them on for others to read.