Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Time Out

When a vacation house claims you, you need to have some memory of the things you had planned to do there.

The easy time that settles around you with each day erases any merely easy agenda.

It will be good if you had thought to bring with you a bundle of old letters to re-read. It will be good if you had opened a favorite book of poems upon your arrival and left it on a bedside table. It will be good if there is a framed photograph standing on a surface where you have been able to pass it every day.

A clock in a store may have made you think of hours and shadows travelling across your floor at home.

Slowly restored to parts of yourself in these vacation rooms, you do things that surprise you.

You momentarily don't mind the world that will be waiting for you upon your return.

Schlabaugh clock at Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet

2 comments:

Ur-spo said...

I have a box of old letters, they are for when I am old and want to remember.
I feel sad youngerfolks will not have a box of letters.
only email thoughts, no longer recalled or saved.

John said...

Among other memorabilia discovered in my parents' house, I located my letters to them from my twenties. Long-distance phone calls had been too costly to justify at that time when I was in graduate school. I plan soon to do a re-reading of those letters.