We’re called the keepers

They say we’re called the keepers

Born with greedy fingers and soft tissue, we pull the world inward and allow it to mark unshaven shins with bruises the periwinkle of forget-me-nots

Hiding in the in-between, neither here nor there, we collect and preserve and maintain what would otherwise be lost as ephemera

Wood paneled walls covered in layers of wallpaper, a topography map of peeling florals and different shades of greens, a reflection of every change

Each doorway bears heights

The ink scrapes atop little heads, recording for posterity the millimeters stolen in the night

Steamer trunks with tarnished brass, straining against their contents

Sagging cardboard boxes, inhaling the humidity of each July night

A perpetually growing library, of scrapbooks and journals and receipt paper bookmarks, of long forgotten biology notes, and illegible shopping lists

The hum of an old television, holding the static tightly against its screen

Crackles whisper against fingertips as home videos play silently

A fifth birthday in 1997, for a little girl who wouldn’t see the next millennium

A homecoming football game in a small town in East Texas

A Thanksgiving dinner that is now a table of ghosts, passing ridged cranberry sauce with hands that no longer hold warmth or babies or other hands

Someone must dust the shelves and update the inventory and carefully box away the moments not meant to be revisited

There are baskets of report cards and bouquets of origami-folded notes passed between generational schoolgirls

There are recipes, with amendments scribbled in the margins, torn from Good Housekeeping magazines and there are carefully tended to piles of baseball cards and stuffed teddy bears and coins with no monetary value past their faces

The inside of a closet has walls etched with the initials of clandestine loves, and a floor coated in a thin film of salt from winter boots that knew the outline of every sibling’s feet as they grew

The wooden dowel bar bows, strong oak curving beneath the weight of so many lives lived, memorialized in fur coats and cheerleading uniforms and coveralls stained with oil

Warm chocolate, winter spices, the lemon of cleaning products

Decades old book pages and the faint powdery scent of Nantucket Briar

Magnolia blossoms, cedar drawers, and the bite of a January morning

It all gathers within four walls, where it is reaped but never culled,

Lovingly tended to with a labor that knows no rest

By someone who keeps, but never makes

Whose memories are never their own