A Vagabond Hour

 

It was just an afternoon in a blur of afternoons

scattered in a line like a row of troll dolls.

Where is the screen porch where we played

when an hour was long and a year eternity?

Where are the mud pies we put in tins?

Where are those houses, those girls, that summer?

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned. 

On a steel rack at the foot of the basement stairs

was a parade of winter coats in plastic sheaths

crowned brightly by hat boxes across the top.

One yellow box had a silhouetted carriage on the lid

and we swooned at the idea of suitors arriving 

as we stood tip-toe on a fold-out stool, snooping.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

Best friends, families, afternoons, troll dolls

all scatter, our solid center become fragile 

bric-a-brac. Today a package came, and in it

a yellow hat box, and in the hat box, the scent

of my late aunt's house, my childhood, and an afternoon

in summer 1966, perfectly preserved and vivid.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

________

for Dverse MTB: Boxing Clever to The Bop.

One day I received a package containing a book (which I changed to a hat box in the poem). The book was inside a plastic sleeve, and when I took it out and opened it, I was instantly back in my aunt's house as a child. I think the book had been kept at some time on a shelf where someone had used the same furniture polish as my aunt used. In any event, I buried my smiling face in the pages and breathed in that long-forgotten scent.  As for the troll dolls, mudpies, screen porches and coat rack with the yellow hat box on top, that was all stuff that I remember from childhood.

Image at top found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Grateful Dead Box of Rain