August 5, 2025

Collectors’ Day at Community Hall

There are a dozen paperweights with flowers inside them.
In the back, three rows of teddy bears. Red Sox memorabilia,
toy ceramic shoes. A wooden case holding thirty souvenir pens.
Etchings of men on horseback. Vintage dolls. Tiny lighthouses.
I’ve stacked my own table with one hundred and twenty-five potholders
I made in the five-month span between an election and the arrival of spring.
Whatever it takes to get us through is one way of looking at it.
Obsession is another. Or foolishness. But in the room, if you were in it,
you’d see only devotion, that great resistance against despair. Try again,
I want to tell the doomsday hawkers, disaster jockeys whipping reins
above our tender skin. You missed.

Instead, I listen to a story from David about his first loom and drink
a half-can of tangerine seltzer and LuLu beside me snips loose threads
and we talk about the sound of wind chimes and what it feels like to tell
the truth and Diane says I have good color sense and Deirdre floats
an armful of smiles in my direction and Steve takes photographs
all afternoon. Then my five-year-old neighbor comes to make new
arrangements of my piles and my wife arrives to take me home
and I put my folding chair on the long stack at the far wall and Linda,
who is carefully packing up her collection of very breakable glass vessels
says I’m lucky to have such an easy thing to carry, and I say, Yes. Yes I am.