The Hoarder's Confession

We kneel low in November light,

the mind learning what endures,

chestnuts still warm from summer stored in shells,

pears heavy with their own sweetness.

To gather is to say I choose you.

To select the ripe from the withered,

to fill baskets with intention,

to know that winter will require this.

I collect the ordinary like currency,

the way morning fog sits in the holler,

how bread smells when it's almost ready,

the particular blue of December afternoons.

These are my harvest, my hoard,

the things I tuck inside the pages

of days that want to scatter themselves

like seeds across unmindful ground.

In the can house, jars line the shelves,

tomatoes bright as stained glass,

pickled beans standing at attention,

jam the color of July condensed and kept.

This is what we do against forgetting,

we gather. We preserve. We hold

the best parts close, label them,

store them where we can return.

But some things refuse the jar,

slip through the basket's weave,

laughter that scatters like pollen,

the exact shade of someone's eyes in candlelight,

the feeling of being completely, momentarily home.

These I gather differently,

not with hands but with attention,

not in baskets but in the soft

accumulation of a life lived awake,

where every small sweetness

becomes a bead on an invisible string,

and I am made of what I've chosen

to stoop down for, to carry forward,

to keep.