KEEPING

One autumn day many years ago I stole an antique book with a tan leather cover embossed in gold. The thin pages smelt of mice. It was in a pile of many heaped in a corner in a muddled room on the condemned third floor of a gothic sandstone castle awaiting remodeling including–and this is important–new wiring. It was a building I loved. When spring came, it all burned up. Nothing remained but a stone shell and they bulldozed that into the foundation hole and built a garage on the spot. I wish I had taken all the books. Henry Sheldon would have– and a juice glass from the dining room and a candlestick and the pump organ and a chunk of the chapel window woodwork and the horsehair sofa from the library and the doughnut jar from the kitchen and the mantlepiece from the common room and the shield that hung above it and the tower bell that fell and no one ever found and a railing from the front porch where we used to sit in the moonlight and sing or kiss. What is this about? — to love places, to care about things, to care what happens to them, to be wary of change, to want to remember, to want everyone to remember, to believe that history matters, to want to keep something, keep many things, the everyday bits: shoes and razors and appleboxes and doorframes, chairs and violins and cupboards and spinning wheels and dishes and cannonballs and hacksaws and drums and books that no one will ever read.