leftovers

there is a place--a cabin in the canyon--where i've gone since i was a small child. when i was three, i sat beside my father on the couch while he read us a story and i watched a little mouse dart across the stone hearth of the fireplace. when i was eight, i proudly unfolded the chaise lounge chair beside the stream and watched, horrified, when our puppy was taken by the current. then i marveled when he floated to my mother twenty feet downstream and pulled himself from the cold water. when i was ten, i corralled girlfriends into acting like my boyfriends in the woods. when i was fourteen, i sat in the backseat of the station wagon, holding a towel over the same family dog after a porcipine filled his mouth with its quills. when i was eighteen, i brought my boyfriend and showed him the woods. 

i was there when my father was on oxygen, i was there by the stream when my mother placed some of my brother's ashes beside a newly planted tree. i've been there for many an argument, for many games of scrabble and when many a year became new. there are hats and sweaters and jeans in the closet from all different eras. the entire place is like a time capsule except that time is not still. like the stream that runs along the property, everything just keeps moving and there is no snapshot that can hold all of this.