Oh old-fashioned cookie tins lightly engraved with a three-masted ship in full sail on a rough ocean, or sometimes a Currier and Ives shed and farmhouse with smoke curling from a chimney—I can't remember the taste of those thin biscuits layered in fluted paper cups inside, only that they were meted out with care so they could last beyond novelty or our hunger for something that smelled vaguely of another land. But after the last crumb was shaken out and the bottom wiped clean, my mother and aunt vied for one to repurpose into a sewing box: embroidery floss, hooks and eyes, little books with rows of needles stabbed into their raised cardboard shelf; and on top, their prized pair of scissors that I should never use, even for cutting paper. When they sewed together, heads bent close under a lamp, I put a thimble on each of my fingers in turn, or sorted buttons. They were so young then; not yet feinting or swinging, the waves of rancor in the years ahead not yet a sea pressing its claims on the shore; the vessels they bore— bringing either sustenance or ammunition, spools of thread, bales of linen.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.