brown study

Well, it’s not the study itself that’s brown, but many of the small objects on the shelf are. Some are natural, others man-made; some were gifts, while others were picked up around the garden and elsewhere.

There’s the worn curve of a rusty horse shoe, the weightless fragment of a wasps’ nest, rosettes and fans from broken pine cones, a desiccated rose bud, a wind-worn gibber stone, insect wings, the hooped circle of an old copper penny, a broken agate ear-ring and a silver bell that makes no sound.

I suppose the coin and the bell must have come from my grandfather’s magic box, but I don’t know when or how I acquired them. The ear-ring has its own story, not to be told here.

I suppose the gibber stone must be the oldest, sent from Australia with a fragment of raw opal. The newest addition is the dragonfly wing, which the cats left for me on the verandah one morning last week.

Perhaps they all deserve their own stories or poems. Perhaps one day I’ll write some of them.