Monday, July 19, 2021

The Weight of Words by Volume

 


I had my son pick up some plastic tubs

from the hardware store. Good sized

these, big enough to store dozens of

binders and books filled with my essays

and poetry.


The bins I had them in before were cram-

med full, and way too cumbersome for

anyone but perhaps an Olympic weight

lifter to handle.


I’d hate to be responsible for giving one

of my kids a hernia after I’m gone. They

may feel resentful enough that I would

bequeath to them such a bulky compila-

tion of work in the first place.


Ah, but the collection is a chronicling of

my life over the preceding forty years.

That legacy has got to be worth its

weight to future generations, no?


Anyway, I distributed my volumes a

bit more sensibly in order to make

the load less unmanageable—more

bins, each weighing less than the

fewer they replaced.


A lot of work for me even shuffling all

that stuff around. The kids might just

decide to throw the whole lot out. Who

would take all that time from their lives

to wade through reams and reams of

my stuff?


Hell, the prospect of that process boggles

the mind. I look at those binders in amaze-

ment, sliding the heft of their weight across

the floor.


The longer I go on, the more I think

and say, the more weighty the crop

of my legacy I leave behind becomes


Perhaps there are some words of wisodm

to discover;many mistakes and redundan-

cies most assuredly to uncover.


It would take the combine of someone’s

mind to separate the wheat of words from

the chaff.


I wonder, on the commodites market today,

what a bushel of words goes for anyway?

Suffice it to say, some words by volume carry

a hell of a lot of weight.



                  -30-


Chris Hanch 7-19-2020 (Rewrite 7-19-21)


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