inheritance ovenbird She’s catalogued every item in her house. Two boxes full of photographs with descriptions of each artifact on the back and their most recent assessed value. We are made to look at every single picture and put our names on the things we want when she dies. The trouble is that we don’t want anything. She tells us the story of each thing she’s amassed over eight decades of living: silver cake forks that were passed down by a relative, a drawing her grandfather made of his wife a hundred years ago, vases from Iran, crystal trinkets and glass bowls, a chamber pot from China, a four hundred year old ceramic cup, an eiderdown of unknown vintage (probably home to the largest colony of dust mites on earth), dozens of paintings of naval vessels, chairs too delicate to sit in, a console stereo purchased sixty years ago, wine glasses from the Georgian era, hand made rugs, hand towels she embroidered as a child…on and on it goes…so many THINGS that carry her own history, her own memories, and mean nothing at all to me. She clings to it all. As if littering our shelves with dusty trinkets will make her immortal. There will be little left to haggle over when I’m gone. Some paintings, some photographs, some records, and a lot of words. So many words inked in cursive code that children aren’t even taught to read these days. Most of what I will leave behind is a story—a record of my mind as it splayed itself over my allotted years. Will anyone want these words with their rusted blades, still sharp enough to wound? Or, when it comes to it, would it be better to let them burn? 260412 what's it to you? who go blather from