The scrapbook

Seventy years old, the scrapbook

is in surprisingly good condition, filled

with yellowed news clippings, each

carefully cut, trimmed, pasted into place,

clipping from two newspapers, back

in the time when two newspapers

per town was the rule, when the news

was more yellowed than the clippings

would become.

Each clipping, the one from the Journal

and the same story from the Times,

is about fire, a fire, a specific fire, scores

of yellowed clippings about fires, scores

of fires that burned orange red and yellow,

yellow like the clippings they’d become.

The scrapbook and its contents at first

a mystery, a puzzle, until a memory

yellowed in time surfaces, a memory

of the time before I knew him, the time

before I was, the time he was both

a newspaperman and a firefighter,

one calling supplementing the income

of the other.

The yellowed clippings chronicle both,

the fires and the news, and had to be kept

or burned when memory failed.

Photograph by Society of American Archivists, Manuscript Repository Newsletter.