The Appeal of Antiques

The intriguing comfort of an imagined past is entered through objects the same way we continue the present but without nostalgia Parents so long for happiness they say one life is not enough and live through their children But children also live backwards through past candles crank telephones   carriages the ascendant animals that lived not in imagination but in Kansas and before there was an Oklahoma with its spotted sun In those days a metaphor for Hell was the corn sheller field corn shriven  shooting out cobs the grindstone   razor strop   even the ladder of progress from which Les Westfield slipped on a mossy rung though his son held the ladder and fell two stories: one the feudal structure of the family   two the harmonic of almost fatal necessity as the maple stump entered his hip along with the difficult remission of breath itself an antique whose furious elaborations mimicked the rose