The Old Wedding Album

The young couple who bought the old house
were left having to get rid of all the left-overs,
as the husband called them -- the realtor
had told them this was usual with estate sales:
the owner was usually old, usually a widow,
-- so all the stuff the now dead couple had
gathered over 40 or 50 or 60 years would have
to collected and taken away. Once Goodwill
might have come for it but it costs too much
nowadays to send out the big trucks -- so now
you must pay somebody to come and get it,
the realtor told the young people -- but, hey,
you got the place prettty cheap, right?

So they went room by room, this pair of
love birds barely off their honeymoon.
At first it was a game -- look at this, one
would say! What crap! the other would
exclaim, or what the heck is that, if
the thing seemed old, pre-cyber age.
Don't know, toss it, was the usual reply,
and happily they threw away old dishes
and clothes and broken lamps and a whole
lot of furniture: tables and chairs and
something called a dresser, all carried
to a large trash container waiting
patiently like a visiting sarcophagus
to swallow a once lived life ...

And atop the heap of unwanted things
lay an unopened wedding album,
with a professional's photos of
a handsome young man and his
beautiful young bride, resplendent
in white, each smiling as though
it were the happiest day of their
still fresh lives ...