There comes a time,

When it is time to cast,

Aside the trappings and the memorabilia,

The cards of appreciation,

The letters of thanks,

The pictures of people taken together,

Accumulated down the occupational years,

Which are part of a redundant history,

A period no longer relevant,

When the only thing left to gather on heaping files,

And settle on drawers full of history,

Is dust.

Times have now passed,

When that all burned brightly,

On occupational front burners,

When retirement was an experience and deep reflection,

On the years that had gone before,

But decades on,

With memories of what was, growing fainter,

It can be time to quit the accumulation,

To consign it to the tip of landfill waste,

To go back over time and to forever live on past memories,

Means that going forward as one should,

Cannot happen.

Memories of what went before,

Notwithstanding material reminders,

Burn less and less with the passing of years,

There are flashes of recall, revisitation to events,

But the mind and its internal reflections,

Move on with age, leaving behind what was,

Sometimes offering vivid but brief recall,

More often diffusing the sharpness of memories,

Dulled by age and tarnished by distance,

From happenings of the past,

Now history.