— for my grandparents
His scent still lingered in the black heat of his darkroom, where he spent decades developing his meticulous world of insects and flowers. Boxes of slides lay piled on top of one another. Holding one to the lamplight, I entered a different universe, where moths silently cling to the stems of roses. In the bedroom we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes and then the slender, fragile model planes he had built from scratch and hand-painted bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings. And in every drawer, countless notes she had written to him. He must have saved them all, each one wedding the mundane to a private world only the lovers themselves could know: Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.