Leaves of a Book

Yesterday I pulled a long forgotten book down off the shelf and a folded paper fell out of it. I picked it up and opened a memory. There was a flower that had been pressed between the pages years before from a trip somewhere. It's a habit I started as a young wife to remember trips with a free souvenir. The first one was a Queen Ann's Lace picked from a roadside in Michigan. Next was a California Poppy from somewhere near Yosemite. There have been Red Maple leaves from Toronto and Rhododendron from Seattle. Even Cherry blossoms from a cold spring trip to Washington D.C. When my parents were moving from their long time city home to their farm, I walked around the garden picking leaves from my favorite plants. The funny thing is, there were always plans to frame or scrapbook these leaves and flowers but most of them never made it out of the books they were pressed into. So now they are little treasures that turn up whenever I pull an old book off the shelf.