A HANDFUL OF MINUTES

It's been chilly recently, and the sudden cold has me thinking about a great invention. Imagine a long-term storage heater. You leave it out in a heatwave to absorb the sun, then when it's suddenly autumn, you just slowly vent out the free heat you collected... a month ago. Surely the boffins at NASA can make that happen, no? Laws of Thermodynamics you say? Pah. Piffling obstacles!

Anyway. The thought went further, and eventually led me to think about time. What if you could store time and then re-use it when  you needed it? That would be great right? I found myself loving what I'd called a 'handful of minutes' at lunchtime today, and the thought of being able to reuse moments, as madcap as it might have been, became a short poem...

A Handful of Minutes

I wish I could take
A handful of minutes
And store them away in a jar
I'd freeze them for later,
When they would be greater,
Than often things actually are

The minutes I'd take?
Those moments of wonder
When laughter was all that we knew:
The holiday weather!
That Christmas together!
When love was still shiny and new...

The lunchtime we shared
Beneath an umbrella
The night when we danced with the stars!
That handful of minutes
And everything in it
Still frozen in time in a jar

And then when the clouds
Come barrelling onward
And misery sweeps with a sigh
I'd thaw out those frozen
Old minutes I'd chosen,
Releasing them back to the sky!

I wish I could take
A handful of minutes
And store them away in a jar
But best to be present
In moments so pleasant
For that is what memories are