Not what you’d call light reading,
but gorgeous, weighty, late 1800s
leather volumes, on a shelf
in the guest bath where the tub
used to be.

Balzac’s complete works on one side,
Bulwer-Lytton’s novels on the other,
with stacks of old magazines
on a bottom shelf,

prominent among them
(and easily seen from the throne)
one headline trumpeting
“The Death of King George V,”
which puts that in 1936,
when the future queen was 10,
eventually becoming the longest-
reigning British monarch.

And you realize,
from your humble position,
how much history reigns
in this venerable ranch house
embedded in this rural California
acreage, how much literature and art
lives in this family whose
lives centered around horses
and riding and jumping,

the legacy that this queen,
who also lost her dear king,
is working to preserve—
her family’s magnum opus
not unlike Balzac’s, a record
of their time on the planet,
in the worlds of the two-legged
and the four- ,

and who still are.

•••

For Felicia Schaps Tracy and her family
of Emigrant Springs Ranch, Grass Valley,
California.