I take what people give me,

The leftovers,

The discarded hand-me-downs.

I hodge podge things together:

A contemporary modern white couch,

A dirt brown recliner,

A cherry butler serving table,

An early 1900s antique oak dresser.

I make a collage of furnishings

And piece items together,

The sentiment far more important than the color scheme

Or similar woods

Or style of furniture.

We don’t need to match--things don’t need to be so perfect,

And like the furniture in my house, I take those who don’t fit:

The one who stutters--

Words tangle, too difficult to flow,

The one who is crippled--

A brace and a lift evens out the limbs,

The one who cannot hear--

Scarlet fever the thief,

The one who is legally blind--

Magnifying glasses enable sight.

I piece together a medley of ears, tongues, legs, eyes

And like my furniture, dissimilar,

But perfect

And not disposable.

Ann Hajdu Hultberg is a retired high school English teacher and college composition instructor. Ann writes nonfiction stories about her family, especially focusing on her father’s escape from Budapest, Hungary, to the United States. Her essays have been accepted by over a dozen magazines and journals including Drunk Monkeys, Persimmon Tree, Fevers of the Mind, Mum Life Stories, Thorn Literary Magazine, and various publications on Medium where several of her stories were editors' picks.