Who Were They?

This is an interesting collection of items. The folded vellum card looks like a book and features golden bells and embossed holly detail. The items below were all folded into the card and paperclipped together.

The greeting reads:

Christmas would / always be welcome / if only because it / gives us a chance / to greet again, good / friends with whom, / somehow, we’ve gotten / out of touch

The inserts consist of three landscapes and a newspaper clipping of a poem.

From the Just Folks column by Edgar A. Guest. Guest was a well known poet popular in America for more than 40 years. His first published poem appeared in the Detroit Free Press in 1898. He was featured as a syndicated column in 300 or so newspapers, had a radio program and even a television series in the early 1950s. A collection of his works published in 1917 was titled Just Folks, and over his career he wrote some 11,000 poems.

The Gardener’s Task

In March I cut the roses back

Which took me years to learn;

I’d not in me the will to be

So ruthless and so stern;

And loving all the growing canes

I left them standing tall.

Unwise was I, for June went by

With scarce a rose at all.

 

I loved not wisely, but too well.

On many a stem I smiled.

To pruning loath I watched the growth

Of thorny shoots and wild.

I thought it tenderness to let

The seven-leafed branches stay

And didn’t know when wild stalks grow

They must be cut away.

 

Last March I cut the roses back

And bade them start anew.

With knife severe I stripped them clear

Of every growth untrue.

Now every branch a promise bears

Of roses soon to be,

And strives to tell in buds that swell

Its gratitude to me.

None of the landscapes have any notes or messages written on them. Based on the one forest scene having a copyright date in 1908, I’m guessing these are items someone had and they reminded them of home. The illustrations and poem may have been sent with the card, or intended to be mailed with the card, but then never mailed. We can never know, but the paperclips were very rusty, so these things have been together for a long, long time.