I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

When my son was younger, he loved to collect what he called nature treasures.

Pine cones, acorns, stones, seashells.

I'd find them when I emptied his pockets doing the laundry.

I'd find them in my purses and coat pockets,

where he'd slipped them for me to discover myself.

He's in middle school now, and he's outgrown this for the most part, but not entirely.

Sometimes he still brings me a wildflower, an unusual feather,

or a stone he notices. And as a little wink and a nod to his younger self, he still calls them nature treasures.

My house is full of them now, on our many bookshelves, on the mantle in the living room, on the dressers in my bedroom,

feathers, rocks, dried flowers, scrolls of sycamore bark, which rolls up when it falls off the tree.

We even have a whole collection of abandoned bird's nests. The smallest can fit in the palm of my hand.

My friend Kate lives in Arizona, and she stopped by to visit us a few years ago when she was driving cross-country.

She brought with her some nature treasures from the desert.

So now our collection includes snake skin, dried cactus ribs, and some sun-bleached

bones. What kind of bones? I have no idea. They're so white, so clean. It's easy to forget what they are. It's easy to lump them in with stones

and gloss over the fact that they were part of an animal. Snake skin and feathers are shed by living

things, but bones? If you find bones, you're looking at part of a

creature that is no longer living. Still, they're beautiful, at least to me. I don't find them morbid.

Today's poem explores both the beauty and the brutality in decay.

Native grasses by Linnell Edwards.

Happenstance and following the animal path, I find the antler, shed in the parlance of the field, its fine tip angling to the sky.

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