This week begins our January series, Life in View, exploring how to look at our lives with fresh perspective. Week 1 focuses on Re-View: examining the past year without grading ourselves. Today’s poem finds a year’s worth of receipts folded in a wallet, each one a timestamp that records without judging.
🎧 Hear the poem aloud or read at your own pace—whichever speaks to you today.
The Receipts
By Scott Tilley
Cleaning the wallet, I find them folded,
faded, soft as cloth from handling,
timestamps of a year I barely noticed leaving.
February 14, the florist on Eau Gallie.
Twelve dollars for what I hoped would say
what I couldn’t find the words for.
March 3, the hardware store, two keys copied.
One for the neighbor, one for the friend
who never did come stay.
April, a Tuesday, the coffee shop
on the morning of the interview.
Four dollars. I got the story.
June 19, the grocery run:
ice, napkins, plastic cups.
The cookout that became a thunderstorm.
August, the vet. I don’t need
the numbers to remember that one.
Some receipts you keep in your body.
October 12, the nursery.
Three mums for the front porch,
the color of something ending.
November, the bakery, the morning after
the call that changed nothing and everything.
I don’t remember what I ordered. I remember the warmth.
December 30, the gas station,
filling up for a year
that was already behind me.
The receipts don’t grade the purchases.
They don’t ask if the flowers worked,
if the keys found their purpose,
if the mums survived the frost.
They just say: you were here.
You were here. You were here.🪞 Poet’s Note
I found a crumpled receipt in my coat pocket last week. November, a bakery I don’t remember visiting. But I remember November. The receipt didn’t care what I was going through that morning. It just recorded the transaction: one item, six dollars, 8:47 a.m. Sometimes that’s all we need from our witnesses. Not judgment. Just presence. Just proof we were there, bought the coffee, kept moving.
✍️ Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today