There isn’t time to do everything, so don’t save the best for last.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch found a hickory nut in the gutter this morning and spent an hour deciding where to bury it, and by the time he had settled on the roots of the big maple a jay had taken it. I used to admire that kind of care. For years I held back the good lines in a poem until the end, on the theory that a reader earns them, and the magazine folded before I ever sent the poem. There isn't time to do everything, so don't save the best for last. The bluebirds in the yard eat the ripe berry first and leave the hard ones for whoever comes after, and I had always read that as greed. Switch sat under the maple a long while afterward, not angry, just reconsidering the gutter.