Three Acorns

I have before me three acorns in various lush shades of brown: mocha, mahogany, and a cream color.

They all seem to have incised in their undersides a circle of what looks like print, in an alphabet simultaneously familiar but unknown to me. 

I cannot read the message.

One of these acorns was recently given to me  by my husband after a walk in the woods. 

It had a flaming orange top that spilled over onto the brown nut. 

It was as though mango frosting was dripping down the sides of a chocolate cake. 

I admired it and placed it in the kitchen window sill with my two other less colorful acorns.

In the morning, I went to examine it again. 

But it had vanished. 

I searched around the sink, thinking that it had fallen off. 

But it was gone or, rather, the orange frosting had disappeared. 

It had turned into a plain brown acorn like its comrades.

Now, if I were given to allegory, this is a ready-made one. 

Objects of this world may lose their surface glitter, although they retain a deeper spiritual beauty: I love the browns and the shiny ridges of these acorns. 

They are a delight to run the fingers over. 

And their familiar but foreign writing on the bottom seems like the hallmark of the divine artificer who made them.

Alas, however, we no longer live in an age of allegory. 

Yet I cannot get that foreign but familiar alphabet out of my mind. . . .