We human beings must love rectangles. We make so many of them! Plate glass, envelopes, stamps on envelopes, sheets of paper to stuff in envelopes, cross-sections of containers, garage doors, non-garage doors, dominoes, playing cards, and on and on. Thinking outside the box is also thinking beyond the rectangle.

But rectangles, or near-rectangles, do occur in nature: cell formation, muscle striations, constellations, fault-slipped rock formations, and on and on. Some eye sockets are more rectangular than circular.

When I was a kid my mom collected S&H Green Stamps, filling in rectangular arrays with the rectangles-with-punched-out-semicircles of the stamps. When she turned them in for merchandise, it was a form of rectangle redemption; thus does my seemingly-random acrostic have some basis in fact.  But it’s a tenuous stretch. Luckily, when you stretch a rectangle, it remains a rectangle…

Here are the words:

Romance wears her nylons sheer
Eco-Friendly’s more austere
Creature comforts may be weird
Take an object choose a theme
Tell a truth that makes us beam
Any shape provides a step
Necessarily adept
Given one who wears a kepi
Leaps & bounds’ll come & go
Even-keelers use the known