When I purchased my first sewing machine, I was coming off a year of doubt.

Twelve months out of graduate school, I decided to accept that my dreams of writing would never pay a bill. I had found myself plagued with the inability to finish the projects I started, increasingly aware of the professional opportunity costs that came with sinking myself into words that would likely never be published. I was brimming with ideas, but each time I began to lay them down on paper, they appeared flat, lifeless, a pale imitation of what I thought I’d crafted so well in my head.

So I swapped in that energy for a job updating the Twitter account for a local nonprofit, assuming that letting go of my hifalutin creative aspirations would be a reprieve. But rather than free, I felt swallowed, detached. I understood I needed a new outlet, one that would touch the part of me that posting content could never reach. That posed a problem. With writing firmly cut from my life, what to put in my idle hands if not notebooks and pens?

I had a good ear for music, but my hand-eye coordination was shoddy at best. My fingers weren’t fast enough for the instruments I longed to play. I was too much of a perfectionist to draw, and while I knew how to knit one and purl two, the thought of knotting endless rows of yarn bored me. I remembered how to thread a sewing machine, but making clothes felt unpredictable and overwhelming. As a teenager I’d once tried to freestyle a pair of pajama pants; the unlined, cotton legs ended up only two inches in diameter, unfit for even my old dolls.

I followed some quilters online and had become interested in the methodical, quiet work. The most arresting pieces were made by hand quilters, women who labored over seas of fabric as they pulled each stitch tight against the last. A single class in the ancient task taught me that I didn’t have the patience for that deliberate, time-consuming ritual. And so I bought a machine, a lightweight beginner model with the Project Runway logo stamped on the side. Every time I set it up, I felt silly, unserious, unencumbered—exactly what I was looking for.

I compiled books on classic and modern quilting styles for inspiration and puzzled through guides to color theory before sketching out some simple blocks I might make myself. I found that I loved the math of it all, calculating fractions of inches for seam allowances and binding strips. I would trace all these computations onto multicolored fabric flattened under clear acrylic rulers designed for the task.

Predesigning the projects emboldened me. I created a strict plan of execution that left no room for the creeping doubt that consumed me halfway through writing an essay. Quilting inverted the typical creative process into one that mirrored my own, allowing me to front-load my energy and excitement into the planning rather than the execution. I created guides that I could almost mindlessly follow, the pre-cut pieces arranged to correspond with a diagram on my cheat-sheet, a paint-by-numbers made of fabric. By the time I stepped on the pedal and began to feel the machine hum under my outstretched hands, I didn’t need to be creative anymore. I could give myself over to the meditative quality of its technicalities: keeping the stitches evenly spaced and in a straight line; folding down the appropriate edges and corners; smoothing it all under the weight of stainless steel and hot steam.

Most surprisingly, I kept at it, even when a single quilt took months. A wall hanging gave way to a baby blanket, and soon I was designing a queen-sized bedspread. As always, I added my fractions, purchased new rolls of cotton and batting, cut each piece with angular precision. But I soon found this project pressed my Bravo-stamped machine to its limits. The needle shook each time it pierced the layers of textiles, and the blanket had to tightly contort to squeeze under its shallow arm.

Three months into the pandemic, I turned 30. After witnessing these battles and my continued commitment, my husband thoughtfully upgraded me for my birthday. He gave me a Juki, an industrial machine at least twice as heavy and four times as expensive as my first. We’d recently moved into a new house, and I hadn’t yet unpacked my first silly, unserious machine. In the crisp quiet of that early spring, I’d started scribbling again, almost compulsively, with more deliberation than I’d ever previously been able to muster. My mind wandered and refocused. As the pandemic continued to surge forth, I didn’t unpack my Juki either.

Four years later, I finally slipped off its soft plastic coverlet. So much had changed since I first sat down with my sweet Project Runway model: I’d built a business, sold my writing, and developed an outline of a book. But on a Friday morning in late September, I wasn't thinking about any of that. Instead, I sat down at my dining room table and reminded myself how to thread the machine.

I can’t say what came over me. I don’t think quilting had been on my mind. But my hands drifted, and my mind followed. Rooting around in a box of old scrap fabric, I pulled out a piece of naturally dyed cotton, a length once made purple and yellow with cabbage and onion skins that had almost entirely faded back to white. This cotton wouldn’t have been suitable for one of my old projects, but it felt perfect now.

I laid down my acrylic ruler and began to cut without planning or math. Somewhere, somehow, I’d freed myself from the rigors of perfection, from the path where I retained all of the control but none of the outcome. Here, with no guide, I realized I could make absolutely anything.

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Katie Carter King is a writer and researcher based in Atlanta, Georgia. She founded Magpie Projects in 2021, a boutique research consultancy that develops factually rigorous historical narratives for journalists and brands. A child of the Georgia Piedmont, she has also lived in Massachusetts, Mississippi, and California. Drop her a line at katiecarterking.com.

Deven and I sat side by side, our silence broken only by an occasional squeak as I nervously shifted in the swivel chair. A chilly spring rain tapped at the windows, running down the glass and distorting the view of the Hudson shore. Opposite us, Steve, the divorce mediator, peered down at an open folder on the massive resin-coated slab of walnut that served as his desk. You could serve a formal dinner for six around that thing, eight if you didn’t mind crowding your guests.

Steve ran his finger down the list in front of him, nodding and grunting a soft uh-huh at each item. When he got to the end, he raised his head and looked at me. “What about the jewelry?”

His question threw me. “Jewelry? What about what jewelry?”

“The jewelry,” Steve repeated. “It’s not on the list. Who gets the jewelry?”

Deven and I were there to discuss equitably splitting up the stuff we owned in common. I had tallied everything I could think of with material, sentimental, or practical value, inventorying furniture, books, pictures, dishes, even the contents of the liquor cabinet. I had some jewelry, of course, but I also owned jeans and dresses and a bathrobe. It never occurred to me that anything I wore would be subject to the division of property in our separation agreement.

Realization dawned. Steve wasn’t asking about my strings of glass beads or hammered copper earrings from a craft fair. He meant big-ticket items, an expensive watch or a hefty engagement ring. But the few pieces I had that qualified as serious jewelry clung to the bottom couple of rungs of that ladder. Plus they were things I had inherited—my mother’s wedding band, her mother’s modest engagement ring, a moonstone pendant that had belonged to my other grandmother—not gifts from Deven.

When we decided to get married, I didn’t ask for and wasn’t given anything to flash off my left hand. For wedding rings, we had picked wire-thin gold bands. Simple, subtle, nothing valuable enough to quibble over. Nothing to split because we each had one. Months earlier, I had ruefully stashed mine in the very back of my jewelry box.

For a quick moment, though, the mediator’s question struck a suspicious, even paranoid, nerve in me. I felt like Steve knew that a pirate’s chest overflowing with glittering swag lay waiting to be unearthed in the back yard, probably camouflaged by the compost pile. Had Deven had been holding out on me all these years, hiding gems and gold and other treasures that might have been, should have been, mine?

Wait.

Mud and gems and rain. Deven had once given me gems.

It was the first morning of our brief honeymoon, a drizzly day, chilly and gray for late May. Still, we set out on foot from the inn where we had spent the night, ready to explore the little Minnesota river town. We strolled up and down the streets, wandering into antiques shops, ducking into a cafe to warm ourselves with coffee. Back outside, we turned a corner and came across two men selling raw clumps of amethyst—my birthstone!—out of the back of a battered green pickup. They had hammered them out of a rock formation somewhere nearby, they told us. The amethyst-studded rocks, ranging in size from tangerine to football, were nestled on a pile of muddy tarps next to a produce scale; the men priced their wares by the pound.

Together, Deven and I picked out an angular hunk of rock. It was the dirty gray of the damp sidewalk under our feet, but veined with purple. Amethyst crystals jutted out, their facets sparkling like fireworks frozen in a July sky. My brand-new husband opened his wallet, peeled off some bills, and bought it for me. More paperweight than jewelry, the gift felt like a fairy-tale treasure mined by elves rather than by two enterprising men in grimy jeans. On that day and for years afterward, I prized this serendipitous find as an omen, an amulet, a promising portent for our freshly minted marriage.

“So the jewelry,” Steve prompted again. “What about the jewelry?”

“Nothing really to speak of,” I told him. “Nothing that needs to be included on the list.”

My honeymoon souvenir didn’t make the cut as marital property that needed to be divvied up. Nor did it pan out as a good-luck charm for a long and happy life together, but that’s a lot to ask of inert mineral, even when it’s bedazzled with purple crystals. Still, I continue to cherish my amethyst. I like seeing it on the bookshelf near my desk. I like cupping its cool heft in my hand. I like the reminder that once upon a time, two hopeful people loved each other enough to sign on for a lifetime together. Mostly, though, I like that it reminds me that pockets of magic lurk in the world, waiting to manifest even at the most unlikely of times. When you crack open an ordinary-looking chunk of rock, for example, or turn a random corner on a drizzly, gray, Minnesota day.

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Jill Rovitzky Black is an editor, writer, and inept but enthusiastic potter who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she struggles to keep weeds out of her garden and chaos out of her house. A lifelong wordsmith who most recently made her living by writing and editing medical education grants, scripts, and slide decks, she is currently working on a memoir about dealing with her husband’s behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, which remained undiagnosed until after his death.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“It started with a pair of baby shoes…” by , The Keepthings

“Living in The Objecthood.” by , The Great Perhaps

“3 Keepers & a Regret: Laurel Cummings” by , Retail Therapy on Substack

“Confessions of an Obsessive Collector” by , From Java with Love

“Why Am I Carrying Around 3,856 Photos of a Stranger?” by , Lovely Girl

Starr didn’t know at the time that the repairs would ultimately take two years, so she did her best to take what she thought she’d need for several months, living out of two suitcases. Find out how Starr made her temporary stays feel like a version of home, whether at a corporate hotel and during house sits and sublets, thanks to yard sales and Buy Nothing groups, which sentimental items she left behind, what it felt like to be reunited with her belongings, and how the experience has made her look at her possessions in a new light.

Click on “Transcript” on the top right to read an auto-generated transcript of this episode.

About our guest:

Lara Starr is a publicist, Substacker, Charm School Principal, sometime cookbook author, former radio producer, low-key activist, and semi-pro thrift shopper. You can learn more at larastarr.com, and follow her antics on Substack, It’s Kind of Long Story…

Lara Starr’s website

Charm School with Lara Starr

Lara’s Substack

Instagram: @larastarr

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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I had the idea on the treadmill. I was visiting my parents during the Christmas holiday and found myself jogging in the “theatre tread” room to a huge screen presentation of the movie A Christmas Story at the local gym. It had been a minute since I’d seen the movie, but when I saw the leg lamp make its famous appearance, I stopped the treadmill, adjusted my own artificial limb, and texted my friend: “we’ve got to make lamps out of my legs.”

We decided we’d make super high-end bespoke and bedazzled leg lamps. We’d get a welder. We’d attach old rusty yard art to the top, maybe animal antlers. We’d use the top of the outgrown running leg (one of which I was wearing while I had this idea), to hang a chandelier that we’d find at a thrift store. We’d wire them up and sell them on Etsy. We agreed this was our million-dollar idea: Leg Up Lamps.

I’ve been wearing a series of prosthetic limbs since I was four years old. The earliest legs were made of literal wood and metal hinges that needed to be oiled in the winter to reduce stickiness; the one I wore at six years old has a ketchup stain that wouldn’t come out, remnants of my grand idea to cover the leg in Heinz 57 “blood” and toss it through the basement window in order to terrify trick-or-treaters, which was hugely successful.

In the 90s I upgraded to my first hydraulic prosthesis, but like any equipment, artificial or otherwise, parts wear out. Each artificial leg in this country of criminal health care was ridiculously expensive, even after insurance “graciously” (as one insurance representative described it) paid for 20 percent of the $10-90,000 price tag. The question remained: What to do with these pesky legs? Do you throw out something that cost more than your car? I’ve therefore been hauling around a box of my own body parts for almost two decades.

If objects carry stories, which they absolutely do, then these legs are a doozy. I traveled all over the world in one, carried two children in another, lost a child wearing another, was married in a few of them, started running in one of them until it literally broke. The smallest legs look sad and stained and from another era—say, late 1880s mining town.

Having a piece of the body that is made by someone else (for me, always a man) is a strange experience—think the opposite of being fitted for a fancy and fabulous dress. For a while, these objects belonged to me, they were literally part of me, but I understood it was time to do something playful and artistic with them.

Rob—my friend of 20 plus years now—and I are serious about making these lamps, and the idea makes me a bit giddy. To take an object that was necessary for my body to go anywhere or to do anything, but was also seen as a flaw or a weakness or a source of shame and make it a source of LIGHT? Yes. It’s so much more interesting than hiding it away in a box.

I’ve always believed that whatever we make or create goes out into the world to have its own life. Although those legs were not my original pieces of artwork (they were made by Bill, Bob, and another Bill, my prosthetists throughout the decades, all of whom are now retired), I wore them into the world, I gave them life and travel and adventure and activity, and now they’ll move into the world in a far different—and fun—way

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Emily Rapp Black is the bestselling author of five books, most recently I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling. She is Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The day I jumped into the pit in the London Tube to retrieve my son’s lost juggling ball” by , At Home in the World

“Toy Story” by , Shaved Meats, Piled High

“Have I Got Too Much Stuff?” by

“The Philosophy of Everyday Objects” by , The Memoirist

“Gen Z and Millennial Collectors Turn Vintage IKEA Into Investment Pieces” by Leonora Epstein, The Wall Street Journal

As a child, I was sexually assaulted by two close male relatives. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when the first assault happened, but I know the age of the second: I was nine. I know this because my mother was in the hospital delivering my younger sister.

Years later, in my forties, I told my mother about the first assault. I hadn’t told her sooner because I imagined she would confront the man, a relative I still see occasionally at funerals. Ghanaians make a big fuss about our dead, and at these events you are likely to meet relatives that you barely know, or those that you would rather were six feet under. On those rare occasions when I meet that uncle, he smiles broadly at me and asks, “How are you doing?” I’m always shocked at how casual he is, how genuinely pleased he seems to see me. Sometimes I wonder if he remembers what he did to me, and what he made me do to him. The last time we met, he introduced me to his wife. I felt like asking her, “Do you know the kind of man you married?”

When I finally told my mother, her response was, “Why didn’t you tell me when it happened?” She then proceeded to tell me how she had immediately told her parents when someone had acted inappropriately toward her as a child. I was shocked. Where was the anger for her daughter? Why was she making this about herself, comparing her experience that wasn’t remotely close to the level of abuse I had endured?

One of the realizations I’ve had over the last few years, especially as I’ve learned about sex-positive parenting, is that many parents simply lack the tools to speak to children about their bodies. This inability to talk openly means children grow up knowing very little about themselves. Particularly harmful is the use of “cutesy” names for genitalia. Growing up, I referred to my vulva as “my wee-wee thing.” That is not a name that stands up in a court of law.

At that time I didn’t even have the language to describe my own body accurately, and yet even as a child who was not yet ten years old, I had already absorbed the notion that sex was “bad,” and that girls and boys (or in my case, a girl, and her young uncle) should not be touching each other in the way that we did. But the sense that I had was, if my uncle touching me was bad, then I must be really bad, too. And as a child, I knew I had to keep “bad” things a secret.

Now, as a parent of a young girl, I see how vital body literacy is. My child knows the correct names for her body. Once, when I slipped and referred to her vagina, she corrected me: “It’s not my vagina, it’s my vulva.”

It has taken me years to unlearn the shame that began with being sexually abused as a child, and one thing I know for sure is that I don’t want any girl or woman to feel ashamed because she has experienced sexual abuse. Part of the reason that people who have been sexually assaulted feel shame is because we don’t talk enough about sex. We don’t tell young people that feeling sexual desire is natural. Experiencing the desire to touch yourself is completely normal. When you are of age, you can choose to have sex with another adult, and there are ways to make that experience safer, and pleasurable. We don’t say to young people, your body is yours, and no one should touch your body in a way that makes you uncomfortable. And if anyone does, tell your parents, or another adult that you trust.

Recently, one of my feminist friends told me that her five-year-old daughter had been sexually assaulted by her thirteen-year-old cousin. They had been at a family luncheon, with the two kids playing upstairs. My friend had made a point of going upstairs intermittently to check on the children, and each time she went up, they were in the wide-open lounge playing. When it was time to go home, she took her daughter to use the bathroom. Her kid sat on the loo and said, “I can’t pee because it hurts. Kofi put his fingers in my vulva.”

I’m filled with rage every time I hear that a young girl has been sexually assaulted. I’m a feminist who has been active in various movement spaces since my early twenties, so I’ve met many girls and women who have experienced a range of serious sexual assault. There is a particular pain in the gut that I feel when I meet young girls who have been sexually assaulted. Sometimes it takes me back to my own past. I remember as a young teen walking through a bustling market, with women selling tomatoes, onions, and fish on either side of me. The lane was narrow, with people passing by close enough to innocuously brush your shoulder or hand as they strode by, and on one occasion, a man—whose face or features I can never remember—but whose words and actions I will never forget, reached out, squeezed my breast, and said, “Bobbie stand up.”

My intimate experience of child sexual abuse, and the casual sexual harassment I experienced as a child, is partly why I write about sex. In a patriarchal world, we may not be able to protect girls from every evil, but we can give them the language to recognize that sexual shame is not theirs to carry.

When my friend told me that her child had been assaulted, I said to her, “You should be proud of yourself. She was able to tell you straightaway what happened.” I wish that as a child I had been able to speak to my parents about the abuse I experienced, but I also recognize that even if I had been able to find the language, they wouldn’t have had the tools to heal me.

Part of the way in which I’m healing myself is being intentional in how I raise my daughter, and teaching her that there is no need for “shameful secrets” between the two of us.

This journey from silence to agency is at the heart of my work. In my latest book, Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals and Sankofa in the Bedroom, I explore how we can reclaim our bodies and our right to pleasure by looking back at our histories and unlearning the shame that was never ours to begin with. My desire to raise my daughter in a healthier way than I was raised inspired me to include a chapter on “Sex Positive Parenting.”

I included insights from experts like Jasmine Johnson, a mother of four, and a licensed clinical psychotherapist who also describes herself as a “full service, forward facing sex worker.” She said, “Oftentimes when people hear sex-positive parenting, they think that we are just allowing our children to run amok, just to be having sex, and hearing, and seeing, and engaging in content that we would otherwise say is inappropriate for children. And that is the furthest thing from being sex-positive. Sex-positive does mean protecting your children from inappropriate material and being prepared for when, and if, they should ever come in contact with that material. It means helping to provide context. It also means protecting our children from some of the really scary things that are sadly associated with children and sex, such as pedophilia and sexually inappropriate behaviour.”

What my experience has taught me is that speaking to children about their bodies, boundaries, and sex is radically important work. Even if we can never fully protect children and vulnerable people in a patriarchal world, we can certainly give them the tools to navigate that world better, while simultaneously working to build new realities where all children and people live free from violence of all kinds.

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Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is the author of Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals, and Sankofa in the Bedroom. Her debut, The Sex Lives of African Women, was an instant classic, lauded by Publishers Weekly as “an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation” and named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist. Nana Darkoa is also an award winning podcaster, a festival curator, and the Co-Founder of the Institute of Journalism and Social Change. Her transformative work has earned her international recognition, including a spot on the BBC’s 100 inspirational and influential women list and New Africa magazine’s list of 100 inspirational Africans.

Click on “Transcript” on the top right to read an auto-generated transcript of this episode.

About our guest:

Alrinthea Carter is an Emmy-nominated comedy writer (Yo Gabba GabbaLand!, A Black Lady Sketch Show), photographer, and improviser based in Los Angeles, CA. She has studied improv and sketch comedy on stages across the country, including Alchemy Comedy Theater, The Second City, and The Pack Theater, and currently serves on the Board of Improv Utopia. When not writing or making up stuff on stage, she is an obsessive plant mom and Kitchen DJ. Her patron saint is and will always be Prince.

Blog: alrintheacarter.com

Instagram: @alrinthea

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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On the Fourth of July 2025 I laid on a couch inside my lake house in Massachusetts, television blaring to cover the sounds of explosions. Outside the windows that look out onto the water, the sky popped with bright whites accented by blues and greens and purples. I crossed my arms and wondered what exactly we were celebrating.

My husband walked up behind me, stretched out on the floor beside the couch. He’d just come from checking on our greyhound Champ, who was shaking in our bedroom. When the first boom happened thirty minutes ago, we sat lakeside. Champ raised his head toward the sky, his lean body tensing in the gloaming’s light.

“It’s okay, buddy,” we said, before he raced to the door to be let in, so he could hustle to his cage in our room, its floor covered in pillows and blankets.

My husband reported: When he put his hand on Champ’s chest, Champ’s heart throbbed against his palm, as if a boogeyman were coming for him.

As I took my turn lying on the floor outside Champ’s cage, rubbing his forehead, I thought of my client and friend Ace, and how fireworks landed for him.

In 2012, I opened a law practice dedicated to disability law. Early on, I connected with the VA hospitals in Massachusetts and found work as a guardian to veterans without any family to fill the role. It was the softer side of disability law, advocating for clients within the healthcare system. In 2014 I met Ace, a Vietnam vet estranged from his only living son. Ace needed help after a female friend of his, a neighbor he fell in love with, stole his money through dozens of ATM withdrawals from his bank account, until $60,000 was gone. Rather than a guardian who helps with medical issues, I was appointed as Ace’s conservator, to deal with financial matters.

It was a fairly easy case in many ways: The woman was caught on security footage at the ATMs over and over, using Ace’s stolen card. I hired a litigator to get the money back from Bank of America, which succeeded. I drove Ace to the district court so he could speak to the grand jury that ultimately found the woman criminally liable.

I worked for Ace for the next four years before he passed in 2018. We moved him into a group home with other vets in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He liked me to visit him once a month—we’d get lunch at his favorite local seafood restaurant, where he’d chat with the waitresses, asking them about their lives outside their shifts. I paid for our lunches with his funds, and he’d always ask me to leave a 25% tip. After lunch we grabbed coffees at the Dunkin’ across the street, where he insisted I leave five-dollar tips even if our order cost three bucks.

Some visits I’d take him to spend his money on himself, buying him a cushy recliner for his room, a new mattress. At Kohl’s he tried on new jeans, asking for my help to tug them up over his protruding belly. Ace was about 65 at the time. The lithium the VA treated his PTSD with after he returned from active duty had caught up to Ace, and his kidneys began to fail in the second year I worked with him.

The group home where he lived with a dozen other vets had seen this lithium-consequence many times before, and it was fairly easy to get their help to bring him to dialysis appointments during the week.

Ace hated dialysis at first, but eventually in our phone calls and visits, he talked about the kind nurses he met who seemed to like his jokes. Ace’s usual commitment to making those around him feel at ease had no doubt come into play. He always liked supporting other vets, too; anytime we were out in the world and passed someone with a veteran hat or shirt, he stopped to talk to them, forging a connection usually in seconds. He called them brother or sister, always disengaging with a “See you later, buddy.”

My husband enjoyed my stories of my time with Ace, about this straight veteran and his Queer, early-forties husband chatting over grilled salmon. I never really came out to Ace, my private life intentionally walled-off from my professional one, where I constantly turned conversations back to my clients. I have good reason to think that Ace would not have cared that I am Queer. When Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans in 2015, I met up with him not long after. He mentioned Jenner’s coming out, and commented on how brave it was of her, knowing that she’d likely face all kinds of backlash. Ace was never big on talking down about others, especially anyone struggling—it was one of my favorite things about him.

He told me, and anyone who would listen, about the action he saw during the war, the buddies he saw die, the bodies he saw felled in Vietnam. He was proud of his service, but admitted that the memories haunted his every day.

Every year that I knew him, around the second or third of July, he called me to warn, “I’m gonna go into hiding for a little while, until after the fireworks.”

The fireworks landed too much like war. The noise met his body in ways indistinguishable from hostility. His heart raced, he sweat, he returned to a different century and country within himself. During the early part of each July, he hid in his room, closed the blinds, cranked up the volume on his TV, as the America outside supposedly acknowledged the freedom he fought for, and its celebratory explosions dinged Ace to his core.

I’d never thought much about fireworks. In my life before then, they happened once a year on the Fourth of July, and usually my family and I, minus my father, drove a couple towns over from our own to see a show. I watched them at Disney World and Euro Disney as a kid and teenager, mildly interested in how they looked in the sky, anticipating the finale when my senses would overwhelm from the colors, whistles, and pops—my whole vision-scape filled. It felt like there was nothing in the world but fireworks for a brief moment. My body handled the event without calling back to a scarier place. Now I wonder, while my siblings and I watched the displays, whether my father holed up at home like Ace did.

My father was a vet, too, of the Korean War, but served domestically. His childhood, however, was riddled with conflict. When he was a ten-year old away at summer camp outside of Minsk, Belarus, in 1941, the Nazis invaded his country. He learned of the war first when a Luftwaffe plane descended from the sky on what he thought was just another day and shot at him. He survived by running, and would do so many times over during the war that defined the next four years of his life, until it ended in 1945. In that time, he outran death over and over. On one occasion, when he slept through the air raid sirens meant to prompt him to run to a bomb shelter, he only woke when the bombs outside his window exploded his bedroom windows inward, the shattered glass finally waking him and reminding him to run for his life.

I wonder now, did the fireworks his children gleefully set out to watch remind his body of the life he survived, and prevent him from piling into the car with us?

I worked with a handful of veteran clients during my time as a lawyer, becoming similarly close to them as I did with Ace. All three disappeared around the Fourth of July, isolating from a world that didn’t seem to care much how the fireworks affected them, even if the fireworks were allegedly supposed to celebrate what these men had offered up their lives to protect.

I can’t imagine an America that will ever grapple with or dismantle the yearly celebration that involves fireworks. Not for environmental reasons, not because they scare and negatively affect people and animals. The America I know doesn’t care about that. It’ll say “Thank you for your service” but “Fuck you and your broken nervous system” from the same mouth. It’s a country with little tolerance for inconveniences or critical thought about its traditions. It’s a country that, for the most part, will send a boy to war and not care how that war lives in him afterward.

I used to enjoy sitting on the edge of the lake during the fireworks. Sometimes my friends and I would float in inner tubes during the show or circle our chairs at the big end of our dock. One part of the sky lit up as a neighbor set off fireworks, before a neighbor on another part of the lake answered in kind, our heads pivoting from one patch of sky to another, emblazoned with violets and golds and bright whites or muted yellows.

Then I met Ace, and I thought of him more and more during the shows.

Then we adopted Champ in 2023, after the COVID pandemic showed me that there was a whole swath of the country not particularly interested in others’ needs if it inconvenienced them. I’m not equating retired racing greyhounds to veterans, I’m only noticing that they were two groups used to serve a purpose for others, and that their well-being doesn’t really have a place in a fireworks display.

It’s felt underscored in this decade that large numbers of my fellow citizens adhere to a “fuck you and your problems” mindset. That point of view burrowed deep into my soul, aggravating my scorn about indifference or hostility toward the needs of others, especially when those who need a little gentler, quieter world, are in the minority. Whatever connection to the excitement of fireworks I might have once had fizzled—like one of those faulty fireworks that takes to the sky, doesn’t light, and lands with a thud in the water below.

I ignored the 2025 fireworks from inside my house, until my husband reported on the disassociating dog I love, suffering in the other room. I took my turn sitting on the floor with Champ, rubbing his soft neck fur, readjusting the earmuffs my husband bought him this year, feeling him shudder as the fireworks reverberated through the floor and the world. My husband Dave crafted walls around Champ’s cage made from soundproof padding, ordered online. A sound machine on top of the cage blasted the sound of falling rain, an attempted cover-up of the loud blasts. We put old episodes of The Golden Girls on the TV; maybe Betty White could comfort Champ the way she always has me.

Champ panted, his tongue hanging from his mouth. I sat on the floor and talked to him, but he looked right through me. I offered him food, his favorite thing in the universe, but he ignored the cookie. I hoped the trazadone our vet prescribed him would kick in soon and take the edge off.

His cage, our love, the extra support: They help, I hope, but didn’t and don’t fix this for him. They are what I can do to counter the fear felt by the living creature I love, now that my father and Ace are both gone.

I wondered where I can bring Champ on future Fourth of Julys, to get away from this aspect of America that I have grown to detest. There was no joy for me anymore in the performance going on outside, a hypocritical pride for a country that doesn’t care how its booms hurt living beings. If our most vulnerable are afraid of the performance, then what’s the point?

I got on my belly and tried to connect with the dog who was already somewhere else, like he didn’t see me at all.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, using Ace’s words, hoping I might cut through the noise and the reverberations, and on some level, at least let him know that we care.

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Jason Prokowiew won the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, a Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Aurora Polaris Prize for Nonfiction for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, Under the Sun, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, Business Insider, and on PBS/WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, “Sing,” has over 2.6 million views on Facebook and is the most viewed in the show’s history. His essay “The Demulcent of Shame,” originally published by Roxane Gay, won the 2023 Lascaux Prize for Creative Nonfiction. He’s received additional support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. A recovering disability attorney, he lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.

Find out more at www.jasonwprokowiew.com

If you’ve struggled with clutter or simply feel like your stuff is owning you rather than the other way around, this episode will help you drill down on the questions to ask yourself before starting to purge your possessions.

Click on “Transcript” on the top right to read an auto-generated transcript of this episode.

About our guest:

Avery Cundill is the creator and host of The Declutter Queen, a lifestyle brand and podcast focused on helping people simplify their homes, schedules, and digital lives. Through practical, judgment-free strategies and mindset work, she guides audiences to let go of what no longer serves them and create space for what matters most—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Her content blends real-life decluttering systems, habit change, and compassionate coaching to reduce overwhelm and build sustainable organization routines.

The Declutter Queen website

Instagram: @thedeclutterqueenpod

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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It’s a mild February day on the Gulf Coast, so I sit beside the pool, sip my umbrella-garnished drink, and bask. From behind my sunglasses, I read with one eye and people-watch with the other. Today, I’m soaking up Anne Lamott’s witty wisdom on how we wordsmiths are prone to seeing connections everywhere. As if on cue, I scan the set and let my imagination take me away.

At this resort-slash-conference center, there are singles, couples, and so many families, each with narratives I can’t possibly know. But I can create worlds that don’t exist with the stroke of a pen—or with no pen at all.

A mom shouts to her preschooler, “I think I see your other flip flop, over there!” I spy it tipped on its side, and I’m tumbled thirty years into the past, when I searched frantically near our dock at the lake for the match to the pricey extra-wide Stride Rite sandal we’d driven an hour to buy and couldn’t afford to lose.

I unearth the wayward sandal from beneath the pile of towels, stash it into the beach bag, then help Eric wade into the shallow water on his sturdy little-boy legs. I alternately encourage and caution: “C’mon, you can do it! Come closer...now, be careful. Don’t step on that rock. Look here! Do you want this sand pail? Wave hi to Mrs. Jackson. There, you’re doing great!”

The past evaporates into the Florida heat as a young woman strolls silently to the in-ground kiddie pool. She seems quiet, yet sure. Just behind her, a little girl, two years old, maybe three. They’re mother/daughter, for the sake of my story. How would I describe the little one, I wonder?

To me—the decades-ago mom of three roly-poly toddlers with baby-fat bracelets—she seems ethereal. Her sparkly pink swimsuit hangs off her small frame, bagging at the legs. The curly blond locks, secured in miniature rubber bands, escape in wisps to frame her petite features. Sunglasses—pink, of course— perched on her tiny nose, she carries a ball, ever-so-gingerly balancing it between her delicate hands. I can almost see the faint clouds of fairy dust she leaves in her wake.

Mom sets her on the edge of the splash pool, where the broad arcing steps lead gently into the water below. I expect her mother to drop down on the ledge beside her or lower herself into the shallow water, poised to catch her daughter. Instead, Mom circles the perimeter to sit facing her. She’s within a safe distance for rescue purposes, but far enough—out of arm’s length. Mom observes as Tinker Bell watches the older boys and girls splashing, shrieking with laughter.

Before long, she tosses her ball into the water, and it’s snatched up by a boy from a boisterous clan. Dark-haired and solid, he’s nearly the perfect opposite of Tink. I tense, fretting she’s seen the last of her toy, wondering how Mom will negotiate this turn of events, but the ball comes right back to her. She tosses it away, again and again.

It’s only a ball, and Mom is right there, but our little girl is not at all concerned. She already trusts that what she sends out will return to her, trusts that who she is will be enough. I suspect her parents have taught her this confidence, standing in for the world as they take what she sends them and return it, predictably, reassuringly. Mom looks on, but I see no dispassion here. She knows Tink will be fine; the little one knows she’ll be fine, too. This letting her discover who she is, free from unnecessary intervention—it mesmerizes me.

Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable.

Is this the mistake I made? I cuddled and snuggled, declaring my love and his lovability, while teaching Eric to survive in a world where not everyone loved him. I cheered him on and gently warned, a continual game of warmer and colder designed to keep him within the safety zone. It seemed a reasonable approach, this shaping him into someone who stays between the lines, someone easy for others to accept. It’s all about common sense, I thought. It’s all about balance.

Yet I felt a subtle urgency then, a quality so completely missing from this mother-daughter pair it takes my breath away.

Stop this, I scold myself. Maybe I’ve attributed great wisdom where there is only passivity. Maybe I’ve witnessed this mother’s self-centeredness masquerading as self-confidence.

Or maybe it’s genetic, this sense of being entitled to a place in the world. Perhaps some—the lucky ones—inherit the secret password and hand it down to their children, never knowing what it’s like to worry about being accepted. I wonder how that would be, even now, waking up in the world like you already know you belong there.

Tink has it easy. Others try too hard, hoping you’ll notice they have the privilege of membership. They’re not hard to spot. Then there are the rebels, who stare not belonging right in the face, daring us to make them care. They work so hard at not caring that we see right through them, too.

It strikes me that it’s those who walk both of these paths—juggling the endless trying and the not trying at all—yet are so skilled at hiding their struggle who must suffer most.

I’ll never know exactly how Eric saw himself at the end, when his recklessness led to his death in a single-car crash at twenty. No one can know the true depth and breadth of his pain. But I do know one thing: This was not the balancing act I had hoped for.

Wails from the wading pool catch my attention, and I’m shocked to see Tinker Bell kicking and crying. Little Miss Calm has lost her cool. She’s confident, all right—confident she’s not ready to leave. Mom’s anything but hands off now. She wraps Tink in her arms and whisks her away, beads of perspiration gathering on her upper lip, tension in her brow. The fairy dust has vaporized.

Perfect parenting is, perhaps, as ephemeral as fairy dust, here one moment, gone the next. What a relief.

I turn back to my book and hide a tiny smile.

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Casey Mulligan Walsh is a retired speech-language pathologist who has written for The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, and numerous other literary magazines. Her essay, “Still,” published in Split Lip, was nominated for Best of the Net. Her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, was released from Motina Books in February 2025. Casey also serves as an ambassador and Board member for the Family Heart Foundation. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin, and too many books to count. Learn more at caseymulliganwalsh.com.

I sailed through the hospital doors wearing a pencil skirt and three-inch high heels, just 21 years old, all dressed up and packing what I believed were essential to the fight ahead: a tube of Necco wafers and the project—ten skeins of deep blue wool, two long wooden sticks and a cabled sweater pattern. Never mind that I had never actually knit. I needed to look good and hold something in my hands besides heartbreak.

My shoes slid to a halt in the doorway of her room. Under a small mountain of white blankets my mother whispered, “Take those damn shoes off, I could hear you a mile away.”

I kicked them under a chair and took her hand. We had a few days to wait for the tumor diagnosis.

Knitting had always looked like a slow way to nowhere. But what to do with my hands in the endless hours ahead? A week before I had asked my cousin to teach me, my voice wobbling. “Forget I said this is an old lady sport. I need something to do.”

She looked at me sideways. “In seven days?”

The basics seemed straightforward; knit into the front, purl into the back, keeping the flat and bumpy stitches hidden. I made copious notes. Then I ran through a local yarn store, grabbed a pattern, wool, and the needles.

As the hospital quieted down for the night, I pulled a metal chair to the side of the bed and balanced the instructions on my knees. I pulled the wrapper off the new needles and froze. I was immediately lost; cast on? decrease? turn cable? I searched my notes for clues. My mother’s breath deepened into sleep.

I flipped the pages back and forth, trying to decipher the symbols. Four decades before cellphones, Google, or YouTube for on-demand problem solving I was on my own, with the slimmest of knowledge, my only contact with the world a pay phone down the hall. The needles slipped this way then that, the yarn ball jumping around in my lap as I clumsily wrestled each loop on and off the needle. Then three stitches fell off and disappeared. I swore. My mother opened her eyes.

I knew she had knit once. Several hats and even a Nordic sweater she had made my father during their college courtship days. I wondered if he had kept the hats after their divorce. I wish I had taken them.

“Hold your hands steady!” she croaked, her throat raw from the breathing tube. “Sit up. Oh no, there goes another one!” I had envisioned myself as Florence Nightingale, quietly knitting in the corner, the peaceful rhythmic click of the needles relaxing my patient, but the mess I was making turned out to be much more diverting.

When the next nurse finally pushed sleeping meds into my mother’s veins, the first ball of yarn had had enough. It jumped off my lap and slow-motion rolled under her bed. I dropped to my knees and crawled my arm under the bed frame. When I stood brandishing a dust-covered ball of yarn I had holes in the knees of my stockings. My mother took one look at me and burst out laughing, wincing as the jiggling pulled on her incisions. Unwittingly, I had also packed comic relief.

“I know it will be beautiful. Eventually.” Her voice softened as the drugs pulled her under. I tucked the blankets around her and moved to the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar to keep her in my sight.

Back in 1980, when security was nonexistent and COVID inconceivable, family could stay the night. I whittled the time away cross-legged, back against the wall, a humming florescent light overhead. Regretted my outfit but leaned into my night vigil: sucked the Necco wafers one-by-one, chocolate first, refreshed my coffee from a machine down the hall, tip-toed into her room every hour to pushed the hair from her forehead and stare at her white face. After every break I grasped the needles again and kept going.

At about 1 a.m., sleep-deprived and staring at my hands in despair, a pair of white laced shoes stopped in front of me. Hands reached down, unraveled a knot in the yarn, then took the needles and picked up a dropped stitch. I looked up and smiled at a young nurse with sparkly earrings. “Looks good!” she said. “Hold your elbows closer,;it will take the strain off your wrists.” She headed back down the hall.

One stitch grew into inches of knitting. I concentrated: in and out, in and out. Cried about my mom. Laughed at my mess. Dozed using the skeins as my pillow.

By dawn my project was knotted and curled in my lap like a small navy dog in need of the emergency room. I fished a dime out of my purse, slipped on the abandoned shoes, and headed to the payphone.

“Well,” my cousin said evenly, “here is the most important thing you need to learn.” As she talked me through, I ripped the entire project out row by row and rewound the yarn, casting on for a smaller size. When my mother woke up, I procured tiny cups of vanilla pudding which we ate off elfin plastic spoons. She fingered the soft wool. Her blue eyes glittered.

That night I joined two communities for the rest of my life: children who lose a mother too soon and people who knit. I put my head down on the bed and she rested her hand on my hair. She talked about her travel plans. I knew despite the results we would fight to the end.

Lessons to begin again, no matter how hard.

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Alexandra Dane writes about what lies deep in the marrow: life, disease, memory and hope—always hope. Her work explores her mother’s cancer and her own: Cake is published in the 2026 food anthology If Memory Serves. A finalist for the 2025 Swamp Pink Prize in Nonfiction, winner of the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction award from The Bellingham Review, Alexandra Dane is published in The Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, River Teeth and San Fedele Press’s American Writers Review, among others. The tiny big things happen at www.alexandradanewrites.com and her knitting can be seen on Instagram at @adaneknits.

“Oh my gosh—that dress…” I said to my best friend Robert when I spotted it hanging in a Kathmandu shop as we were walking back to our guesthouse after dinner. “I need to hold it.”

The tiny green dress, hanging among sarongs, woollen jackets, and bedspreads, looked like it might fit a 1- or 2-year-old. It was made of green silk, stitched with tiny mirrors and threaded with red and orange embroidery.

The shopkeeper sighed when I asked him to take it down. He was closing up, already half gone for the night. I watched him hook it from the window and place it in my hands. Up close, the dress was heavier than it looked. I pressed it against my chest. The shopkeeper explained that it was from Rajasthan, and that the mirrors were meant to ward off evil spirits.

I was in my early twenties, working as a hostess in Japan and spending the money on travel. My life plans extended only as far as the next rave, the next full moon party. I couldn’t imagine a future that included any kind of permanence or settling down—never mind becoming a mother. And yet, something about this dress stirred a feeling I’d never experienced before.

“I think I’ve just had a vision,” I whispered to Robert. “I’m going to have a little girl with shiny black hair. And this is her dress.”

I felt foolish saying it, the certainty so out of character. I tried to laugh it off and hand the dress back to the shopkeeper, but I couldn’t. Buying that dress wasn’t a choice.

Robert must have thought I was having a momentary lapse, or that the party drugs were talking. It must have made him sad.

Robert was in love with me. I’d known for years. I’d told him I wasn’t attracted to him that way. We’d road-tripped to the Grand Canyon, gone to countless concerts, and now we were in Nepal to hike the Himalayas. He knew my stories. My messes. My exes. I trusted him completely, even as I refused the future he quietly imagined.

He didn’t try to talk me into or out of buying the dress that night. He knew it wasn’t about the money, or the lack of space in my already full backpack.

Two years later, I gave birth to a baby girl with thick black hair. My marriage to her Japanese father was unexpected and unconventional. The baby—my surprise.

As soon as she could walk, I had the sleeves taken up by a neighborhood tailor and dressed her in it. She loved touching the mirrors, fiddling with the hem. One fall afternoon, back in Canada while visiting my parents, my father and I took her to Stanley Park and tried to photograph her in the dress. She wouldn’t sit still. She ran toward the water, the mirrors flashing as she moved, her laughter carried by the wind.

When my little girl turned six, my marriage ended. We left Japan and were staying with my parents. Robert helped me unload my shipping container of belongings, gave me a computer, and lent me his car.

A few months later, I woke one morning wishing Robert was lying beside me.

That little girl is 28 now. I still wake up beside Robert each morning. The first thing I see when I open my eyes is the dress, hanging from an elephant hook above the green dresser at the foot of our bed.

“Remember the night you bought that?” Robert asked yesterday. “We were so young.”

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Dhana Musil is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Grain, The Ex-Puritan, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She writes personal essays and narrative nonfiction that explore memory, place, and interesting subcultures. She lives in British Columbia.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“My Collection of Etch a Sketch feat. Princess Etch” by , My Collection Of

“The Safety of Objects” by , The Hopeless Millennial

“THE DEATH-PUDDING CONTAINER” by , The Keepthings

“You’ve Been Shopping for a Woman Who Isn’t Coming” by , A Home That Shuts Up

“‘Toy Story’ Convinced Me My Toys Had Feelings—and I’m Still Dealing With It” by Juliana LaBianca, Good Housekeeping

“The Power of Friendship Bracelets” by Natalie Katona, To All The Men I’ve Tolerated Before

“The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America’s Garage Sales” by Caity Weaver, The Atlantic

Learn how LeBleu developed a love of magazines, which surprising magazine was her inspiration, the reality of what it takes to launch a print venture, and what she hopes readers take away from Geezer.

Special offer: Use code FINDERS15 for 15% off an annual subscription to Geezer. Available to the first 10 subscribers through June 30, 2026.

About our guest:

Laura LeBleu’s life has always revolved around storytelling—either as an actor, a writer, or, now, as the founding editor of Geezer, a print magazine for Gen X. Bringing Geezer to life has easily been the most fulfilling creative achievement of her fifty-something years, and she’s thrilled to share this weird, soulful publication with fellow Gen Xers and the world.

Geezermagazine.com

Geezer Magazine on Substack

Laura LeBleu on Substack

Instagram: @geezermagazine

Instagram: @laura.lebleu

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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I make a good lentil soup. But I only get the official take on how good it is when my husband eats the leftovers. “It’s better now,” he says, often enough that I wonder why I don’t cook it in advance. While the soup may be piping hot and fresh when I take it off the stove, after a day or two, when the onion, cumin, and tomato have had time to blend and settle together, it’s richer and more layered.

It took me a long time to realize that this was also true with writing. When I think I’m done with a draft, I’ve usually just put the ingredients together. The real flavors—the structure, thematic resonance, and depth—emerge over time.

But how much time exactly? While this essay offers pointers for writers to recognize when they’re done, the hours it takes for a piece of writing to be cooked to perfection is a mystery, dependent on many different variables: what kind of piece, how close the writer is to the material, how motivated the writer is, what resources they have, if there’s a deadline, etc.

False Endings

Case in point: As a first-time author, I thought I was done with my debut memoir, This Incredible Longing, after working for a whole year on the second draft. I made the rookie mistake of sending it out to the few agents I knew. Despite knowing them personally, I never heard back. The sting left by their silence eventually morphed into the drive to rework it.

I was sure I was done by draft four. In reality, I’d added material that weighed the story down.

By draft seven, I was as done as I could be without professional help. I was hoping for the input of an agent, but despite some close calls, I didn’t land one. I paid for a developmental edit that revealed the manuscript was near completion. I needed to start the book sooner to hook the reader while providing just enough backstory for my character’s choices to make sense, but not so much backstory as to smother momentum.

I was sure I had nailed it when I sent a snazzy new Chapter One to my writers’ group. But their faces in the Zoom squares looked grim. It wasn’t working.

When I got the same feedback from three new beginnings, I decided to quit.

By that point, I’d been working on the book for five years. The joy in creating it had been replaced by overwhelming frustration. Who was I to think I could write a book? Who cared about my story anyway? Quitting gave me a feeling of power over the situation. I was done.

In hindsight, I was taking an extended marinating break. Though I’d been writing for thirty years, a full-length narrative was new. I simply needed more time to integrate everything I was learning about structure, scene building, and tracking themes.

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“Scooch down a bit,” a kind voice requested. I looked at my feet, precariously placed on cold, metal contraptions, and shimmied my body toward my fertility doctor, stretching my toes inside their socks. I’d been here before, many times, yet there was nothing routine about it.

The socks I wore were always the same beige color. Once I had a teal pair, which elicited a moment of excitement. The fabric wasn’t particularly tough against the skin, but too universally manufactured to be soft. The bottoms had little white, raised bubbles—grips like road markers on a highway. They were for stability during walks down the hospital hallways, or better traction when feet moved into awkward positions, onto silver pedals. Every pair was individually wrapped in clear plastic for each new participant, not intended for more than one usage before disposal.

Back in the dressing room, I removed the nondescript, bluish gray robe tied around me like a wrap dress and tossed it in the fertility clinic’s hamper. I threw away the paper-thin cap that held my hair back. But instead of tossing the socks in the garbage too, per the instructions, I shoved them into my handbag, as if I was stealing a clue from the scene of the crime, half trophy, half sadistic souvenir. It wasn’t the first time I’d taken them with me.

I’d gone through seven egg retrievals, the procedure in IVF when a patient’s eggs are carefully extracted from the body while under anesthesia, then mixed with sperm to hopefully create perfect, genetically healthy embryos. It was an in-depth process I’d become accustomed to undergoing.

It began by answering questions probed by various people who introduced themselves one after the other. A nurse inserted an IV and covered me in a warm, weighted blanket before accompanying me into a cold, brightly lit room, a place I’d soon expose myself mentally and physically in ways I never imagined. When it was all over, there was juice, graham crackers, and a piece of paper with an arbitrary number totaling the number of eggs extracted from my body.

I’d been shown seven pieces of paper over two and a half years, never with any numbers worthy of jubilation. Seven short chapters of my life with endless waiting, dreaming, and tortuous hours wondering about things, and numbers I couldn’t control.

Another ubiquitous part of the process —required not only for fertility treatments, but any surgery—were those ugly hospital socks. In the infertility world, though, they weren’t just an obligatory, clinical covering, they were a focal point, endlessly included in recommendations or potential success tips:

“Keep your feet warm at all times!”

“Never ever dream of going barefoot!”

A warm foot supposedly equals a warm uterus, which is most conducive to creating a baby. According to any article, or Instagram caption, forgoing this advice could come at a hefty price.

For many, these very common accessories represented a badge of survival or triumph over hardship. They were a symbol of soldiering through infertility, under the guise of merch. Intended to display a person’s personality, or status on social media. Women showed off pineapples on their heels, or scripted words like “Hopeful Mama,” or “Stick, Baby, Stick.” An entire, intense, traumatic experience condensed down to a phrase capable of fitting on the bottoms of each foot.

I never had interest in this kind of insincerely felt merchandise. But at a fertility event I attended, a gift bag contained a candle, bath bomb, and a pair of pink, fuzzy socks, emblazoned, of course, with the company logo: Cozy Warriors. I caved and gave them a try.

I abhorred constrictions in bed. I always had bare feet and kept one leg outside the blanket, comforted by the sensation of cold air hitting my skin as I slept. But for me, infertility was about the constrictions of things that were once pleasurable. So I gave up that feeling and, as advised, kept my feet warm, even through the sticky air of summer.

I wore the Cozy Warrior socks to my first, anticipated embryo transfer. After four arduous treatments, I’d finally made one healthy embryo. “It only takes one,” is another quote thrown around in the infertility industry that’s meant to elicit hope and a sense of power. I convinced myself I’d been cynical or jaded before. It only took one, and maybe the pink socks really were a life-changing good luck charm, capable of manifesting my goal of motherhood.

As I prepared for my embryo transfer at the clinic, I went through the same mechanical steps. This time, I dismissed the sad plastic-covered socks offered by the hospital in favor of the personal pink ones I’d excitedly brought from home. They were soft and smooth on my feet. Wearing them, I felt more hopeful than ever.

Ten days later, I got the news that it failed, and I wasn’t pregnant. I threw the socks away, distraught and angry. I knew the choice to wear or not wear them wasn’t the deciding factor of my outcome. But the loss of an embryo is a terrible, ambiguous grief that requires something tangible to blame. I wished I’d never worn them. “Warrior, please,” I muttered, annoyed I’d allowed myself to give the accessories so much power over me.

I continued IVF after that, but returned to my predictable, generic coverings. Yet I still couldn’t stop myself from saving them. My sock drawer was eventually filled to the brim with 10 pairs, from seven egg retrievals and three embryo transfers.

After each cycle, I brought them home, along with the flimsy, plastic hospital name tag bracelets, the way one would keep a concert ticket or movie stub. Each time I prayed the next pair I wore would be the ones that went in the scrapbook later, an identifier of the day I became a mom. But they never were, all seemingly destined to exist in a heap inside my dresser.

If grief is a souvenir of pain, or lost love, then the socks were an outlet for saved trauma. Stored away just as tightly as my memories, a brutal reflection of my failures. Simultaneously, they were a warped way of staying hopeful, and I couldn’t let go. I’d thought of them as tools of manifestation. As if saving them could somehow ensure success or mark a transformative moment I could tangibly touch, like a teddy bear, or pair of baby socks.

But manifestation isn’t as simple as plain old longing, and wishing for something desperately still didn’t make it so, no matter how many Law of Attraction memes or messages insist otherwise. Putting faith in a pair of beige, plain socks that I wore while my hopeful embryo was implanted inside me started as an act of magical thinking.

During infertility there is a lack of control over almost everything. I’d convinced myself keeping all those socks was giving me back some of the control over my future status as a parent. But as the collection grew, cynicism started to dominate my faith.

I became so numb to my own routine that it was only after my fourth embryo transfer that I realized I hadn’t taken that day’s socks with me. Whether subconsciously purposeful, or just plain forgetfulness, I wasn’t sure. At first, I mourned my mistake. What had I done?! I wailed to myself.

Still bruised by the fumble, I soon processed my error. I reflected on the huge collection of IVF socks I’d amassed over the last few years and started to see them differently. They weren’t agents of change, or action; they were just physical souvenirs I’d given too much weight. Once I started to see them differently, the power I’d attributed to them lessened, and the need to symbolize everything about my experience dissipated. A pair of socks couldn’t manifest my destiny or put me in control of it. All I had was my hope, whatever was left of my positivity, and my ability to wait.

Ten days later I got the call. It worked; I was pregnant. I gave birth to my daughter the following summer. I’d collected countless hospital socks thinking they would somehow radiate good luck that would bring me a baby. But they were more than just would-be manifestation tools. Each pair, from every failed IVF cycle, was like a strange little souvenir that symbolized my effort and resilience.

Now, I have a new collection—baby shoes. In the end, it was the socks I didn’t collect and save that wound up being the most significant.

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Blake Turck is a freelance writer and NYC native. She can be found most nights watching movies with her husband, Golden doodle, and baby daughter. She’s written for Slate, Washington Post, Today, Washington Post Travel, Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, HuffPost Voices, Travel + Leisure, Salon, Well + Good, and more.

In the winter of 1999, at age 22, I sat across from my father in his rented condo in Sarasota, Florida, pressed the button of a tape recorder and said, “Start at the beginning,” and he told me of a warplane descending upon him when he was ten years old. That first night of our work together, I considered a little boy, running from a firing plane, then coming home from summer camp to discover his family gone.

How must either of those disasters feel to a child? I asked myself that night as I drifted into a broken sleep. We’d captured the actions of those moments, but not the feelings.

The next day we met again, the recorder between us, and I clicked the button. My father was ready to move forward and tell me what events happened next.

“Hold on,” I said and he looked at me. “How did it feel,” I asked him, to find his family gone? “How did it feel,” I went on, to see their apartment burned down and to be ten and alone, in a city freshly crawling with war? “How did it feel?”

I leaned back, waiting.

“Why do you keep asking me about the first day?” he bit back, with the same domineering staccato he would use to tell me I’d overloaded the dishwasher or failed to take the trash to the curb. The voice felt like a warning. His tone had often frozen me solid, as my protection from an anger that always seemed one infinitesimal mistake away from erupting. He could turn his voice thunderous; use it to put me in the place he wanted me.

I crossed my arms and looked over the table at him. He clicked his tongue and scowled. He stood and went to the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee his usual way: a splash of cream and two level teaspoons of sugar. I watched a snowy egret drift across the pond behind the condo and waited. My mother passed through the room with a pile of laundry in her arms. The tapes rolled, capturing stretches of silence interrupted by the clink of his pipe against an ashtray, the striking of a match.

He sat again. He shifted in his chair a few more times. “As soon as you see your city almost gone, there is a knot in your stomach. You have that sinking feeling. This just gets worse as you approach your burned-out building. You are hopeful, you are hopeful, you are hopeful and little by little that last hope is gone, too.”

I began recording his stories the winter after I’d enrolled at Oberlin College. My first semester, I signed up for Russian language and history courses, curious about the land my father came from but hardly mentioned.

During a Russian politics course, we watched the 1985 Russian film Come and See, about the 1941 German invasion of Belarus. When the film’s protagonist Flyora returns to his village after the Nazis arrive and finds it abandoned, buzzing with flies, it reminded me of a story my father had told my family, one I’d never focused on. I remembered sitting in our living room, my father relaying the tale of finding his family’s apartment in Minsk scorched, walls collapsed, surrounded by piles of dust that were once other buildings.

I found myself pulled like a magnet to my professor’s office, to tell him the film felt familiar, like something my father described. He asked a question I couldn’t answer: What had happened to my father’s family?

My father had never offered the information and I’d never asked.

Why had neither of these things occurred? I knew only that one day he had a family and on the next he didn’t. His family of origin—my family—felt like characters in a Dostoevsky novel: a grandma, Valentina: an aunt, Rema; and peasant great-grandparents from a primitive village.

I used Oberlin’s month-long winter semester, meant to encourage independent study, as a reason to visit my father in Florida and ask about these people he had lost. My parents were snowbirds by then, spending winters down south. My father reluctantly agreed to the interviews but wondered aloud why any professor would offer academic credit for having him talk about his past.

Our early recordings were slow, a mixture of my relentless refrain of “how did that feel” and his hesitation to connect feeling to the actions. He rolled his eyes at me again and again, indicating I was ridiculous to want to know how his experiences of war felt. The best I could do was not budge, wait him out, ask the question again. I wanted to know from his point of view, because I couldn’t imagine what he had endured, because I had not experienced war myself.

He eventually detailed the hunger he felt waking each morning, unhoused and orphaned, on the streets of Minsk, Belarus, with German tanks now roving the roads of his home city.

“How does hunger feel?” I asked, because he’d made certain I never knew hunger and I didn’t know how hunger borne from food scarcity felt. There was always food available in our home. My father described an all-consuming ache in his belly. Before the war, he always had access to food and never had to think about finding it himself and now suddenly, with his apartment gone and his family disappeared, his waking hours were dedicated to begging for or stealing it. It was the foremost consideration of every moment and the work of every single day

After I shut off the tape recorder at the end of the day he described this hunger to me. I sat on the condo’s salmon-colored couch staring at the local news blaring through their television, exhausted by what he had shared. My father sat behind my mother and me at the dining table and tapped his pipe against the ashtray.

“Don’t you feel bad for me? Don’t you?” he asked.

I turned to him, saw his face scrunched up, his eyes pinched nearly closed and moist. I walked behind him, hugged his neck and kissed his nearly bald head. “Of course I do, Papa, of course I do.”

What else to say? I did feel bad for him.

“How come you’re not telling me about people?” I asked, when we spoke about a time in 1945, after he had escaped a newly unfolding conflict in Belarus and found refuge in Germany and was running again—this time from the BMW plant where he worked, to bomb shelters. This time it was Allied planes that dropped death from the sky.

“I know about the workers in the factory, that they existed, but none of their details. It seems like it’s just you,” I said.

“I told you about Zigmund and Luda,” he protested, naming two people he had met at a Displaced Persons camp in Germany who would eventually become his godparents.

“Fair enough,” I answered. “But that’s it. Where are all the other people?”

He cradled the black plastic pipe tip between his teeth and paused. He exhaled. “Once you make a friend and that person dies from the bombs and it keeps happening, you stop making friends,” he said, strumming his fingertips on the table where we sat, as he looked at me to understand.

At dusk I sat outside by our pool. Alone by the bubbling water, the filter humming, I looked up at a sky devoid of aircraft, but I kept imagining a plane breaking through the walls of our house. My father joined me, filling his pipe as he sat. I told him my fear. He had known that fear, he said. He had seen empty skies too. This hush, he said, was good. Precautionary. He wasn’t afraid of this sky and America now was not Russia then.

The fall months of 2001 passed, and we closed in on the end of recording his stories. He recounted his immigration to the United States on the USS Sturgis in 1949 when he was eighteen. He had heard of the United States as a land of promise for immigrants, where he could have any life that he wanted if he worked for it. He told me about falling for my mother at a St. Patrick’s Day dance in Chicago in 1950, when all he could say in English was, Would you like to dance? and how she abandoned the boy she had come to the party with to swing with my father to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”

He detailed their eventual move to Boston so that he could attend MIT, how he wanted to go to the best possible engineering school, because he felt that was the best way to land the best job that made him the most money, so that he could support the family that he and my mother wanted to create. He told of raising a family, sharing with me anecdotes about each of his thirteen children, as I steered clear of what he wasn’t saying about his drinking, his violence, the pervasive tautness of my childhood home, where we all stepped around him as if he were a human landmine. At the time I didn’t have words to ask him about the atmosphere of our home, where his children loved him but feared his brutality most of all.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say about it, or I was afraid to push, worried he would stop talking if I did. If there are omissions in the tapes that feel like wasted opportunity, this is one.

After we finished our interviews in January 2002, I continued living with my parents while I looked for my first post-college job. One day, I was in my bedroom practicing a song I had no business attempting, “Reflection,” a ballad off the Mulan soundtrack recorded by Christina Aguilera. In the song, Mulan’s character wants to be seen by her father as a warrior who is brave and capable, in a time and place where girls weren’t supposed to be either of those things. I sang it an octave down and it sounded silly coming from a baritone’s mouth, but I related to the message of wanting to be seen as I was, in a world that didn’t want to see me. I finished singing and heard little noises—light footsteps, the scuffle of slippers—outside my door.

“You sound beautiful, son,” my father said when I opened the door and found him there.

He would use that word to describe me. “How’s my beautiful son?” was his greeting for me most of the time now.

Lodged in my memory were the other words he called me in earlier versions of both our lives. Fat. Ugly. Stupid. The monster of my childhood was now calling me beautiful on a daily basis. I tried to hear it, tried to make room for new ways of being with my father. I couldn’t help having a childlike reaction to his new sweetness and feeling resistance. I actually rolled my eyes, waiting for the monster to reveal himself, to upend the pleasantness.

“I want to talk to you, son,” he said to me one day, early in 2002, as I was heading out for a run.

“What?” I asked with a jerk of my head, wanting to get out the door.

“I am going to die soon,” he continued. “And I want you to know what you should do for your mother when I am gone.”

“Why do you think you’re going to die?” I asked. “I just know,” he said. “Just write this down.”

I wrote his instructions on a piece of torn-out notebook paper. He directed me to all his bank accounts, what I should do with each and how I should make sure my mother had everything she needed. He gave me a hug when he was done, his tears wetting my running shirt at one shoulder.

As I jogged out of the driveway, I looked back at the house, thinking that what had just happened was a little bizarre, but not unsurprising. He’d been sick for a while, with no answers from the medical establishment and no plan provided for recovery, despite countless referrals and meetings with specialists. “Not dementia.” “Something else.” “Don’t know what,” they said. He’d gotten worse, unable now to drive himself a few miles without forgetting the way home. He was 73, still spry, still walking around the yard and the neighborhood with my mother, but after all the medical dead ends, he was realistic enough to think he might not escape whatever this was and it frustrated him.

Throughout his life he had relied on his body and mind and his ability to adapt, to escape what was meant to kill him. He’d excelled at it. This time, despite a team of physicians, despite tracking the course of his illness, his body and mind seemed to be conspiring against his will to survive.

Because of our work together, I knew that the man crying on my shoulder in 2002, the one certain he would die soon, was his most recent incarnation. And like his previous incarnations, his current condition was driven by necessity. Because of what the world demanded, even his name had changed. He had been Volodya, the child separated from his family by a Nazi invasion, then Wolfgang, the pre-teen taken in and raised by the very Nazis who engineered his abandonment. From there he became Władysław, the young, displaced person delivered from the Germans by the United Nations to the shores of the U.S., where he learned to be Walter.

Walter. My father. My tormenter. My interview subject. A force that drove my own life’s changes and incarnations. Over 50 hours of recordings, we sat with one another, each of us asking same question: Who, exactly, are you?

It’s been nearly a quarter century since his death in early 2002 and still I must ask myself, Who exactly was my father?

From War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir by Jason Prokowiew. Reprinted by permission of Trio House Press.

War Boys is our November 2026 Open Secrets Book Club selection.

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Jason Prokowiew won the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, a Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Aurora Polaris Prize for Nonfiction for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, Under the Sun, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, Business Insider, and on PBS/WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, “Sing,” has over 2.6 million views on Facebook and is the most viewed in the show’s history. His essay “The Demulcent of Shame,” originally published by Roxane Gay, won the 2023 Lascaux Prize for Creative Nonfiction. He’s received additional support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. A recovering disability attorney, he lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.

Find out more at warboysbook.com

They were going to throw them away.

Four sets of curtain fairy lights, impossibly tangled, each with 10, maybe 12 feet of fine wire.

They handed me what looked like a three-foot cocoon.

“Have at it.”

I put them in the back seat of my car.

I couldn’t wait to get home and untangle them.

At home, I made my favorite ginger tea, grabbed a cookie from the jar, turned on the fire, and sat on a big Moroccan pillow so I could be level with the cocoon, formerly known as fairy lights.

Of the forty ends, only one was visible.

It called to me.

Here I am.

I followed its path through the cocoon, through knots, through crossings, through small tightening pulls that tried to split it away from itself.

After about an hour, I freed my first strand.

I wrapped it around my wrist in a perfect spiral, secured it with a hair tie, and set it beside me.

It wasn’t going anywhere.

Not until the others were free.

That was hours two through six.

Of day one.

While at work the following day, I realized my fingers were sore playing piano.

Funny. I hadn’t practiced.

Then I smiled.

My fairy lights.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait to go home.

To untangle the mess.

To discover the order in the disorder.

To return the lights to themselves.

At home, I sat on my pillow.

My husband made my tea, my biscotti, and turned on the fire.

He didn’t ask if I wanted help.

He knew the answer.

I tried to listen to music, but it was too distracting.

I had one goal.

Find the ends.

I had untangled seven individual strands the night before, but the cocoon had barely decreased in size.

How could that be, I thought.

Maybe untangling was like cleaning.

Before the cocoon could shrink, everything inside it had to loosen first.

I pictured the cocoon shrinking.

My hands hurt.

By midnight, with only a small dinner break and a single glass of wine, I had uncovered the first complete section of the nest.

One strand.

Made of ten smaller strands of the finest wire.

Threads, almost.

Tiny glowing hives along the wire.

So delicate.

And now, carefully wrapped, no longer at risk of tangling again.

I looked to my left.

Somewhere in that cocoon, there were thirty more ends.

Thirty.

I should have been exhausted.

But instead, I was invigorated.

The rest of the week repeated the first day.

Work. Tea. Cookie. Fire. Untangling.

I was finally on what looked to be the last set of strands.

Ten, maybe twenty ends left.

I held a needle used for embroidery.

Thick, but sharp.

It would help me separate the remaining ends with ease.

I looked behind me at my work.

Two completed sets of fairy lights, each strand wrapped and tied, hanging neatly.

Symmetrical.

Ordered.

I had even arranged the hair ties in rainbow order.

They made me so happy.

Now to find another end.

As I worked my way through the finally shrinking cocoon, I felt an unexpected sadness.

It was getting easier.

Before the fevers and the coma, I solved things quickly.

I used to finish Sudoku puzzles during intermissions at concerts.

Word games. Patterns. Puzzles.

My brain preferred shortcuts.

Now it takes the long way around.

It follows every crossing.

Every knot.

Ideas arrive slower now, but more completely.

The fairy lights only asked one thing:

Find the next end.

Then I picked the needle back up.

I separated the wires carefully, as if performing surgery on conjoined twins.

The last set took almost no time at all.

It was only midnight.

My hands didn’t hurt.

Or maybe I didn’t notice any pain.

I slowed down without meaning to.

I set the needle aside.

I would finish the last few the old-fashioned way.

Old-fashioned, as of last Sunday.

I remembered finding the first end.

How exciting it was.

How complete it felt.

I remembered that day’s cookie.

Warm.

The fire.

The tea.

I unraveled the last strand.

Somewhere along the way, the work had stopped being about finishing.

It had become finding the next end.

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Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a composer, writer, and arts educator based in Colorado. She owns two arts education companies serving more than 200 students weekly and writes about embodiment, neurodivergence, performance, and modern womanhood. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Genre Society, Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine, Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Larina’s Lit Lounge, and Divergents Magazine.

For eleven moves, I’ve carried three linotype cases myself because they are too precious to hand off to movers.

”Oh, I’ve seen those things before. What are they?” people say when they see linotype cases on a wall in my home. When I tell them, no one knows what they are. Even writers and avid readers don’t know they are looking at the history of publishing. It wasn’t always computers, drop-down font menus, and page layout templates that determined how our printed pages look. It was the skilled hands of composers like my father who did it for hundreds of years before.

Catching a glimpse of the typecases showcased on my wall, whether holding Lego mini-figs, rolls of coins, or wine corks, visitors are peeking at publishing legacy while peering through a porthole into the making of me.

My dad was my rescue companion and lighthouse: a beacon of relief from critical gazes and escape from being relegated to the dank basement crawlspace a “should be seen and not heard” child was supposed to play in. If I’d been asked, I would have chosen books over Barbie, Tolkien over tea parties. But I wasn’t asked.

As a kid, my true play spaces moved with my father’s day. More his kid than hers, I went to work at his print shop with Dad. There were no limits at the shop. I couldn’t get anything wrong there. My father’s hands were huge and skilled. He deftly swirled a wide spatula through pots of primary-colored ink, blending shades to Pantone precision on a sheet of glass. My job was to say when Pantone’s Navigate (17-5025) developed to Deep Teal (17-5024), one step away on the color swatch. I still believe I see more colors than other people.

Dad jogged six-inch-thick stacks of newspaper-sized paper, riffling the stock with air so the sheets wouldn’t stick together as they shot through the monstrous Heidelberg press that sat like Jabba the Hut in his shop corner. I knew about paper types, weights, and sizes. I had access to a small warehouse of colored Bond paper, a precursor to my serious stationery habit.

But nothing captivated my interest more than how ink could be laid out on the page to tell a story.

My father was a compositor and later a hot-metal linotype operator, until the machines were phased out of every print shop, newspaper press room, and publishing house in North America by the early 1970s. I have one California Whetton post-war job case and two Hamilton Triples. The Hamiltons are less common and more ambitious because they can carry an entire font family in a single tray. (No need for an upper case and lower case with the Hamiltons.) Chances are good that these cases held an ancestor of the Times New Roman font for the small-town newspaper my father worked for after high school.

Before my father sat at the linotype’s clacking keyboard casting whole lines in molten metal, he composed by hand. The process didn’t change much after Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press in the 1400s. I saw how small a single “sort” of type was, and couldn’t imagine my dad’s big hands reaching into wooden cases, but the edges of the tiny compartments were worn dark by fingers pulling each letter and symbol, and space, quad, or lead out one at a time. He would have been transcribing mentally from handwritten copy or typewritten pages, setting type backwards and upside down, building lines into a composing stick until he judged it would justify. The transposing eye of a compositor or linotype operator made margins flush, decided on hyphenation, and corrected orphan words before software did.

He became a machine operator, casting lines at speed, and when offset printing made his own business possible, he evolved. When computers came, he found a way then, too. The technology of book building changed, but he stayed, and so did I. The linotype cases moved from his office wall to mine.

Dad was well-known for his long-winded, detail-laden recounting. Our window-down station-wagon trips were lessons in post-WWII cultural change, delivered by story. He’d call out farm family names, breeds of cattle, and the make of every airplane and car. We were inseparable; less his choice than mine.

He taught me about scenes and they became the core of my non-fiction teaching and book coaching career. His stories featured visualizable details, and not just commonplace descriptors. Dad made me a writer from my discerning font choices to narrative mosaics. Like the finest of storytellers, he was life taught, and short on academic training.

He made one demand of me, in my entire life. “Go to university for something, anything. You can always come back and run the business.” I wanted to make books, but I never went back to the print shop for long.

My downsizing last year was more keep-what-your-heart-can’t-part-with than pitch-the-cracked-and-dented-things purge. It was my reckoning with rupture. I had become a reluctant curator of ghosts for other people’s stuff. I feel a kinship with containers. So I mudlarked through discarded family jewelry and envelopes of loose black and white photographs of family I’d never known. I made difficult choices. I held tighter to the things I feel define me. The things I choose to keep tell me who I am.

The linotype cases will always be part of my home. They are as essential as family photos for me; they’re my origin story. Books are in my blood. We have forgotten how books are made. Without personal storytelling, we risk forgetting the people who formed us, too, or misremembering the moments that created us. Writing memoir is an act of personal archaeology.

I keep them to protect them and the remainder of his fingerprints and to honor the man who made me and the profession that fostered my own. I keep them because I couldn’t bear to part with them. Isn’t that why we keep so many things, or what we tell ourselves?

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Patti M. Hall is a writer who walks comfortably among ghosts—of cities, family, and partially told tales. From them, she crafts maps, meaning, and memoir. She is the author of Loving Large (2020) and is writing Things We Choose to Keep, a memoir about the sacred weight of kept things. A lifelong independent authority on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, she writes about books and the writing life at Behind the Book on Substack. She is a writing coach and publishing strategist to non-fiction and memoir writers crafting impactful books that serve.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“LOSING MY WATCH” by , What Comes Next?

“You Can’t Buy Memories” by

“What Dolls Taught Me About Being Human” by

“Downsizing” by , The Middler

“‘I felt the space opening up around me’: Author Ann Patchett on what she learned from a radical declutter” by Ann Patchett, Good Housekeeping

“Is It Ever OK to Declutter Your Partner’s Stuff Behind Their Back? Asking for a Friend” by Lisa Milbrand, Real Simple

In this episode, thriller author Rob Hart discusses how he went about downsizing twice within a few years after his divorce, and then upon remarriage, each time having to get real about what he took with him. As he says, he had to ask himself, “What do I care about carrying with me into this next phase of my life?”

Hart discusses the nuances of being a published author faced with a multiplying array of copies of his own books, including foreign editions. How do authors store the work that they’ve invested countless hours into? What do they do with all the extra copies they amass?

Hart is also an avid Lego enthusiast, dedicating days at a time to building items like a Lego typewriter, which he likes to display when he’s done, and shares this hobby with his daughter. What’s the draw of building Lego sets, and what’s Hart’s dream Lego purchase?

We also discuss Hart’s research process for his Assassins Anonymous series, whose latest title, Three Hitmen and a Baby, was released this week.

Click on “Transcript” on the top right to read an auto-generated transcript of this episode.

About our guest:

Rob Hart is the author of Three Hitmen and a Baby, The Medusa Protocol, Assassins Anonymous, The Paradox Hotel, The Warehouse, the Ash McKenna crime series, and is the co-author of Scott Free with James Patterson. He’s worked as a book publisher, a reporter, a political communications director, and a commissioner for the city of New York. Hart lives in Jersey City.

robwhart.com

on Substack

Instagram: @robwhart1

Three Hitmen and a Baby

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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My stepfather Arthur* loves fresh fruit.

He and my mom spent their 30 years together in Florida, and for all the Sunshine State’s flaws, the produce is amazing. Citrus, melons, stone fruits, berries, even plain ‘ole apples—that man could demolish a fruit plate. When he’d come visit us in Seattle in springtime, he’d marvel at the Bing and Rainier cherries, devouring bag after bag.

My mother would chastise him. “Your triglycerides are high,” she’d say, telling him what he already knew.

My mom was right, but so was Arthur.

She knew too much sugar had consequences. He knew how to relish what he loved. But he also lacked the sense to know when something was a bad idea. Or perhaps he knew, and chose to indulge anyways, without regard for what might happen next.

In life, as in peaches.

This is my stepfather.

In 2019—about five years after he and my mother divorced—my stepfather and his business partners were convicted of scamming over a dozen people out of $3.6 million in investments. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison and to pay restitution to his victims. I have no personal knowledge of how or when these crimes were committed. I found out about it in the news, like everyone else.

I’m sure the courts went after his bank accounts and other assets. I hope it was enough to compensate all the victims for what he stole from them.

As Father’s Day approaches, I’m contemplating my own restitution. I also had something lost or stolen, but nothing a court of law could replace.

I lost my trust in a parent—and in my own memory of him.

Because this is also my stepfather.

I first met Arthur in 1987, when I was in high school and he and my mother began dating. My parents had recently separated. I’d just started to appreciate my home without my dad in it, the sense of levity I felt in the absence of his imposing presence. And then there appeared this new man, one who physically wasn’t unlike my dad: tall, Jewish, brown hair, hazel eyes. But the resemblance ended there. Where my dad was mercurial, tipping toward explosive, Arthur was chill, thoughtful, and kind in ways my troubled, angry father never was.

As an adult looking back, I have an even greater appreciation for Arthur; it’s not every 40-something man who wants to take on a girlfriend with two teenage children. But he did that and more. He quickly became a father figure for me—a relationship I sorely needed, and one that continued for decades.

Arthur listened, and he heard me. I can recall a conversation we had sometime in my twenties, even as I don’t remember what blowup with my dad had preceded it. “If your father can’t see what an amazing person his daughter is, then fuck him,” he told me.

It was so much easier to do that, knowing Arthur had my back.

I come from a loving family, though perhaps one where success is valued so highly that vulnerability gets swallowed. Arthur got it. Countless times, he reached out and asked if I needed anything, financially or otherwise, making clear it was between just us. He always made me feel like I could come to him for anything. Even better, I rarely had to—he’d ask before I found the words.

When I told Arthur and my mom I was engaged, he was as happy for me as if I’d been his own daughter. He met my future in-laws as my parent, and financed a good deal of the ceremony, expecting nothing in return but that I enjoy the day as I wanted to plan it.

At the time, I had only one living grandparent, my mom’s dad, who opted not to fly across the country for our wedding. That stung. But Arthur’s mom and her partner showed up; they flew out and danced the night away and rejoiced with our family. I don’t think I ever let them know how much that meant to me, and I wish I had, before they were gone.

Once I became a parent, Arthur stepped up effortlessly as a grandfather, spoiling my daughters with his attention and affection. He always remembered holidays and our birthdays, and would send cards or messages.

He still does, even now.

The only years when I didn’t receive them? The ones when he was incarcerated.

My stepdad contains multitudes, and so do I.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

So says Whitman in “Song of Myself,” and so do I, as I try to reconcile a 30-year nurturing paternal relationship with the criminal I know Arthur to be. My heart and brain keep circling the same questions: how, and why? How did the same man who loved, raised, and healed me then go on to commit such crimes? Who was the real Arthur? And what was I supposed to do, as a stepdaughter and mother, in continuing a relationship with him? Does he deserve a place in my life, with my family? Do I owe him that after 30 years? Can we both hold that many multitudes?

It’s been nearly seven years since his conviction, and he’s served his time. I still can’t answer these questions. All I have is what I’ve gleaned from the past, and the steps I’ve taken—or chosen not to take—in the years since his arrest.

First and foremost, I know Arthur loves his family unconditionally. More than anyone else, Arthur demonstrated to me how to love without judgment.

In the kindest reading of his circumstances, this may have been his undoing.

It all began years earlier, when Arthur’s daughter started dating a man who was in prison, had been there for years, for some sort of white collar fraud crimes. He was innocent, of course, and he was loaded, naturally, so when he got out of prison, he and Arthur’s daughter were going to get married, or so he said.

So Arthur started visiting the prison with his daughter, to get to know this man whom she intended to marry one day.

My mother was horrified.

I understood why. I’m certain my mom gave Arthur an earful. Once again, my mom was right, but so was Arthur.

She knew validating this relationship and investing time to get to know a criminal could have negative consequences. He knew how to cherish what he loved. And if his daughter loved this man, then he wanted to support her by getting to know him. I’d never known anyone in my family who would’ve supported me without judgment like that.

I was awed by his unconditional love.

But also, I’m my mother’s daughter. I shared her misgivings. I understood Arthur lacked the sense to know when something was a bad idea—or perhaps he knew, and chose to indulge his daughter anyway, without regard for what might happen next.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.

My mother faced no such contradictions. Arthur’s support of his daughter became the final straw. They divorced in 2014.

I continued to receive texts and Facebook updates from my stepfather. His daughter’s boyfriend did get out of prison, and they did get engaged. Then they formed an investment company together. My mom and I wondered at the feasibility of it all, but now from a distance.

And that was it, for years. I can’t say what part Arthur played in the financial scam, how much he knew, or why he did what he did. My knowledge ends here, but the story continues.

On February 19, 2019—my wedding anniversary, incidentally—the news came: 16 charges of wire fraud. Then the fiancé died of a heart attack in prison. Arthur’s daughter was never charged. I have to think he protected her, though I have no proof.

Arthur reached out to me ahead of his sentencing and asked if I’d be willing to write a letter to the judge on his behalf, hoping to lessen his sentence. I wrote that letter. I told the truth, that knowing Arthur had made my life better through his kindness and support over the past 30 years.

“It made me cry,” Arthur replied when I emailed it over.

He got 42 months. I’m not sure if that was good or bad for his crimes, but I’d like to think my little words made an impact. At Arthur’s request, I provided my email as a point of contact for the prison. When I got the message that he’d officially been incarcerated, my heart sank as my mind’s eye filled with a past vision of my stepfather, grinning with his giant nightly plate of fruit. The immensity of his actions knocked the wind out of me, and I teared up as I thought, He’s 72 years old, and he’s in prison, and I don’t think he’ll have fresh fruit there, or possibly ever again.

He loved fruit so much. I cried for his loss, and for mine. How is this our shared reality, I lamented.

I’ll never know.

He’s out now. He texts me on holidays, and for the kids’ birthdays. Sometimes I reply, but I keep it brief. I know he’s still in Florida because when I posted photos on Facebook while visiting my mom, he messaged me, asking to get together. I can’t. Or at least, I don’t.

I know I can’t recover what I lost. I had a father figure knocked out from under me. Someone I loved without question betrayed that trust, all his multitudes notwithstanding. Unlike his victims, I won’t get restitution from him. What’s lost is lost. Instead, I look for it in myself. I hold onto the good I had with him, and I choose to believe it was real.

I’m certain it was.

I’m happy he’s out now.

I hope he’s relishing a too-large portion of melon, peaches, and berries, ripe and in-season.

I may even send him a text to wish him a happy Father’s Day.

*Name changed for privacy.

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Digging through a bag of refrigerator-cold Bing cherries, my fingers are stained with dark juice. I spit the pits into a plastic bag next to me then sink my fingers back into the cool fruit for my next prize. My bedroom windows are open and birds are chirping in the golden light of early evening while I dig into the bag again, testing the firmness and color of each piece of fruit, trying to find the one guaranteed to be sweet when I bite into the flesh. I’m almost always right in plucking the best cherries from the bag, leaving the ones slightly bruised and too soft at the bottom with the pits and stems. I’m picky about fruit. I like my cherries like I do my grapes, apples, pears, plums, nectarines, and peaches—hard to the touch with no give. I take extra time with all of them so I can ensure there are no surprises or rot with my enjoyment. By the time I’m halfway through the bag, I’ve sorted a good portion of the cherries into the do not eat pile. My grandmother would be ashamed at how wasteful this is, but I’ll take the guilt for the perfect bite.

I’m guilty elsewhere in my life, too. Guilty of ruminating, developing, and musing about pleasure and joy and all the ways it can show up in my life. Of trying to cherry pick the best experiences and habits so I can prove to myself, and sometimes others, I’m moving forward positively, that I’m more than the same cycles that keep my life moving. That I’m more than sleep, commute, work, commute, eat, write, sleep, wake, repeat. I sort through all the options around me, testing each of them, until one of them seems to be the remedy for what ails me, whether that be boredom, fear, anxiety, depression, or restlessness. By the time I discard what seems to be not quite right I’m left with a trail of options but not too many choices. But I won’t say the cherry picking isn’t sweet.

Even with those discarded possibilities, the ones I know are still good just not perfect, I’ve still managed to gather little luxuries and mantras and indulgences. I’ve fostered my quiet and solitude, too. I’ve solo traveled and wandered alone and made so many efforts to center softness in my life. I’ve learned to set harder boundaries and stand up for myself more. The game plan is there. I know all the steps to take. But I’m still guilty of planning and not doing despite my best efforts. I’m still guilty of finding the best there is and giving it away because I think it makes me more worthy to eventually receive something good myself. I think, in some ways, I’ve made this journey more about the path and not the destination, more about others and their opinions than myself. I can lay out the perfect way to go but what happens if I barely take a step? What if I keep giving away what I need and end up starving in the wake?

I haven’t always been guilty of this kind of cherry picking. I started my pleasure journey in earnest and I’ve had a great time doing so. The path I’ve set up for myself is beautiful. That much is true. And I still know quite well the reasons I started prioritizing this kind of habit. I tend to run myself ragged by trying to be everything to everybody or keeping my name alive by doing events and engagements or by rarely saying no. The summer I took three months of FMLA, I was in the midst of a decision. I’d grown fond of the idea I was living into a year of radical pleasure, kind of a year of selfishness that would allow me to think of myself first and give the best of who I am to the woman in the mirror before I handed over pieces of me. I wanted more days like one in my bed with the sack of fruit in my lap. For a while I lived just like that. Until the selfishness, no matter how honorable, started to turn to guilt and I began giving myself leftovers again.

Now, coming up on two summers later, that year has come and gone. Back then, radical pleasure meant something else. The idea was based on breaking and dismantling. I’d always felt confined—in my body, my brain, my life. I always felt like the cherries at the bottom of the bag. Like I was ripe and ready but not quite aesthetically pleasing enough to be the prize. That first year was meant to be as uncomfortable as it was pleasurable. It was supposed to shake me free from everything that had been weighing me down. I was supposed to take the time to learn myself from the inside out and discover my imperfections weren’t ever holding me back. I was doing that by living into a life and an image never meant to be mine.

I did learn something that year. I learned the foundation of my pleasure and joy. I learned what is required for me to feel safe and more whole than when I started. I can press against my flesh now and see where I’m soft, not on purpose, but by life’s bruising. I can feel where I stand firm and I can most certainly taste the sweetness I’ve invited into my life. The biggest lesson has been, however, that all of this new knowledge doesn’t necessarily look as I always imagined. Some days it’s nothing like I expected.

In the end, I’m like the cherries. After the first round of rooting around in the bag, I’ve taken the best of the best with little effort or consideration for myself. I get what’s left and sometimes that’s barely enough to taste. But I know now to pay attention to the other cherry-picking days. Like the next day after the fruit has spent another night chilling in the refrigerator and all that’s left is the stone fruit I didn’t want but may still be viable. The extra cold firms up the flesh and I pick out the best options again.

By the third and final day, I’m fishing around in the sack just hoping I missed something good. I never finish a bag in full. Sometimes my life is like this. I can have everything perfectly in hand but the result is still sour. The flesh of some of the cherries is deep red, the stems a perfect green, the shape of them round with juice I know will be sweet. Then I bite into disappointment. Sometimes on the third day of rooting through the bag, I’ll test my luck with the cherries left behind—the too-soft ones, the bruised ones, the misshapen. I bite into them still chasing sweetness and there are always surprises. Some of them are rotten or turn to mush between my teeth, but some of them? Some of them burst perfectly no matter how imperfect they appear on the outside.

I can’t lie and say my cherry picking has changed. I still sift through the bag and press my fingers into the fruit. But I know the flesh yielding isn’t a failure now. There is still sweetness to be had even if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing or fully whole. So what’s life at the bottom of the sack? Life is a little misshapen but still soft and sweet. Choices, while not always pretty, are still here and often they are the best option for being nurtured.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.