When your face appeared on my laptop screen, I blinked. My mouth went dry. A LinkedIn notification showed that you visited my profile, even though we hadn’t spoken in more than twenty years.

Your last name had changed, but you didn’t look much different from how I remembered you in the photograph that hung on our refrigerator all those years ago. In the picture taken on my twenty-first birthday, you grinned as you fed me cake, a row of piercings lining your ear.

The shutter caught me faux-protesting, gently pushing against your arm, draped with a bracelet of wooden Buddhist beads. A child’s plastic barrette held wisps of newly cropped and dyed blond hair out of my eyes, which were framed by wild smudges of black eyeliner.

I wouldn’t have become the woman in the snapshot if we hadn’t been accidental roommates in college. You introduced me to punk shows, vegan restaurants, and Riot Grrrl zines. The only thing I remember offering you that semester was flashcards for our Brit Lit final.

More than two decades later, between back-to-back meetings at the PR firm where I spent nine-hour days talking clients down from unrealistic demands, I stared at the screen. Did you mean to click my name, or did your finger slip, forgetting that LinkedIn lists every profile viewer?

I typed your name into Google and learned you were married with two children, living a few towns away from the apartment we shared in our early twenties.

***

You had convinced me to move to New Jersey shortly after I graduated. “Come live with me. We’ll find an apartment near the train to New York,” you said when I bemoaned my life as a clothing store employee. I packed my things within weeks.

I needed to be close to you, believing proximity could make me more like you. Do you remember how, during Finals Week, when I was sad over some guy, you ran into the Boston Public Garden, ignored the “No Trespassing” signs, and plucked a yellow tulip, saying I deserved something pretty? I wished I could simply take action like that without always overthinking.

I had also hoped proximity to the city would bring big things: an editorial assistant job at a glossy magazine, enough money for rent and Chanel Vamp nail polish. Maybe I’d even date a hot guy in a band.

That summer, the air in the apartment swelled from blistering heat. We sought refuge in the living room under the window AC, napping together on the futon, limbs intertwined like kittens, or reading Anaïs Nin aloud, searching for clues on how to become women.

Other nights, we layered our lips with crimson and descended into darkened clubs. A circle of guys, acquaintances, gathered close. I watched them watching you as you tucked a tendril of your pixie-cut brown hair behind one ear, then smoothed the front of your plaid skirt. Their bodies shifted from stiff stances to softened figures, arching like willows down to your ear to say hello.

I wanted them to look at me that way. No matter how much weight I lost after college or how I tried to replicate your style, I couldn’t conjure your confidence, like how you winked at onlookers that night as if casting a spell.

You hated the attention; at least, that’s what you said. Maybe that’s why you reached for my waist, finding the space between my babydoll T-shirt and worn jeans, your fingers echoing the beat of the bass on my overheated skin. I wrapped my arms around you and melted into the reassuring warmth of your touch, which gave me a shot of courage. Knowing you were an arm’s length away, I could run off in dark corners and kiss guys whose names I’d never know.

For Christmas, you made me a journal with hand-painted pages and Nin quotes, telling me every writer needed one. I wasn’t a writer, but a waitress. The glossy magazine job never materialized, and the mailbox bulged with rejection letters. My mother suggested I take an admin job; you circled writing jobs in The Village Voice classifieds and left notes of assurance around the apartment.

Do you remember how we draped fairy lights on the porch, sharing clove cigarettes under the canopy of a giant maple? Between crackling drags, we mused about the future where we’d be middle-aged neighbors, babysitting each other’s children, and bringing the other leftovers for lunch.

No one had ever been that present in my life. On Saturday nights, you’d be waiting for me, curled up on the futon under dimmed lights, when I got home from work. “I can’t sleep when you’re not here,” you’d whisper.

My attraction to you terrified me. So did my fear of destroying the most important friendship I’d ever had. I took double shifts, hoping that avoidance would solve the problem.

You noticed, and asked me to spend time with you and your new boyfriend — a guy in a band.

“Come out with us. I miss you.”

“I can’t go on dates with you.”

“It’s not a date. We’re just hanging out with his friends. I feel more comfortable when you’re there. Pleeeeeease.”

Later that night, I sat on the edge of your bed. My heart raced as I looked past you.

“I’m in love with you. I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve been lying to you.”

Had you asked why I chose that night, I couldn’t have given you an answer. Today, I understand. I feared that you were becoming his, not mine.

“You’re terrible at hiding your feelings. I’ve known for a while,” you said, holding my gaze until I looked away first.

I exhaled with relief that you didn’t make it weird, and I could go on living without being crushed by embarrassment.

Then you kissed me. Just as quickly as your lips met mine, you pulled away. I don’t know what I expected. I assumed we’d talk it out like we did everything else and laugh about it years later. You weren’t supposed to kiss me.

“I love you. I need you in my life, but we don’t love each other the way you think we do,” you said with a steady voice while my hands shook.

The person I am today would have asked you why you kissed me. That night, I had run out of words. I stared at the pile of CDs on the floor, Tori Amos floating in a cloud of shards. How many times had we left the album on repeat for hours?

Maybe you said something important. All I could hear was music that wasn’t playing.

I ran up the narrow stairs to my attic bedroom and scribbled ramblings in the pages of the handmade journal until dawn.

We never talked about it again. Did it keep you up at night weeks later, as it did me?

A few months passed, and I found a job in New York City editing corporate press releases. It wasn’t the job I wanted, but I hoped it would lead to something better.

Work and commuting took up most of the day. With more space between us, we returned to a familiar rhythm: movies on the futon, basement shows, and occasionally you met me after work for veggie burgers on St. Mark’s Place. While people-watching punks with Manic Panic purple hair, you cackled about your weird coffee shop customers, and I dished about my office crush.

Except it hadn’t returned to the way it was before, had it?

Does the night I stood at the counter, chopping tomatoes for veggie chili, haunt you the same way it haunts me? You tucked your arms beneath my baggy overalls and hugged my waist. The intensity of your squeeze was as tender as it was cruel. Do you know your fingertips left invisible imprints on my skin, even years later?

“If you lose any more weight, I won’t have anything to hold onto,” you said as you raised your voice an octave, the way you did when you attempted to cloak any seriousness. You started to say something more. Stopped.

I wanted to ask what was on your mind. Instead, suffocating from the cloying smell of vanilla and hazelnut coffee syrup on your work shirt, I stared at the porch door, willing it to open and release a rush of air.

If you knew how much I needed your friendship and approval, would you have done anything differently?

A few years later, I shared this with a guy I was dating.

“Don’t you think your approval was as important to her?” he asked.

Back then, I never considered that you needed anything from me.

Maybe that’s why I left, transferring to the Boston office as soon as a position opened.

I wasn’t sure how to break the news. Instead of taking my place on the futon next to you, I retreated to the wicker chair, unable to make eye contact, and clutched a pillow to my waist.

Your face drained of color when I told you.

“How can you do this to me?” you asked, tugging at the beads around your wrist.

“I’ll visit. Help you find a new roommate. We’ll still go to shows together. I’m not leaving you, just moving.”

“I don’t want a new roommate. If you leave, we aren’t friends anymore.” Your voice cracked, then lowered into a sharp, accusing staccato.

Blood beat at my temples, drowning out whatever you said next.

“You’re selfish and deserve to be alone,” I said. I wasn’t sure where the words had come from, but in that moment, hurting you was my intention.

Neither of us spoke another word that night; instead, we withdrew to our rooms.

In those final weeks, doors creaked, shower knobs turned, and the refrigerator with our picture opened and closed. We remained silent.

***

After I left New Jersey, you disappeared from my life for two decades, until LinkedIn showed me you had found my profile. I wondered if I’d see a message pop up in the sidebar asking, “How are you?” Or if you would confess that over the years, you had thought of reaching out, but it never seemed like the right time.

That’s the answer I would have given had you asked. But neither of us ever messaged the other.

A few months later, after a breakup, increasing work demands, and too many afternoons crying in the office bathroom because I felt trapped in a career I never wanted, I quit my job to pursue freelance travel writing. My savings bought me a one-way ticket to Europe and a new journal. In a fit of anger years ago, I burned yours, but I never stopped writing or carrying a notebook with me everywhere I went. You taught me that.

Seeing your face on the screen didn’t cause me to quit. It reminded me how, during a summer so hot our dresses clung to our curves, I believed you could do anything, and you believed that about me.

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Kristin Amico is writing a memoir about finding the courage to quit a career she never wanted and backpack solo around the globe in her forties. Her work has appeared in Off Assignment, Sundog Lit, HuffPost, and The Toronto Star, among others. She spends her weekends offering typewriter poetry on the streets of New York and other cities. Find her at www.travelingtypewriterpoet.com.

It was a Saturday morning in March 1996. My boyfriend was sitting on the couch, my head on his lap. It was early, and I’ve never been a morning person. I was dozing, moving in and out of alertness. I heard him talking to me but didn’t register what he was saying. I opened my eyes and saw the ring. He asked me to marry him and I said yes.

This beautiful ring was white gold, with a central star sapphire and purple amethysts on either side. The star sapphire was a deep periwinkle blue. When held in the sunlight, the sun’s rays shone like a star in the center. The amethysts, my favorite stones, were royal purple and framed the sapphire on either side. I cherished this ring because it was unique and special, just like his love for me. Our love sparked quickly after years of friendship. We got married that August.

Our lives together were full of work, going to concerts, and walking around the city holding hands. He would attend all of my dance concerts, even when the Mets were playing. He’d listen to the game on headphones, take them off during my time on stage, then put them back on while the rest of the dancers were on. Dance wasn’t his thing, but I was.

About a year into our marriage, I was doing laundry in the basement of our building. I was feeling grateful for the convenience of having laundry downstairs, making it simple to stay on top of things. Neither of us were home very often and it was easy to get behind on housework, which was never-ending. As I moved the last of the clothes from the dryer to the basket, I looked down at my hand: The sapphire was gone. I frantically searched the laundry machines and the clothing but I couldn’t find the stone anywhere. I was devastated. I went back to the apartment, sobbing, feeling utterly gutted, and called him.

It took months to get the stone replaced. First they put in a new star sapphire but the amethysts were missing (WTF?!). How had it taken so many months, why had they taken them out, and why didn’t they put the ring back the way it was? The sapphire was a much darker blue than the original, and the star was a bit uncentered, but I was focused on the missing side stones. After another month or two I finally got the ring back, all stones in place, but the amethysts were also different. They were more lilac, almost pink. I was tired of waiting, my naked finger missing my special ring. I decided it was good enough.

Our lives had settled into a comfortable pattern, each of us getting busier with work and other activities and having less time for each other. He traveled for his job as a B2B journalist, I dove into my yoga practice, and we just kept going. We fell into a comfortable and steady pattern.

After multiple moves, graduate school, two children, and many years of financial and other struggles, we were always on the edge of getting ahead when something would happen: a job loss or a major medical expense, that derailed our plans. We chose to divide and conquer with the kids and their activities. Most days we both felt exhausted, and had little time or energy for each other. Sex wasn’t on the table, even when I asked. While he yelled at the umpire on TV, I was alone in our room. I was slowly disappearing in the marriage. I tried to “fix” the marriage by working on myself, but there were two of us.

In 2016 we took our annual family trip to York Harbor Beach in Maine. I had taken off all my rings, earrings, and necklace and put them in my bag for safekeeping. We spent the day at the beach, jumping in the waves until we were numb, building sand castles, and taking photos to remember it all. I played with the kids, but avoided eye contact with him. I spent more time on my towel reading than I had in previous years. He would start talking to me and I didn’t notice until he called my name.

On this day, I felt like I was going through the motions. I was coming to the realization that the marriage was over and that I wanted out, but I wasn’t yet ready to share that with him, or even say it out loud. When it came time to get cleaned up for dinner, I couldn’t find my ring. All my other jewelry was there, but my engagement ring was gone. I searched in the bathroom where I’d gotten changed, I looked in the sand where we’d been stationed, but it was gone.

This time, I didn’t care. I was surprised to notice how right that felt. Somehow my body knew before my mind did. My heart felt settled for the first time in a long time. That’s when I knew that the marriage was truly over.

The ring that started our journey together was gone, and now it was time to move forward alone.

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Janine Agoglia is a licensed acupuncturist, yoga instructor, and mom to two young adult men. She has written two books, Living Yoga: One Yoga Teacher’s Journey to Surrender and Intentional Eating: Finding Peace and Balance in Your Relationship with Food, both available on Amazon. She also writes the Substack “Yoga Living 50 and Beyond.” She’s a GenX, Type A, recovering perfectionist who tries to live her yoga practice, both on and off the mat. She lives in Central Massachusetts all by herself, and loves it.

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 Barbells Sad Lament” by

A letter from Albert Einstein (Note by )

“You Inherited Boxes of Family Photos. Here’s Where to Start.” by , The Unexpected Genealogist

“The Emotional Architecture of Home: Family rituals, traditions and the little things we pass down” by

“Clutter Was the Enemy—Now It’s a Design Choice” by Zoë Sessums, Domino

On the hot summer day I decided I wanted to live into a year of radical pleasure, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. I knew that there needed to be a change in how I lived my life. I was burned out like so many of us are, but also realistic enough to know that didn’t mean I would wake up the next day and quit my job. Bills still needed to be paid. I needed health insurance. I live in the United States of America and no matter how burned out I was, the business of living in this country would keep grinding. I had to figure out how to work on that burnout. And I also had to find strategies that would allow me to move to the fringes of the kind of life where I knew I would be able to breathe at least a little bit more freely.

So, what was the plan? It started off with the material. I won’t lie about that. My vision of what pleasure and freedom amounted to was the ability to lean into luxuries, even if I called them little. There was the Chanel face wash and moisturizer. The fine leather notebook. Lots of linen and the fashion sense of a coastal wife. Tiny gold jewelry and a rotation of signature scents. I splurged and justified and splurged again. I figured I had the money to do it so why not? And if I could trick my body into thinking this meant that I was living a life I really wanted then the job was done. Except it wasn’t. It didn’t matter how many Chanel boxes piled up in my bedroom or how many first class flights I took. I was still waking up at 3 a.m. nearly every morning covered in sweat and hoping against hope that this was the day I would be able to leave the rat race behind. Except it never was. I was still commuting to my desk with the bottom of my stomach falling out with no end in sight. There was nothing I could buy that would fix that.

I had to move onto a second plan. What I settled on was a combination of the luxuries I afforded myself with a more practical sensibility. Luxury wasn’t money. Luxury was time and rest and grace. I leaned into it even if at first it felt like I was wasting time and resting too much. What I had been craving, what I’d needed, for so long wasn’t the illusion of a luxurious life. What I’d been looking at was the soft girl aesthetic that told me that neutral tones and a minimalist lifestyle were the hallmarks of a woman who wasn’t stressed about much of anything. Some of that aesthetic very much aligned with my desired life, but the rest of it was ill fitting. So I started deconstructing. What about that life was the pleasure I was seeking? After writing about joy and pleasure over the life of this column, I’ve come up with a few ideas.

First, radical pleasure is relative. What’s radical or revolutionary in practice for me is light work for one person and terrifying for another. You can’t compare what makes you feel good with anyone else’s version of happiness or joy. Over the last couple of years I’ve pushed away from the idea of guilty pleasures or indulging in “unserious” pursuits. I like romance novels and stories about fated mates so I read them without shame. I don’t have to justify their intellectual value or balance them with any other “serious” work. I can be honest that I want to just enjoy the hours of my day. Sometimes that looks like a deeply serious research rabbit hole and others it’s me giggling over a TikTok video about the latest online discourse. What became important at this step was I learned to define my days not by the external expectations I’d carried for years, but via what made me feel a wide range of emotions outside of stress and worry.

Second, there were bound to be false starts. I’m a creature of habit. I wake up at the same time every day, drink the same drink, drive the same route, perform most of the same actions. I’ve honed my routine via years of necessity and some of it needed to come with me to my “new” life. The rest of it was ripe for change, but life can sometimes be muscle memory and over my radical pleasure journey I’ve fallen back into old ways of thinking and living just as often as I’ve built new, healthier habits. I’m consistent in seeing my therapist bi-weekly, but I still drink too much soda that makes me jittery. I stop myself from having to produce all the time, but I still make copious to-do lists like I’m always bound to the idea of production. Falling back into those habits isn’t failure. I’ve started to look at these habit patterns as road markers. Maybe going back to the muscle memory of something I need to let go of is bringing me back to the same starting point so I can try a new path again. There’s no shame in that. The goal is movement and it’s okay if it’s not always forward.

Third, the goal may change. That’s okay. I learned I wasn’t a static being who was on a journey with a set destination. The entire point of living into a year of radical pleasure was the forward movement. It was the experiences and the discoveries that kept me traveling toward a true sense of myself. That kind of inner and external work is something that lasts a lifetime. Pleasure is always in motion. It should grow with you, exist with you, and that is never static. It took a minute but I finally came to understand the purist of pleasure is not perfect and it is not fast.

Fourth, pleasure is a mind, body, and soul pursuit and it’s not going to always be balanced. Each of these pursuits enrich your life in their own way. It goes back to the ideas above. There is no failure if I spend more time paying attention to what my physical body needs. It needs that time and energy and so I give it just that. Maybe joy is in my mind and so I loop the same song over and over while I puzzle through why it makes me feel the way it does. Or maybe it’s my spirit and I have shaky conversations with a higher power. I don’t have to force it because joy is unbridled. It comes from something I can’t replicate on a whim. I have to feel something spark inside me and then follow where it leads me.

My year of radical pleasure was over a long time ago, but the idea is still ingrained in my everyday living. It’s still a work in progress, too. But I’m confident my joy and happiness don’t look like anyone else’s. They’re unique to me because only I can determine what I need in the moment, what I need in the short term, and what I need for a lifetime.

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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.

My husband and I decided on our safe word.

Watermelon.

I shaved my legs, my pits, and my bits.

I waved goodbye to our three-year-old and my parents, who’d ferried over to babysit, texted our teen who was working at the froyo shop that we’d be out for a few hours. As we began to reverse out of our housing co-op driveway, the homeschooled neighbor child rushed up to my passenger-side window. “Where are you going? What are you doing?” She always wanted to know about my life. I mumbled something about a work dinner for my husband. Why did I feel so guilty lying to this eight-year-old, when lying to my kids and parents came so easily?

Bridge traffic into town was heavier than usual, and I started to worry I’d ruin this most important night out because I’d signed up late for the “sexy sauna party” and still hadn’t received the email with the address of the event’s secret location.

I needed a reset. An escape from domestic life, even for a few hours. I needed to check my “mom hat” at the door and be anonymous. Not a mother, not a wife. Not a yoga teacher. If I had to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” for my kids’ yoga classes while balancing on my sit-bones in Navasana one more time, I was going to lose it.

My husband had less riding on this night out. His business was finally launching, and I was thrilled, even though it required him to travel almost half the month. He’d call me from Oslo or Austin, and tell me about some great meal or some new band he’d discovered, while all I had to talk about was our eye-rolly fourteen-year-old who was still pissed that I’d had another child, that the dog had diarrhea—again, that our cat kept bringing me half-dead mice, and my peri-menopause symptoms: night sweats, brain fog, and frozen shoulder were getting worse.

I had become obsessed with the idea of strangers seeing me fuck and get fucked. I wanted men…and women. I needed to forget kids’ birthday parties and lunches and pet hair and the Sisyphean effort of rolling that damn boulder uphill just to have it crash onto me again and again. I wanted orgasms to crash over me, not parent-teacher conferences.

My husband, bless his heart, found us a “lifestyle” society that hosted monthly sex positive events and the mandatory orientation night happened to be beside the Costco we went to. We could do our weekly shop, and sign waivers and disclaimers. Win win.

Ping! Just as I thought the night wasn’t going to happen for us, the email with the location of the sexy party arrived in my inbox. The basement of the oldest steam bath in the city. At over a century old, it was practically a historical landmark.

My husband and I had visited the upstairs private saunas a few times. For forty dollars you could buy yourself two hours to shower, sweat, and attempt to awkwardly mess around on the single bed with the crinkly paper cover, but I’d long been curious about the men’s-only basement. I’d seen men enter and exit, which made me wonder why men got to have bathhouses for quick anonymous hookups, but not women. Are we wired that differently? Was there something wrong with me for wanting what I was looking for this evening?

The basement locker room sported frayed, threadbare carpet. An old TV console playing some kind of fuzzy porn. Once undressed, our clothes folded neatly inside the metal locker, my husband and I entered the communal steam and sauna, with its cracked tiles and exposed ceiling pipes, and walked into what appeared to be a jubilant game of ring toss. A woman was bent over with some kind of long-handled butt plug protruding from her ass, onto which the group of about two dozen were to toss rubber rings. This was less Eyes Wide Shut and more community theatre with nudity, but I told myself to stop being so judgy. Things would get more erotic.

Next up was the “human carwash.” Men and women divided into opposite sides of the communal shower and when the emcee blew her whistle the two groups were to run toward one another like the opening rush of a dodgeball game and wriggle and writhe against one another while the emcee stood on a chair above us and squeezed neon pink shower gel all over us. I lost track of my husband and paired up with a dark-haired woman with soft lips and while this was titillating, all I could think was: I am so going to get a UTI from this shower gel.

Before the next game began, my husband and I ducked into one of the two cedar saunas, hoping this might be where the serious action was happening. Unfortunately, it was empty, but we thought, Fuck it. We’ve come to get kinky, so we may as well get to it. He got down between my legs, but my mind kept wandering.

Did our little one cooperate with the teeth brushing? Was she snuggled on the sofa watching Toopy and Binoo?

Should I be on the sofa watching Toopy and Binoo?

Then, the sauna door opened and two women entered. Someone to cheer me on, even if just from the sidelines.

But no. They sat on the bench opposite us, acted as if we were invisible, and proceeded to complain about public transit, their exes, and co-parenting issues. Groceries! What? Here we were, in an underground sex chamber, where we could do what we wanted, and these women were acting as if we were fully dressed, standing at school pick-up. Where was the erotic?

I noticed one of them was holding a bottle of whipped cream, so, hoping to entice them, I asked if they’d pass it to me. They handed it over casually, like we were fully clothed at some backyard BBQ and I was asking for the mustard for my hot dog. I sprayed the whipped cream all over my breasts and urged my husband to lick it off while trying to make eye contact with those women, but…nothing. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were, hot and willing, and they were going on about the traffic? What was even happening? Perhaps I’d set my sights too high. This wasn’t Paris or Barcelona. But still.

Finally, when it became obvious that our fantasies weren’t going to be fulfilled, I called “watermelon.” I’d put so much emotional energy into this night. I’d thought our risqué adventure would somehow cleave me open and free my dormant sex goddess, but my tailbone hurt from the wooden bench, we were both overheating, and neither of us was going to get off.

We made up an excuse as to why we needed to leave early, but the emcee told me to sit down on the locker room bench. “You can’t leave without your party gift.”

While my husband got dressed, a tall woman with long, thin breasts approached and stood behind me. She draped her boobs over my head and onto my face. Her nipples practically touched my mouth. Then, she proceeded to hum the national anthem.

“Congratulations,” the emcee announced with a laugh. “You’ve earned your boob hat!”

En route home, we stopped for a cup of tea and a piece of dry cheesecake and made a pact never to speak of this night again. Then our teen daughter called. Business was slow at the froyo shop. She was being cut early. Could we pick her up?

As the three of us got out of the car back at the co-op, my neighbor rushed out in her pajamas, hungry for news from the outside world.

How was your night? Did you go downtown? What did you eat?

I mumbled some neutral answer and told her to go back home to bed. As I closed the door behind me, my daughter asked, “Why is she always so curious about you? It’s not like you ever do anything interesting.”

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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.

If you had to suddenly flee your home, leave your country, and only take whatever possessions you could carry, what would they be? Money? Jewelry? Photos? A special book or musical instrument?

My grandmother grabbed her pillow.

Litzi, my maternal grandmother, wasn’t typically forthcoming with stories of her traumatic past as a Vienna socialite-turned-Holocaust-refugee. However, when I was about 10 years old, she told me about the dense goose down pillow crowning the twin bed in her tiny Chicago apartment.

In her thick Austrian accent, she’d say, “This is the only thing I have left from home. It was my favorite pillow, and I grabbed it when we had to flee.”

Why a pillow? I wondered. Then surmised, “Oh, what a great way to hide your expensive jewelry! Quick thinking, Grandmum!” I couldn’t imagine any other reason for a pillow being the one and only thing to grab from a huge household of valuable treasures.

“No, no…I just wanted my pillow.” She shrugged, with that distinct, vacant gaze I’d see whenever I asked for details about her former life in Vienna.

A touching story but still I shook my head, incredulous.

I hadn’t thought about the pillow in a long time, until eight years ago when I embarked on a major purge in preparation for downsizing from a largish house to a smallish condo.

My mother, Litzi’s daughter, had become more of a hoarder as she aged. This was likely the result of not adequately dealing with the trauma of her refugee childhood and extreme poverty, the ultimate reversal of her previous generation’s wealth.

After my mother died, my husband and I confronted piles of QVC and department store clothing, housewares, and trinket purchases stacked floor to ceiling in her home, much of it still in their original bags. Most items we donated or dismally tossed into a rented trash dumpster, and some boxes ended up in our basement. Years earlier, when Litzi died, my mother had acquired her beloved pillow, but it was apparently lost in the chaos of the cleanout. What was once a treasured item and sole symbol of home ironically became a victim of pathological overabundance.

In making the decision to downsize, I vowed never to make my own children deal with too much of our stuff. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became my bible and Marie Kondo my guru. Over a full year, I spent countless hours in our basement, going through boxes of every kind of household item imaginable, very little of it making the cut. It was, essentially, an archeological dig of our immediate and extended families’ lives, spanning decades. The process was stifling.

I was driven and ruthless, sorting, tossing, and donating. Whenever I’d waver, I thought of my mother’s hoarder home. In the end, I was proud of how very little made it to the keep pile.

One afternoon, announcing “I’m going down to the dig,” I took some deep inner-resource-gathering breaths, visualized our pristine waiting condo, and resolutely descended the stairs to the basement. I opened boxes filled with Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, exclaiming, “I’ve hit the 80s!” and moved them to the “get one of our kids to try to sell this on eBay” pile.

Then I got to my mother’s boxes, most filled with long-forgotten photographs. A project for another day. The next box was full of linens—some new, still in the package, and the rest crisply washed, ironed, and folded. The decades-old starch scent brought a flood of childhood memories of my favorite Mary Poppins sheets and my old bedroom. As I dug through the linens, moving them one by one to the donate pile, I caught a glimpse of—could it be?—yes! Mary Poppins pillowcases!

The brightly colored pillowcases depict Mary with rosy cheeks holding her red umbrella in one hand and Michael and Jane Banks’ hands in the other as they fly above the rooftops of London. Her magical rose-bedecked bag is flying along with them. As a child, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting and fun. These pillowcases inspired dreams of travel, whimsy, song, and dance, along with many stories and games.

“Ohmygod, Mary!” I exclaimed. It was like seeing a beloved friend after 50 years. Digging deeper, I found more of my childhood pillowcases—Batman, ice dancers, circus animals—which together with the music and magic of Mary Poppins basically defined my young emerging personality, foreshadowing who I am to this day. The pillowcases could easily justify a small amount of space in our downsized linen closet. Definite keepers!

Now, when our two young grandsons sleep over, I let them choose which pillowcase they want to sleep on. “What do you want to dream about?” I ask. “Fighting crime with Batman? Flying over London with Mary Poppins?”

The 4-year-old, an avowed animal lover, always picks the circus animals. “I want to pet a lion!” he exclaims happily.

The 7-year-old has cycled through all the options depending on his mood. During the winter Olympics, he dreamt of being a figure skater and opted for the ice dancers.

I see these joy-sparking pillowcases whenever I open my linen closet and wonder if they will persist through future generations.

I imagine my grandkids saying, “These are some of the few things my grandmother kept when she downsized.” Maybe they’ll even remember the story about Litzi’s goose down pillow from Vienna.

Families can have all kinds of legacies—good and bad. I’d always assumed ours was about persecution, perseverance, survival, and trauma.

But I’ve come to realize that our family legacy is actually about pillows, and my pillowcases are constant, colorful reminders. After generations of persecution, we have survived and rebuilt beautiful lives in new places. The trauma is subsiding. What has persisted is that we carry peace, home, comfort, rest, and relaxation wherever we go.

We carry the freedom to dream.

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Elizabeth Surlin Gordon lives in the Chicago area and writes poetry, essays, middle grade/YA fiction, and a holistic wellness column for Our Evanston magazine. Over the pandemic, she wrote the children’s book, Where Is Everybody? Her work has been published in BAC Street Journal, Point of View, East on Central, and 10^th Ward Lit. When not writing, Elizabeth loves musical theatre, travel, QiGong, making music, art, and stories with her two young grandsons, and resting on pillows.

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:

“Old Jewelry on Old Paper: Understanding Jewelry Through Antique Catalogs and Ephemera” by

“10 uses for a pocket notebook to keep you off your phone” by

“Someone Found a Box Full of ’80s Transformers on the Curb, and It Is Every Collector’s Dream” by Vaspaan Dastoor, Comicbook.com

“Can Thrifting Be A Form Of Overconsumption?” by Elizabeth Whitehead, Refinery29

Saturdays were Mom’s hair-washing days. She let it hang loose to air dry, the only time I would see her hair down rather than curled into the everyday bun or the elaborate French twist that were her typical day and evening leaving-the-house styles. She didn’t have a blow dryer, and didn’t want to put her hair up until it was dry, so Saturdays after we moved to the U.S. from Tokyo, where Dad’s service as an Episcopal priest had brought our family in the 1960s, were also Mom’s bread-baking days.

The bread she baked was a classic 70s loaf, dense with whole wheat flour and wheat germ, sweetened lightly with honey, enriched with dry milk powder. She made three loaves a week for several years before she got a job, cut her hair, and bought a blow dryer. But in that sweet (for me) period when her work was primarily raising a family, she showed me how to bake bread. She made it look easy. Although sometimes I wanted more explicit instruction from her, with bread, she just did her thing and expected me to follow along. So I did.

She would pull the big yellow Pyrex mixing bowl down from the cupboard and stir together warm water, honey, and yeast. Once the mixture was bubbling, she’d add the flour, milk powder, and wheat germ, its vacuum-sealed jar cracking open with a satisfying whoosh. She set her rings on the windowsill to keep the stones—a diamond and a deep blue star sapphire in an intricate gold setting—from getting doughy while she kneaded. Sometimes I slid the rings onto my own fingers and stretched out my arm to admire them; sometimes I was more in the mood to punch and prod the dough. A few hours later, the kitchen warm and fragrant, she’d pull the loaves from the oven and cover them with one of Grandma’s faded tea towels, scolding me away from slicing the loaf warm. Even though I secretly longed to eat store-bought white sandwich bread, those comfortable Saturday mornings with my bread-baking Mom were a step on my path to cooking independence.

My firstborn, Ben, was a few weeks old when Mom and Dad came to visit us in San Francisco. Unlike friends whose moms sat impatient and distracted in hospital waiting areas, magazines open but ignored in their laps, or were even invited into delivery rooms, I had asked my parents to wait until we were a bit settled, until I was surer of myself as a mom. What I couldn’t anticipate was that their arrival would coincide with Ben being gripped by colic. Our house rang with sharp cries; I felt caged and exhausted. I started tracking my meals and Ben’s, trying to find a link between what I ate and what upset my baby, overwhelmed by the extra effort of trying to both diagnose and alleviate the discomfort. Gluten was suggested as a culprit, so I gave it up, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t make a difference. It didn’t, and I was glad; devoted as I was to this unfamiliar new creature, I still couldn’t imagine being so self-sacrificing as to give up the deeply-rooted comfort of bread.

It would make a tidy story if Mom baked bread during that visit, reminding me of the pleasure it used to provide me, or if her presence gave me the time to bake bread. It wasn’t anything like that. But she commiserated. She held the baby a lot. She dosed Ben with gripe water when I couldn’t bring myself to put the dropper—the first thing Ben had tasted besides breast milk—into their wide, wailing mouth. She came along to the lactation consultant with me and fled with me just as quickly when she said Ben was tongue-tied and suggested having their frenulum snipped. Gripe water was hard enough; I couldn’t possibly surrender my tiny infant to a scalpel.

And then one morning, she blow-dried her hair and Ben stopped crying. She discovered an on/off switch we didn’t know Ben had, using an appliance that I, with curls so different from her hair, didn’t even own. When she left at the end of the week, she wrapped the cord around the little travel dryer and handed it off to me, knowing how essential it had become. My husband Tony and I got in the habit of taking it with us when we went to friends’ houses, pulling it out like a party trick: plug it in, turn it on, watch the baby drop to sleep. Eventually we bought a proper white noise machine which lived under Ben’s bed and traveled with us and helped the whole family sleep.

I learned to bake bread on easy Saturdays, watching Mom knead dough in a kitchen that smelled like honey and yeast, her rings glinting on the windowsill; I inherited the blow dryer in the midst of a less peaceful time. Neither gift announced itself, “This will help you mother.” But I can make three loaves on a weekend morning, and I know where the blow dryer is if I need it. Both are hers, and both are mine.

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Caroline M. Grant is co-director, with her husband, of Sustainable Arts Foundation. She has published essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other outlets, and has co-edited two anthologies, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat (Roost Books, 2013) and Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008. She was editor-in-chief of LiteraryMama.com and has taught writing at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives in San Francisco with her family.

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:

“Flowers Against Darkness” by , Inhabitable Images

“Minimalism: A Love Story” by , Burned Haystack

“What Does Your Clutter Say About You?” by , The Harmonious Home Approach

“The Full-Contact Sport of Estate-Sale Shopping” by Grace Yoon, The Wall Street Journal

“The Return of the Vanity” by Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times

Our September 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick is memoir in essays Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures by Marianna Marlowe. You can get a taste of the book by reading Marianna’s essay, “Why My Friend’s Reaction to My Bracelet Charm Filled Me with Shame,” which is excerpted from Portrait of a Mestiza.

Join us in the Open Secrets Magazine chat to discuss the book, and for a Q&A with Marianna on Thursday, October 1 at 8:30 p.m. ET on Substack Live, which you can watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Click here for a reminder; Open Secrets subscribers will be notified when we go live. Please bring your own questions for Marianna, which we will ask as time permits. The discussion will be recorded and posted for anyone who can’t attend live.

Below you’ll find a personal note from Marianna Marlowe, purchase links for the book, which you can also check out or request at your local library, and more info about what to expect.

A Note from Marianna Marlowe

I began writing memoir at fifty, an age when many women are taught to accept invisibility by silencing themselves. Instead, I found my voice.

My first book, Portrait of a Feminist, traced the evolution of my feminism. But feminism, I discovered, was only one strand in a far more complicated inheritance. Identity is never singular, and mine has been shaped by race, class, citizenship, and religion, as well as migration, marriage, and motherhood.

In Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures, I turn toward the fault lines that run beneath those identities. Raised by a Peruvian mother living in a kind of exile in California, married into a Syrian family wary of my Americanness and my lapsed Catholicism, I inhabit the borderlands that scholar/activist Gloria Anzaldúa named—the in-between spaces where cultures meet, collide, and reshape one another.

This memoir asks: What does it mean to inherit both pride and shame? To raise mixed-race sons when you once longed for daughters? To move between languages and loyalties without feeling fully claimed by any of them?

Dedicated to Anzaldúa, Portrait of a Mestiza brings mestiza consciousness to life—not as abstract theory, but as lived experience. With this book I invite readers to explore with me the possibility of a world beyond prejudice and exploitation: a place of courage, openness, and potential, where division transforms into connection.

Where to buy Portrait of a Mestiza

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About Portrait of a Mestiza

We are all shaped by the cultures that surround us—their expectations, ideals, and norms. But what happens when those cultures collide? When your mother embodies one world and your father another?

In this profoundly personal follow-up to Portrait of a Feminist, Marianna Marlowe explores the intersections of race, class, and gender as they are molded by family, religion, and migration. Born to a Peruvian mother and an American father, Marlowe’s early life spanned continents—from the Philippines to Ecuador, Brazil to the United States—leaving her with a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Through a series of thematically linked essays, she reflects on the complexities of identity, the fluidity of culture, and the enduring search for home.

Now raising two sons with her Syrian Muslim husband, Marlowe continues to navigate the ever-shifting landscapes of culture, language, and faith. Inspired by scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, Portrait of a Mestiza is both a meditation on life lived in the “in-between” spaces and a call to dismantle the binaries that divide us. Thought-provoking and deeply relevant, this collection urges us to embrace hybridity, challenge inherited limitations, and create for ourselves more ethical and expansive lives.

About Marianna Marlowe

Marianna Marlowe is the author of Portrait of a Feminist: A Memoir in Essays (February 2025) and Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures (May 2026), memoirs tracing the evolving intersections of feminism, culture, and belonging.

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Last spring, I was rushing through the city to meet a friend for lunch, pausing every few feet to hammer out a text to my husband. I furiously pecked at the screen, demanding that he immediately delete all footage from our home security camera. I had discovered that morning that the camera had been accidentally bumped so that it faced the interior of our home instead of the intended outside parking lot. Which meant I had been quietly filmed for days—if not weeks—without my knowledge, and my mind reeled with the potential embarrassments caught by the tiny lens.

Sure enough, when my husband reviewed the footage, he discovered a scene of me, all alone, quietly folding laundry. Then, without fanfare, I stood, took off my pants, and attempted the dance sequence performed by Milchick in the season finale of Severance.

Like anyone who discovers that what was believed to be a private, personal moment was actually available to be rewound, re-watched, and guffawed over by an entire Google support center, I was outraged.

As I stood in the weak afternoon sunlight, fuming over why I ever married a gadget-happy tech nerd, I suddenly felt what no one ever wants to feel on a street corner of Manhattan: someone touching me. I let out a bloodcurdling scream before quickly whipping around. An elderly woman in a parka peered at me.

“Your color is lavender. And you hold all of your power in the left side of your body,” she croaked.

An eccentric greeting even by New York standards. I normally would have been on my way, but I was intrigued by the lefty part. I am indeed left-handed, though I doubt anyone who’s ever witnessed me attempting to use scissors or a spiral notebook would describe it as “powerful.”

“I’m a psychic,” she continued. “I don’t normally do this…but your energy…it fascinates me.”

“Oh!” I nodded enthusiastically, despite feeling my usual twinge of unease at the mention of soothsaying.

She gazed at me intently. “You also suffer from anxiety.”

I nodded again, somewhat less impressed. The way I’d screamed bloody murder upon her lightly tapping my shoulder might have been a tipoff that I wasn’t the most relaxed of individuals.

“And…” She leaned closer. “Your name will go global in the next three years.”

Global?!? I blinked. For what? My mind raced, immediately landing on either “killed in incredibly weird way” or—perhaps far worse—“leaked Milchick dance.”

But she couldn’t tell me for what. The vision…it wasn’t clear. However, if I were to follow her back to her psychic office, she could definitely tell me more, and for a very reasonable price.

My city sense finally blinkered back on.

“Ah, no thanks! I’m good!” I smiled before hurrying myself and my lavender-hued aura across the street.

I have what I would describe as a rather complicated relationship with divination. I grew up very Catholic and was raised on saints and signs and The Omen. (“It’s all for you, Damian!”) Magical thinking was wound into my world-view from a very young age. While this isn’t necessarily the worst thing (who doesn’t like a bit of magic?) it also isn’t the best thing if, like me, you struggle with anxiety. Or if, also like me, you carry with you the faint whiff of OCD. (Similar to the whiff of gas I’m sure I can currently smell from my stove.)

I fully understand the allure of forecasting the future. Who among us doesn’t wish for a crystal ball? Especially right now, when the world seems ever teetering on the edge of collapse. Whatever one’s belief system, I think we all long for some sort of map to GPS us through the chaos. And yet, be it horoscopes, tarot cards, or a Magic 8 Ball, I’m still most comfortable with a fortune that comes tucked in a cookie, where I can tack on a humorous “in bed” at the end. I have simply spent too much time (and co-pays to therapists) learning how to put my faith in facts rather than my fears.

Which is why it is rather hilarious to me that I have now authored an entire book on astrology. Because I have. Though my book is a humor book (All Toddlers Are Scorpios) and not an actual guide. It’s intended to make the reader laugh, not help them use Mercury in retrograde as an excuse not to toilet train. Even still, before I wrote it I knew I needed to educate myself, and so ordered stacks of astrology books for research. Prior to that, the only resource I owned was called Sextrology, which I had skimmed only once 20 years ago, back when I first met my husband. (The book claimed that, as two Sagittarians, sexually we were “the stuff of which legends are made.” Which at the time we were rather smug about. Though thinking back on it, I realize they did not specify which legend they were referring to. (Loch Ness? Slender Man?)

Doing a deep dive into astrology was a bit of a strange experience for me. As I said, I like to hold prognostication at an arm’s length. Not because I adamantly just don’t believe we have the capacity to peek beyond whatever fluttering veil exists between us and the future. Rather, it’s because I sometimes do. And it freaks me out a bit.

Once, back in high school, when I was tooling aimlessly around town with my boyfriend—my first love—we passed a sign for a psychic.

“Want to try it?” He grinned at me.

As I was always eager to do something in our tiny Indiana town that didn’t involve either a Denny’s or rolling old tractor tires down a hill, I eagerly agreed. He quickly pulled his mom’s Chrysler into a parking space and we entered the musty storefront. When the psychic asked whose future she should tell, we decided on Jeremy’s. He was starting college the next year, and his future felt much more imminent and interesting, whereas I still had a year of high school left.

I remember very little of the visit. What the woman looked like. What was said. Except for one key moment: Before starting, the psychic paused and asked us if there was anything we didn’t want to know. I suddenly blurted out: “Nothing about when he might die!”

Jeremy laughed, while I blushed. My response to her question had surprised me. Jeremy was a healthy, handsome 17 year-old, and his death wasn’t something I consciously worried about. The psychic simply nodded at me, before commencing murmuring various vagaries about Jeremy’s future, none of which I can now recall. But two years later, Jeremy would die. Very suddenly. The memory of us sitting in that storefront with its dusty little curtains floated back up to me like a ghost. What rattled through my brain wasn’t my fear of the psychic…but a fear that I was psychic.

There is actually a belief among my friends that I possess some psychic abilities. Over the years my supposed powers have sometimes presented in heavy, heartbreaking ways, such as with my boyfriend. But most of the time they veer toward the ridiculous, and my friends don’t just call me psychic, but rather: The Awkward Psychic. So named for my uncanny ability to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. Some examples: One time at a party I watched as a stranger repeatedly struggled with opening a bag of chips, his hands bumbling and fumbling. I leaned in to joke: “What are you, a sculptor?” To which he looked at me in sheepish surprise and said, “Yes, actually. I work with marble.”

I was also once at a job where someone mentioned a serial killer who was in the news, and I turned to my boss and joked: “That’s your dad, isn’t it?” Seconds later I was pulled aside by a co-worker and informed that my boss’s father was in fact in prison for murdering someone.

And once at a friend’s book launch, while the author was being lauded for her success, I turned to her husband to include him in the conversation. I jokingly asked, “And do you have a job?” He blinked at me, while his wife sputtered: “He’s uh…between things at the moment…” The husband then made a beeline for the drinks table, while I debated making a beeline into oncoming traffic.

Some might simply call these interactions: “putting one’s foot in one’s mouth.” Or “being a thoughtless dope.” Some might also say: “Maybe let’s stop with the jokes.” All of which is fair feedback. But it’s the strange specificity of my comments that fascinates my friends. This isn’t just me looking at a woman’s stomach and congratulating her on a baby bump that is actually just burrito bloat. This is me looking at a woman’s stomach, congratulating her on a baby bump, joking that she should name the child after me, then learning that Johanna is the name of her OB-GYN who was recently run over by a train.

My friends think I should learn to harness my intuition, and they sometimes give me books with titles like Psychic Awakening: A Beginner’s Guide, or How To Talk to Your Spirit Guides. All of which I kick beneath my bed.

Recently, for my birthday, a friend gifted me a tarot reading. It was over Zoom, and the woman spent a lot of time telling me I seemed “pushed down by the patriarchy.” Which right now kind of feels like telling a woman, “You look like you breathe oxygen.” But she also told me one of my spirit guides was Hermes. I momentarily felt confused, as I thought she meant the luxury brand, and I imagined my guiding forces as a purse or scarf that I can’t afford. But then I realized she meant the messenger of the Gods. She continued to explain Hermes’ influence on my life, but my mind was already drifting away, wondering if “Messenger of the Gods” was how I should start signing off my emails.

Back in my thirties, when I was living in Ireland, I once pitched a piece about psychics to a local newspaper. In hindsight I think it may have been some sort of subconscious, half-assed attempt at immersion therapy, like those people who have a phobia of bugs and so climb into a bathtub of centipedes. The paper paid for me to take a train to Cork and have my fortune told by people named Cathleen and Ciaran and Caoimhe, all of whom forecast my future with a delightfully charming lilt. They also all told me radically different things. That I’d have five children. Three children. No children. That I would move to the desert. The sea. The suburbs.

When I arrived back in Dublin, I was exhausted and starving, but was supposed to have drinks with a woman I was hoping to befriend. She kept buying us pints, and at the end of the night I drunkenly stood, threw a handful of 5 cent Euro on the table, then stumbled out the door mumbling to myself about mystics. I didn’t need a psychic to tell me I would never hear from this woman again. Or to tell me I shouldn’t try to keep up with the Irish when it comes to drink.

The next day, through my fog of a hangover, I video called my mother to regale her with my psychic adventures, smugly offering up all of their contradictory readings as proof that they were all charlatans, and that there was not, in this life, any magical or otherworldly force for us to grasp on to. There was no guide, no map, and we were all, in the end, at the whims of whichever way the wind blew.

She listened to my rant, then gently smiled.

“Or maybe,” she said, “some of them are charlatans. We just don’t know which ones.”

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Johanna Gohmann has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Cut, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other places. She is the author of All Toddlers Are Scorpios – An Astrological Guide to Your Adorable Tiny Terror.

It is Zion’s 348th day in the shelter.

He’s a skinny, chocolate-brown pittie with cropped ears, gray hairs dotting his muzzle just beginning to poke through—hints of the frosty face we had hoped we’d never watch age behind kennel bars.

Today, he’s going home. The volunteer coordinator sees me returning a dog to their kennel and tells me: “Zion’s adopted.”

“Oh my god,” I say, trying to be as composed as possible because the second I move a single facial muscle, I will erupt into tears.

It’s too late; they come before I can turn away.

Minutes later, a fellow volunteer, Rachel, is filming his sendoff for her Instagram account showcasing our shelter dogs, which has amassed 40,000 followers. I am now sobbing, and Rachel catches it all on video. Mortified, but laughing, I cover my face and shoo her away.

Zion steps out, blinking into the sun-drenched lobby, his body loose and wiggly. Staff and volunteers—his people—gather, lining the hallway for soft cheers and goodbyes. He is the shelter’s second-longest- stay dog. The third-longest will be euthanized in a month. An animal’s future is never guaranteed in this place.

Outside, Zion bounds into the car of his new adopters, a retired couple still grieving their old dog.

“My husband was scrubbing the house all morning,” she tells me, eyes shining. “We had to get everything ready for Zion.” We laugh at the idea of vacuuming for a dog and cry together in the parking lot, two strangers holding the pure shock of joy.

For four years, I have spent nearly every weekend walking dogs at New York City’s open-intake animal shelter, a place where no animal is turned away and where space is constantly at a premium, and where dogs live in crates for months because a kennel is not available. It’s where every cat and dog (even the occasional pig or chicken) found abandoned in the city’s parks, streets, or vacant apartments will wind up. I began volunteering for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to hang out with dogs who needed, if just for a few fleeting moments, to remember how to feel joy again. To experience the world like a real dog again, not one trapped in a box for twenty-three and a half hours a day, on the best days.

What I wasn’t expecting was the women. An intergenerational group of volunteers whose passion for animal welfare either matches or outpaces mine.

I didn’t start showing up every weekend because I needed more friends; my social life was already full. But this community has quietly, profoundly reset the trajectory of my life. Diving headfirst into the world of open-intake sheltering with them beside me has given me peace, clarity, and a kind of companionship I didn’t realize I was missing, to guide my purpose.

Being a firsthand witness to the extent of my volunteer friends’ dedication quickly inspired me to show up more often than I’d initially planned. It made me understand that I may not be able to control the outcome, but I can control my ability to ease suffering in the moment.

They are the only people who understand the constant cycle of grief that comes along with volunteering at a shelter where animals die, the grief that can begin before one is even euthanized. Once a dog has been placed on the “at-risk” list, walks become more bittersweet, knowing this may or may not be the last time they get to sniff the treasure trove of scents in tree beds we pass, stare in awe at the family of geese commandeering the cemetery, watch the crowds of people watching for the bus, tails wagging in anticipation of a shred of attention.

After adopting my young, chunky American bully, Gizmo, a dog with an absurdly large head and disproportionately small legs who takes a full half hour to make it around the block, I knew my husband and I would be a one-dog household for a while. Gizmo filled every inch of space on our king-sized bed, and in my life.

Three months later, Connie arrived at the shelter, an elderly, deaf pitbull who waddled in on short, arthritic legs, her charcoal fur threaded with silver. I knelt to greet her. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I said, This is just temporary, rubbing her chest. She blinked slowly. Something in me cracked open.

A few weeks later, my volunteer friend Elizabeth took Connie on a beach day—sand, sun, and requisite McNuggets. She posted a moving reel of their adventure, set to The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” When they arrived back at the shelter, I asked, “How’d it go?”

Elizabeth laughed. “I think she might be too slow for even Gizmo.”

I doubted it. It was clear Connie moved at the exact rhythm my life wanted to. In November, I adopted her.

Despite being ten years older, Connie regularly left Gizmo in the dust on walks. She was steady where he was goofy, unbothered where he was dramatic. Together, staring out the front door and barking in unison at absolutely nothing, all the time, they made sense.

Two years later, I lost her to cancer. A framed photo appeared on my doorstep: Connie on the beach, sunlight catching her fur, the words “Here comes the sun” beneath it. A note read, “From your volunteer friends.” I sat with it and cried, not just for Connie, but for the community that held us through both hello and goodbye.

In recent months, church bells in my neighborhood play “Here Comes the Sun” every morning, something I never noticed until Connie passed. Maybe it’s her way of reminding me I’m exactly where I should be.

Volunteering didn’t just give me purpose: It gave me a circle of women who provide me with proof that goodness still wildly, stubbornly exists. An unrelenting reminder that nothing we give is ever wasted.

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Emmy Favilla is a New York–based writer and editor. Her essays have been published in Catapult, Pigeon Pages, BuzzFeed, Gloria and other outlets, and she currently works as managing editor at Forbes Vetted. She is the author of A World Without “Whom” (Bloomsbury), a book about the intersection of language and technology. Emmy is working on a memoir in essays largely focused on her volunteer work with shelter dogs and growing up in NYC.

The rusty blue dumpster behind Second Chance Animal Shelter towers above me. Wedging one foot into a corner, I pull myself up and over the ledge, balancing on mounds of plastic garbage bags. Ripping open the nearest one, I begin to search.

Working at the animal shelter is my first job since my 17-year-old daughter’s life ended on a stormy country road two years earlier. Like the turquoise green earrings Ellen was wearing, my heart and spirit were crushed into bits. In my previous life, I was a teacher. I have always loved interacting with young people, the give and take of the classroom, the excitement of new ideas. But now, young voices are excruciating.

In the surreal weeks and months that followed Ellen’s accident, teaching myself to play the songs she had written became the only thing holding me here. A natural musician, she had taught herself to play guitar and had written four dozen songs in only a year and a half. Through an unimagined sequence of events, gradually I began performing her music, to share her with others, and keep her present, in a sense. It became the one thing that offered any purpose.

Now, working with animals in the shelter also provides some comfort. They each have stories of loss. I sing to them as I work. On this particular morning, however, I don’t sing. I have twice the usual number of runs and cages to clean, so I hustle from cell to cell, quickly changing my plastic gloves between each. Though something feels odd, I am too focused, moving too fast, to fully notice. It isn’t until I get home that I realize what.

When Ellen’s belongings returned to me after the crash, I began wearing the iridescent opal ring I’d given her when she’d turned 13. Suddenly her ring is not on my finger. This is the second treasure of hers that I have lost. A small, lopsided stone, reminiscent of a heart, on which she had lettered I ♡ U Mom, had been worn smooth by my fingers’ unconscious reassurance that it was still in my pocket. Until one day it wasn’t.

The loss of these things is a manifestation and magnification of my bigger loss. These objects are tangible representations of her that I can carry. They are things she touched and made and cared about. I know they cannot replace her; they can’t bring her back. But they were hers. Each new loss is a deeper reminder that she isn’t going to return. If she were still here, a ring would just be a ring, a stone would be a stone. Now these things symbolize her—they provide a physical presence that I can hold.

The ring is really gone. Despite hours of searching, I can’t find it inside any of the gloves in any of the garbage bags in the entire dumpster. Maybe it washed down a drain while I scrubbed the animals’ dishes. Or perhaps it slipped off as I walked with Ellen’s dog after work in the chilly October woods.

It’s not coming back. Ellen isn’t coming back. But I can’t stop searching.

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Naomi Bindman’s poetry and prose has appeared in magazines and literary journals, including Mothering, Friends Journal, El Portal Literary Journal and South Florida Poetry Journal. They won Dogwood Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Award and received funds from the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Humanities Council. Naomi is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. Her memoir, You’re the Words I Sing, the story of Naomi’s journey back to life performing the songs of her daughter, Ellen, is currently on submission with major publishers. A film based on the memoir is in active development with a leading Hollywood company. This essay is drawn from a chapter in the memoir.

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:

“A Meditation on (Moving) Stuff” by , a ladderto the stars

“Collection: Hands” by

“How do you decide what to keep of your parents’ stuff?” by , The Shrieking Cactus

“Thrift Shopper Was Told Her New Ring Was Worthless. Then She Took It to a Cash for Gold Exchange” by Ashley Vega, People

“The Strange Business of Selling People Their Own Family’s Photos” by David Pogue, New York

“The ‘Pokémon princess’ with a £90m card collection” by Emily Smith, The Telegraph

Bill’s first brand that I remember was a Schlitz tallboy. In the time before everyone recycled, the loud cans would roll out of the trash in our kitchen. As a child I assumed the name was onomatopoeic since “Schlitz” sounded a lot like the air escaping a can when it’s popped open. There’d be one dripping with condensation on the table next to my father’s recliner (he always used a coaster) while he watched Perry Mason or read Popular Mechanics. On rare occasions I’d be allowed a taste and would wince when the bitterness touched my tongue.

He’d have beer with dinner or after getting home from his second-shift factory job, noshing on leftovers pulled from the fridge. He had a large frame and a beer belly, which I punched playfully for laughs, and if he was ever drunk, it wasn’t the kind of drunk that you perceive as a threat when you’re a kid. He’d get boisterous, maybe a little rude, at family cookouts. His breath would give off a spongy odor of peanuts and mildew. But there was never any violence—not toward me, not overheard from the other room.

In his fifties, having lived on salty snacks and processed foods, Bill was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Doctors told him that his only hope was a heart transplant. He was healthy enough in other respects to qualify for the waiting list. So his name went on the list and we waited.

I was in high school then, realizing with some cynicism that I could join the ranks of those radioactive kids who had lost a parent to death. By chance, a young man in Maine who had the same blood type as my father slammed his motorcycle into a tree. Early one morning, a phone call came.

It may have been to deflect from the subject of her own medical needs that, when my father fell ill, my mother became a strict enforcer of the protocol dictating his care. She was in no fine shape herself—a smoker since her teens, she developed arteriosclerosis in her forties. She was already a semi-expert on the medications that Bill would be taking because she took a lot of them, too. The transplant offered my father a second chance at life, one made possible by the grace of fortune and extraordinary medical science; it wasn’t going to be thrown away.

While my father wasn’t about to contradict this sentiment, he was also not allowed any say in how the rules would be applied. Of the new regimen that he had to follow, my mother lasered her focus onto one: absolutely no booze. The anti-rejection meds that my father had to take didn’t require that he do away with beer completely, but if the alcohol contributed to the demise of his first heart, she wasn’t about to let it do the same to his new one.

If Bill wanted to resist, he wasn’t going to find an ally in our household. I was a teenager, my older brother emotionally challenged, and my mother firm in her convictions. He would never convince anyone that the tradeoff of extended life for forfeiture of a vice was not a worthy swap.

A phenomenon that interests me when I see it is how the relationship between a parent and a child realigns once the child becomes an adult. The younger becomes more aware of, and sympathetic to, the elder’s fears and hypocrisies. The elder may come to see the younger as something closer to an equal, less needful of discipline—no managing of curfews—but still wanting of guidance. Some become friends; others carry resentments and grow apart as the younger asserts their will.

When I went to college, my mother became the screen through which news about my father was shared. She accompanied him to doctor’s appointments and gave me the updates; when she handed him the phone, she would lurk close, and he wasn’t left with much to say.

He asked me once, when she was out of earshot, if I drank at school. During Bill’s dry spell, the brands had changed; Schlitz had been acquired by Pabst and became hard to find. Wary of forging a connection, I tried to strike a balance between honesty and distance in my response. The beer at school was discount, watery, guzzled unglamorously, and spilled on carpets while we played asshole or other games that made us drink faster because we weren’t doing it to savor the taste. The campus was pinned between two highways and any city culture was far away. Men and women stumbled over furniture, tried with no subtlety to hook up, and embarrassed themselves when they failed.

His pub was called the Four Winds. In the years before the transplant, after he had gone out for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, Bill would come back with the Sunday Boston Globe and a bag of Andy Capp’s Hot Fries (for me). My mother, as a matter of investigation, would ask if he ran into anyone he knew. That’s how she’d know he had been at the Winds.

Whether out of pride, denial, or something else, we never described my father’s drinking as alcoholism. As we knew it, alcoholism brought ugly scenes, explosive arguments, injuries, insults, and disgrace. My father’s drinking was a steady mechanism, one that my mother quietly detested and rarely joined him in partaking. (When she drank, her choice was white zinfandel.)

After the transplant, Bill knew there would be questions about any time spent unaccounted for, so there wouldn’t be any more excursions to the Winds. It was then, while home watching TV in our basement, that I heard the pop of a can come from behind the door to his workshop. Later, I poked around and found a case of Budweiser concealed in the bulkhead.

Rather than confront my father, I decided to tell my mother what I had found. I don’t know what good I thought it would do. Perhaps lingering resentments from growing up as a teenager with sick parents led me to choose a path that sought to wound. I had convinced myself that it was my mother who needed support, though I was beginning to question whether her disapproval of Bill’s drinking was entirely due to concerns about his health. She seemed to view it more as an emotional affair, a choice to love his vice more than his family. (Her own health issues didn’t stop her from returning to cigarettes, and her son picking up the habit at college didn’t help.)

She confronted him, letting him know that I was the one who discovered the stash. From my mother’s telling, there were tears and agitation—which was notable, since the only time I had ever seen my father cry was at my grandmother’s funeral.

The beer disappeared, or else it was relocated to a more secret spot. In time I moved away from home, quit smoking, got a job, and met my future wife. My own drinking choices evolved, gravitating first to wine, later to a cocktail before dinner, as though discernment of taste separated me from my father and gave my own habit a legitimacy that his somehow lacked.

I also found at this stage of my life that I wanted to work with words. Writing papers and stories seemed to be the only activity that justified my time at college. Words gave me a weapon to sort through what didn’t make sense. Through the grace of geography and serendipity I settled into a job as a lexicographer, where I wrote entries for dictionaries like the one that our family stored under Bill’s side table, the one on which his Schlitz tallboy stood.

“Harry, how about a quick one?” asks Earl Angstrom to his son on the second page of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971). The men have left their work at a printing plant and are stopping for a drink before heading home. Earl’s drink is a Schlitz; Harry, either out of affectation or that same desire for separation, opts for a daiquiri. Earl gives updates about Harry’s mother, who has Parkinson’s, and broaches the subject that Harry’s wife may be having an affair.

My eye pauses at such scenes and how the parent-adult child companionship is treated. “Working together ten years,” Updike writes, “they have grown into the love they would have had in Harry’s childhood, had not his mother loomed so large between them.”

My mother loomed large between my father and me, but our relationship was also hamstrung by the lack of a common interest. We didn’t fish or play golf. We didn’t mess around with cars. Bill wasn’t a sports fan, and he never learned about the internet. (I never showed my parents the internet.) I put my energies into reading, writing, and making art; Bill puttered around his basement workshop, tinkered with small woodworking projects, and volunteered at the food pantry. We didn’t have a third space when we could talk about things in confidence, whether as men, adults, or people looking for an escape. Neither of us sought one.

At some point, the adult child sees what the elder does not, or at least what they won’t acknowledge. While my father was full of grace for his extended life, I could tell that he felt babied by my mother, treated like a project, and diminished. But even with maturing insight I couldn’t bring myself to try to alter that dynamic even as I wised up to its contradictions.

I never questioned my mother’s approach, which was guided by her own deep fear of mortality and being alone but granted no mercy for my father’s agency. I didn’t question then what I think about now, in retrospect, something that I suspect more people my age ask themselves as they take on eldercare: How much value is there in protecting someone’s health for the sake of being alive, versus that of enjoying life and all of the thrills and dangers it affords?

Another parent-child bonding-over-a-drink scene occurs in Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), when the title character, a Berkeley grad student, returns home for the title event (for her twin sister). Cassandra sits at the kitchen bar in her family home while her father fixes her an adult beverage. The circumstances in this one don’t align as well with my scenario, but I’m still drawn to it, perhaps because Cassandra savors the moment as it occurs:

“Lovely,” I said, and it did seem lovely, suddenly, the whole idea, getting here, being in this house where I knew everything so well, the wastebaskets and the paintings and the herringbone wood on the ceiling; my sister out there breaking her lungs in the pool waiting for me, and me inside about to have a drink with our father.

The drink is a brandy and soda—“a civilized choice,” Cassandra’s father remarks, because it’s what he’s drinking, too. He’s a retired professor of philosophy, and the banter they share is witty and erudite—adults genuinely glad to be in each other’s company, not so concerned with the push and pull that often occurs between generations. (The push and pull occurs in an extreme way later in the novel when Cassandra attempts suicide in her childhood bedroom.)

After I moved away, visiting home rarely presented such chill moments. My mother’s anxiety set the tone. Pill bottles and medical literature cluttered the space. I’d get reports about Bill’s appointments and lab results, which depressed me even when the news was positive. We’d go out for dinner in a chain restaurant, and I’d labor to steer the conversation toward any subject other than aging and illness. I’d order a Blue Moon or a Sam Adams and not think about what import that held for Bill, left to be content with an iced tea or ginger ale.

For some reason, not upsetting my mother took precedence over allowing my father just a little slack. In the initial years after the transplant, this might have been sensible. (Transplanted hearts, at least in the nineties, tended to give out early or chug on for a while.) But as he got older, our family clung to a custom that was less about protecting Bill and more about protecting expectations. To disrupt that custom would mean breaking a code. As the son who saw what his parents did not, I couldn’t muster the will to be the disruptor.

On one occasion, I brought my partner home and our family—a party of six comprising my parents, my partner, my brother, his fiancée, and myself—went out to dinner at a slightly more upscale restaurant, what passed as fancy but not challenging with its menu. In the hum of the dining room, with the waitress standing over us, Dad asked if he could have a beer. It wasn’t clear which one of us he was asking. I watched my mother pause. Then, before she could answer, I said out loud across the table, “Have a beer.”

He ordered the same as me, one of the higher-end craft brews that had entered the market. We watched as he took the first sip. Then we went back to our menus and talked about other things.

But we never got to have one together, just Bill and me.

The biggest thrill near the end of Bill’s life was when, in spite of his declining health, he and my mother drove across the state to see our house. My wife and I bought it the year before he died. Like a true dad, he was very interested in the integrity of the structure down to the pipes and wiring, and he ran down some homeowner’s tips, like knowing where to find the shutoffs to the outdoor taps so the pipes don’t freeze over winter. I think of him when I turn them on and off every year.

I don’t see my hometown much anymore, but on one occasion I thought about peeking into the Four Winds to see if any echo of Bill remained there—say, a wall gallery of past generations of regulars. But the business has changed hands and been remodeled since Bill’s time, now more of a lunch spot than a watering hole.

Had I lived closer, and had I the nerve to take charge, I might have blocked out time for us to slip away for an afternoon draft, father and son. I would’ve asked Bill if he wanted to go back to the Four Winds or try out somewhere new. We’d talk about small things, maybe discover we did have a common interest, one that had been there the whole time.

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Neil Serven’s stories and essays have appeared in Washington Square, Post Road, The Pinch, Monkeybicycle, Ploughshares online, Greensboro Review, and the Cincinnati Review’s MiCRo series. He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Softly running my fingers through the coarse hairs of Kevin’s beard, we lock eyes. “When you’re dead, I’m going to chain smoke all day long. I can’t wait.”

“That’s the good part of me dying first; you get to smoke,” he says. Not that he’s stopping me. He just knows that I’m taking a break. Four years so far, and I don’t plan on starting again. Until he’s dead. That’ll be the right kind of catalyst. Excuses are different from catalysts. Willpower is a helluva drug if you’re stubborn like me. It can also be compulsive. Which is why the blister packs have accumulated. I want to measure success, waste, failure, rhythm. It feels empty and complete all at the same time.

“You want a cigarette?” Kevin shouts as he pours coffee in the kitchen.

I side-eye the pillow my head is lying against, tucking in my knees close to my chest. It’s not a shame reaction. It’s a holding-in-my-excitement reflex as I clench my teeth. “Yes!”

Moments later, he enters the bedroom, two mugs clambering together in his right hand, as he outstretches his left: a fist faced upward only to uncurl like a flower blooming just for me.

This is the ritual every morning. Coffee. Cigarettes. Skin on skin. All the smells.

The cigarette is: a candy-crusted little pillow. A sweet little rectangle with a nip. A distinct burning type of dank spice that unfolds with each bite of peppermint, or spearmint, or wintergreen. The outer shell dissolves quickly as I knead the gum with my molars and then pocket it; in my cheek, under my tongue, in the small den that once occupied the wisdom teeth on the left lower side of my jaw.

Three shoeboxes contain row after row of sharp, silvery blister packs of off-brand nicotine gum. It’s a Rolodex of scents due to the many already-been-chewed pieces stowed away in empty slots—a habit when I can’t find a nearby garbage bin. Dried saliva, my DNA, is in many of these little packets, filed away, marking my ongoing addiction that began as “quitting.” It’s better than smoking, but it’s still habitual and relentless. Without it there’s rage, and that’s what I stave. Pockets and purses are verified before leaving the house. Prophylactic. Mood stabilizing.

Kevin cooks often.

“Taste this.” He guards the spoon as if not to spill, while his left hand is outstretched, waiting. He wants the gum first. ABC. Like a mom asking to give it up. I never spit directly. Rude. Silently, a choreographed dance of sorts, I place it in his palm.

“Damn, that’s kick. It’s good.” I wanna get punched in the face. With fire. Craving the feeling of being alive is the name for this. Give me cowboy coffee and habanero hot sauce. I want to terrorize my body, but only if I’m in charge. Give me sorrow and give me grief and give me gum.

After our first year of dating, I showed Kevin my collection of plastic-y foil bubbles. “It’s like a sculpture,” I said, “but it keeps growing over time.”

“You can make your own gum wall like in Seattle, but…a not-gum, gum wall?” I could see the wheels turning in his head.

Every finished pack goes into a shoebox. There’s no option to recycle these things. They’re trash. I hung onto them one by one, reluctant to throw them away out of guilt. And then I fell in love with some kind of beauty. Aesthetics. Somatic sensations. The growth. It was all so satisfying.

A fixation on cessation breeds unease. It’s many things. Are my teeth going to fall out? Investigating my gums with my tongue, I wonder if they’re receding too fast.

An acquaintance, colleague, or friend watches me pop a little chiclet into my mouth.

“Hey, can I have a piece of gum?”

“Only if you want Nicorette,” I say. “If you don’t smoke, it’ll make you feel sick.” I’ve learned to shrug off the mild discomfort of outing myself.

After all, I spent 20 years loving smoking cigarettes and didn’t care if anyone saw me. I didn’t love smoker’s cough, walking up hills, and knowing that people could smell it on me. At my age, I’m not sure if my wrinkles are from smoking, genetics, or choosing to opt out of injectables. Although I covet the skin of many of my peers, I’ve learned to appreciate my wins and what I do have: three shoeboxes chock-full of empty nicotine gum packets. A man who likes to cook.

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Lera Acey (b. 1987, Québec City, Canada; raised in Pittsburgh, PA) is a practical nurse working in acute care. She has a background in filmmaking and new media, with writing for galleries and arts publications. Her work moves between nursing and art, shaped by care, observation, and language.

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:

“5 summer upcylcing ideas from my closet to yours” by , Front Porch Threads

“Upcycle Files” by , Preschool Maximalist

“My Collection of Hot Wheels” by , My Collection Of

“A birthday gift for a partner with dementia brings unexpected joy” by Marc Silver, NPR

“‘Throw it all out’: My parents’ stuff is more than clutter” by Katie Roiphe, The Washington Post

“The Surprising Mental-Health Benefits of Bedazzling” by Angela Haupt, Time

As a Taurus, I know that earthy, material things make me happy; they keep me grounded. The way a certain fabric feels. The scent of a particular perfume. A juicy burger with the softest bun, cooked to the perfect temperature (medium rare, of course). Because of this nature, I am ever the crafty-crafter. I love knitting, collaging, and baking.

With the world on fire, knowing this about myself is important more than ever. Grounding is necessary in global (and life) upheavals if I am (we are) to survive this.

Enter: pottery.

I’ve always craved to know what clay felt like, wet and spinning on a wheel. What was it like to get messy and make something from a blob of water and dirt? But as a girl growing up in an Asian immigrant household, getting dirty was not something I could do. You got dirty? You got punished.

Meanwhile, raised Catholic, I’ve always thought about the teaching that God is the potter and we are the clay. I wondered: What would it be like to be God? What would it be like to make something, to shape something from clay? And would I be able to breathe life into it?

I started pottery about a year and a half ago, in the midst of trying to understand who I was, now that I was divorced and a single mom of three. It had been two years since everything was finalized and legal, and I was still fumbling around in this new version of me. Who was I, now that I was single again? And not just single, but “divorced.” And in midlife.

When I started pottery, I was very focused and intent on “getting it right the first time,” whatever that meant. (How very Asian of me.) I followed the instructor’s guidance. I made sure I made no mistakes. I was careful in my movements. I was reluctant to trim, to sculpt. I wanted to make each piece perfect.

But what I didn’t know about this craft was that pottery was all about mistakes. They were inevitable. The whole point was to surrender and adapt.

Ha! As if!

After a year of instruction, due to my schedule, I had to shift to open studio hours where I would work independently. There was no instructor. Only YouTube videos if I got into trouble. But who wants to check their phone with mud all over your hands and a brown lump spinning wildly in front of you?

I learned how to surrender the hard way.

One time, I threw down about two pounds of clay on the wheel and started centering it. Or at least I tried. The thing didn’t stick and just slid off. I sighed. I stopped the wheel, took off the bat with one hand while holding the clay in the other, grabbed a fresh, dry bat, put it down, and threw the clay on that. This time a little harder. This time, it stayed and I worked on centering, reminding myself: I’m the boss and the clay cannot push me around (despite the clay actually throwing my hands around in wobbly circles until I pushed back and got it centered).

Another time, I was working on shaping a bowl and my pull was uneven—the bottom was thicker than the top. So I worked on drawing up the clay from the bottom to even it out. But then the dreaded Wobble showed up. The top part of the bowl was too thin and started to collapse. Wobble, wobble. I accepted my fate. The last time I tried to fix the Wobble, it didn’t work out so well (RIP, bowl). I got my pin tool and trimmed off the top half. My bowl was now a plate with a tall edge.

Last week, I had to smush down a bowl whose bottom I made too thin so that when I wired it off the bat, there was a big hole. I didn’t want to make the effort to create and attach a false bottom, so I just smushed it down back into a blob.

Time and again, I’ve been asked to surrender to the clay. Instead of being the God-like potter who was in charge, I was the servant, the one in service of the clay. What did the clay ask of me? What shape wanted to come through and how could I help form it?

What has emerged for me has been a practice in deep listening, in coming to pottery as a sacred act of connecting with the divine. And honestly, I didn’t see that coming. But what has come forth are sacred vessels that remind me of who I am and where I come from: a colonized people who have resisted and persisted for centuries, a people who remain despite the attempts at erasure.

My bowls are made from speckled brown clay, a symbol of Filipino “mixed-ness” as the people of an archipelago. They are then painted with underglaze, representing the attempts of colonizers to “civilize” us, to erase our “savagery.” Then, the bowls are carved using a technique called sgraffito to show that we still remain and we refuse to be hidden or silenced. The etching away of the underglaze says: We are still here, found in the symbol of the Filipino sun and the Tagalog word “kapwa” (which means interconnectedness, all are one from the same source).

Who I am has not changed. I’m still a Taurus. Still a Catholic. Still a daughter of Filipino immigrants. The only thing that’s changed is the way I’m showing up in the world. And I’m still learning, still changing. Thankfully, in the face of constant change, pottery has become the grounding and guiding force that always brings me back to Me.

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Leslieann Hobayan is a Filipina-American poet, essayist, activist, and host of Spiritual Grit, a podcast on spirituality and activism. She is the author of the chapbook, Divorce Papers: A Slow Burn (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a 2018 Best of the Net, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Aster(ix) Journal, The Lantern Review, The Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2025 NJ Council for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and teaches at Rutgers University. Find her on Substack at Adventures in Midlife! Find her sacred bowls at hobayanhouse.com/kapwa-bowls or on IG: @leslieannhobayan

Sunday mornings in the laundry room of my apartment building are a microcosm of the dynamics of its residents. At 8:30 on Sunday morning, three of us stand between a bank of industrial size machines—washers to the left and dryers to the right. One of the dryers is disconnected, and presumably out of order, and a pile of someone’s laundry is stacked and tumbling off one of the others. It’s clear another resident got tired of waiting and the mountain of baby socks, bras, and t-shirts were taking up precious space and time. I understand the pile even if I would never be bold enough to take someone’s items out and replace them with my own. It’s about courtesy and good manners.

The machines run via an app that notifies the user each time a cycle ends so the pile of clothes, now clearly cooled and wrinkled, is a sign someone doesn’t care about fair use of this amenity. The three of us standing between the machines laugh about the time-stamped photo I took when I entered a few minutes ago and interrupted them talking about the pile. I wanted proof it wasn’t me that moved the items in case their owner wants to tussle about it. After I lock my phone, I select a pair of machines as far away as possible to avoid potential conflict and for further protection.

There’s been an onslaught of people moving out in the last few weeks—four units have emptied if I haven’t missed anyone while at work. There’s already less than 40 apartments so each departure is a hole. The dynamics and connections shift more than you’d expect with each change. Noise levels rise or fall. Friendly hellos in passing slow or speed up. But something like the laundry room really shows the pulse of how people get along. It’s an indicator of whether people care that they impact someone else even if it is something as small as a pile of clothes atop a dryer or an unclean lint trap.

I’ve been in the building since 2016; the man now moving a load of wet clothes to an open dryer was here before I moved in; the woman standing with us has been here just about a year. It was him who knocked on my door to tell me that my car had been hit and totaled overnight and I needed to go assess the damage. It’s her, and another neighbor across the same hallway, that bring my packages up from the lobby and place them in front of my door to lessen the possibility someone will steal them. That same neighbor uses her doorbell camera to make sure I make it safely off to work each morning, often before the sun rises. It’s not nosiness, it’s community care.

The air in the laundry room is thick and smells like dryer sheets. A thin layer of sweat starts to bead on my forehead but I keep chatting. We gossip about those who’ve moved out and why.

“She told me that her new downstairs neighbor was really mean and filed a lot of complaints about them, so they were moving. They were here before me,” I say.

“The other lady told me she doesn’t like the new people moving in. It’s not a good mix. Things are going downhill.”

Most of the complaints circle this idea. The new residents aren’t mean. They’re just detached. I’m not friends with the neighbors from the laundry room, but we’re threaded together by a social contract that wants to make sure we are all okay. And I kind of agree. The new tenants, while mainly younger than the three of us, don’t seem to show much interest in niceties. But in some ways I can’t blame them. The building they’ve moved into isn’t what it used to be. It’s difficult to get to know the people who share the four floors if there are no common spaces besides the laundry room and lobby. You can’t really look out for someone if you don’t have the occasion of meeting them outside of fire alarm evacuations or passing in the elevator. Still, us older tenants have managed to do that in small ways. It’s just getting more difficult to maintain those connections.

I think the unraveling of the building’s community started with a table in the lobby and only continues with the piles of laundry in the building’s basement, the elevator hogging, and the occasional package theft.

The wrought iron and glass table used to be a hub. On any given day it was where packages waited to be collected; where dry goods were left for those who needed them; sometimes clothing or baby items like diapers appeared in reusable shopping bags; and one day there was a bowl of condoms for the taking. People left what they had and took what they needed. Some mornings I left items and by the time I came back down the elevator for food delivery they were gone. It wasn’t uncommon to have a chat at the table or give a knowing look at someone scooping up one of the items up for grabs. Unlike the laundry room, these items weren’t points of contention. They were meant to be shared. Until, one day, the table was gone.

A message came from the property manager to avoid leaving unwanted items in the lobby. That was it. No real explanation, just a thin thread of community snipped. Perhaps someone complained about clutter; maybe a coveted item was snatched by someone else first (maybe it was the brand-new Ninja air fryer I scored one morning); maybe it was something else. No one will ever know. It doesn’t really matter. The ripple effect was the same. Packages are now scattered beneath the bank of mailboxes with little care. No one shares food. There are no little trinkets of joy. Very few people linger.

The heat in the laundry room gets worse as the dryers head into their 60-minute cycles and the washers start spinning. The three of us head back to our apartments one by one, but when the cycles end, we are back standing between the machines. The man chuckles when I walk in like he did the first time. He says, “You missed it! They came down and we got to fighting about that laundry.” The pile is still there, softly collapsing onto itself, but none of the clothes have fallen to the floor. I think it was him who made sure of it as the dryers tumbled and other people moved things in and out. And that’s the point, right? Care. Community. He could have just ignored a sock falling or a bra slipping between the machines, but he didn’t. Instead, after I tell him he must have won the fight and share a laugh with him, he turns to me and asks if he should move the clothes back into a now empty dryer.

When the woman returns to get her clothes, she checks in on the noise level in my apartment. She knows the neighbors who’ve recently moved in next to me have been driving me a little bit crazy and I’ve been thinking about moving out after all these years. But the noise has gotten better, markedly so. Why? Because she spoke with the neighbor when I wasn’t home about an issue she was having with them and it came up. Our small cluster of apartments, four of them grouped together, is quiet, she told the new person, and we look out for each other. We don’t have to be friends, but we need to know each other’s names, look for warning signs, and make sure we are all safe. She’s right.

Social media has gotten one thing right recently. In my scrolling I come across creators saying that everyone wants a village but no one wants to be a villager. True. You can’t expect collective good works if you aren’t a part of the collective. It’s the small things that create the village. When someone left the bags of rice and beans in the lobby it made sense they took the bottles of perfume as a trade. The bowl of condoms, while a little unexpected, was still an act of care. So were the clothes and diapers. The car seats and strollers. The trial size luxury beauty products. All of it meant that someone in the building was acknowledging another one of their neighbors in that space needed or deserved something they could provide without asking for anything in return.

No matter if it’s a sweltering laundry room, a lobby, or at 2 a.m. during a fire alarm evacuation, the important part is the people present and the connections between them. In a world that’s increasingly splintering, it’s time to get back to basics, especially in our shared home—a safe space where people look out for one another for human reasons, not profit, content, or praise.

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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.

Although it was cold, and I was outside, the heat rose up through me, that hot surge of shame that ends with a flush in the cheeks.

A new friend had just asked about the charm I wear on my wrist.

This charm is a tooth. A baby tooth. White and smooth, it hangs from a link on my bracelet. I’d never before thought to question the Peruvian tradition of wearing that particular type of charm; until then I had understood it only as a representation of the maternal bond, of the love between mother and child. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, a charm to claim my children as always mine, small and tender-looking—pretty, like a pearl or a bit of shimmery shell. Set in 22-karat gold, a tiny talisman claiming a stake in the maternal self.

But that easy embrace of a familial and cultural tradition changed when my new friend asked about the charm hanging from my wrist and then . . . flinched.

We were sitting, my new friend and I, outside my recently purchased home, on a terraced portion of the hillside garden. It was a fall day, in the afternoon, and the air was chilly. But the children wanted to play, and the interior of the house was only sparsely decorated, as we had no money at the time to invest in a designer, whole sets of matching furniture, or even a nice sofa. The bedrooms had only mattresses on the floor and our living room was empty save for a brass urn I’d bought years earlier at a Neiman Marcus sale.

The terraced bit of garden on which my new friend and I sat was supposed to be a patio, but was only a poor imitation of one at that time, having been molded, literally, from the claylike soil and pounded into a semblance of a flat deck. There was no railing or flagstone, just a drop from the edge of pressed dirt. I had placed on this dirt a couple of teak patio chairs brought from our small backyard in Seattle, and the two of us sitting on them resembled a pair of birds perched on a cliff, the wind chilling our skin and goosebumping our flesh, our noses threatening to run and our eyes to water as we strove to chat companionably about our children, their teachers, the school.

Then came the moment when this new friend noticed my charm. This was a charm that my mother had three of herself, one for each of her own children. A charm that my mother and I had planned even before my sons were born. One for which I had given her my toddler’s baby tooth to have set in gold in Peru, where it was a common type of adornment. A charm that she had brought back, packed with loving care, in a small velvet jewelry bag.

It is fascinating and strange to me how a mere gesture, a small movement, an oh-so-slight recoil can cause, like a finger in a socket, that surge charged with shame. The actual moment was subtle, barely discernible, even though it felt to me like a slap in the face. The person who flinched, this school-parent friend, would never have been obvious in her distaste. She was too polite. Too reserved to exhibit judgment beyond the slightest widening of the eyes, a tiny lift of the eyebrows, the centimeter of movement back—at most the suggestion of a gesture rather than a crude, obvious sign. In Spanish, the word used for disrespectful or rude is malcriada, which literally translates into badly brought up or badly raised. My Anglo American friend had been, within her family’s traditions, bien criada.

The first time I saw Meredith as an adult was during a tour of a garden carefully cultivated to be viewed and appreciated, even coveted. This garden tour was part of an annual fundraiser for the aforementioned school, the school where one of my sons and one of hers shared a grade. In some ways Meredith had grown up to be my doppelgänger. Same age. Tall like me. Dark hair and eyes. Serious, if not quite bookish. Native of the same small town. Graduate of the same large university. For a few years, decades prior, we’d even shared an elementary class in the same school our boys now attended. Yet there were key differences.

Meredith had short hair. Straight and shiny and neatly trimmed. Contained. Her whole persona was contained and controlled in a neat, WASP-y package. My own hair was thick and unruly—the polar opposite of Meredith’s neat short cut, of her tidy poised persona.

That first day we met on the garden tour, after all those decades, she had on a white button-down shirt, crisp and clean, and a pair of pale khaki maternity slacks, for she was a few months pregnant with her fourth child. Diamond studs shone from her small, exposed ears, and the diamonds were stunning—large, but not too large, sparkling and clear.

I wanted to continue the custom in my mother’s family of setting children’s baby teeth in gold and keeping them as a kind of amulet by wearing them as charms. What was so awful about this small, defenseless object? So offensive? What made it something to draw away from, to flinch at when first recognized for what it was? It may have been the perceived crudeness, the primitiveness of wearing a physical part of another person—a piece of bone, made from calcium, first grown in a mother’s womb and then in a baby’s mouth—as jewelry. Perhaps it was an association with superstitious practices that deemed the wearing of such a charm un-Christian, uncivilized. Or an association with the body and therefore the dirty, grotesque, or even sinful.

There exist various scenarios in my mind, but they are all assumptions. I can’t really know, since I didn’t ask. I would never have asked. It would have been too embarrassing—bringing my insecurity into the light, exposing my self-doubt. I also noted the Christian cross my friend wore that day, and realized how bizarre and pagan my tooth charm might seem in comparison.

Yet I had the urge to defend myself, even if only to myself, in the face of that judgment. If I had been in court, both as defendant and lawyer, I would have pointed out the underlying history of the Christian cross hanging from my friend’s neck. I would have reminded the jury that the cross is a bloody symbol that has been sanitized not only by time and exposure and acculturation but also, in this case, by the platinum and diamonds from which it had been crafted, by the thin, elegant chain from which it hung as it rested on the smooth, perfumed skin of this white woman, this wealthy wife and mother, this critical tourist of cultivated gardens and automatic condemner of another’s talismanic charm. Was it fair, I would have demanded the court, that I was to be judged for my innocent little piece of baby bone, one given up by my child’s body willingly, appropriately, and naturally as superfluous, when my friend could wear—with approval and even admiration—a symbol originating in violence and gore?

If people are shaped by experience, by the way they are nurtured as well as by their genetic makeup, then I have been shaped by layers of indirect, implied shame, a sense of humiliation that arrives obliquely and stays backstage in the shadows, never venturing into direct sunlight so that it can be seen, recognized, and named. This is the way shame thrives—like a dank mushroom, a slippery, nocturnal creature, one that can exist only in the darkness and the shade.

The twisted layers of complicated shame in my life originate on my mother’s side. Shame is a ball we have passed back and forth all my life, from mother to daughter, again and again. There are times I’ve rejected it, when I’ve tried to hit it out of the park, a home run, never to come back—but then, becoming a boomerang, it inevitably does.

My mother, born and raised in the upper classes of Peru, educated by nuns, served by maids, taught English and horseback riding and piano, in this country strains toward whiteness, threatened always by the negative stereotypes that exist here in words like immigrant and Hispanic. She lives a precarious balance between the past and the present, brown and white, Lima and California, Spanish and English. She balances there always, as if on a tightrope between skyscrapers or a slippery ledge on a rocky mountainside. A woman in exile, having left her beloved Peru in her twenties to marry my father, she must constantly negotiate the racism here in Northern California, where brown people from Central and South America are stuck, for the most part, in the service sector. They maintain the gardens and clean the houses, they wipe the tables in restaurants and fix the engines of SUVs and sedans, but they don’t live in our kind of town, in our kind of house, with our kind of privilege.

My mother has her own prejudices, of course: She forbade me once I became a teenager from even setting foot on Haight Street, for example, fearing not only drugs and promiscuity but also grime and hippies. She’d flinch at things and people and ideas in the United States only to feel like an outsider when others—the women in our town, the mothers of my classmates, those who spoke flawless English with only American accents—would flinch, literally or figuratively, at something about her.

Yet I myself own the flinch. It seems I have inherited it, an early bequest, from my mother. When I visit Lima as an adult, when I spend time with my mother’s family and in my Peruvian relatives’ homes, I often draw back, internally, with distaste at the things I hear and see: My aunt looking through her maids’ bags before they leave for their homes, suspecting them of stealing. My cousin driving off in irritation when the light turns green after yelling out the window—¡Demasiado tarde!—at the ragged brown girl frantically searching through her boxes for the exact flavor of chewing gum my cousin had insisted on. Another cousin’s friends, when all of us are sitting outside with drinks together one summer evening, talking about the “dirty Arabs,” not knowing or not caring that I am married to one. In the United States, I have flinched as well: In the morgue where my father-in-law lay when I saw a room full of urns for pet ashes next to the room full of urns for people’s remains. At an acquaintance who threatened the principal of the elementary school with withholding much-needed donations if she wouldn’t add Chinese to the curriculum. At a white friend of a white friend who, well-intentioned yet ignorant, still uses the word “mulatto.”

I have periods of time when I believe myself free not only from my mother’s prejudices—ones that she turns on people of different races or classes or nationalities with different customs and behaviors from her own—but also from the shame that is the other side of the coin. Clearly, however, as my friend’s flinch showed me, I am not. This shame is the shame of the colonized and therefore the shame of imposed inferiority. It is the shame fed by fear: fear of exclusion, of embarrassment, of the faux pas. The back-and-forth movement between cultures, the constant negotiation of traditions and mores demanded of the immigrant, render weak and assailable my mother’s standards of behavior and attire. I inherited these standards that could be questioned and judged, that could be deemed primitive or tacky. It is in this space that the immigrant and her children live, the space between a sure, strong, established knowledge of the self, of the rightness of how one presents the self through dress or rituals or speech, and the feeling that one’s culture and taste are wrong, aberrant, vulgar. I remain divided into two selves: the cerebral and the visceral. I know in my head what my values are—they are a blend of the maternal, the immigrant, the Peruvian, and also the paternal, the first world, the Anglo American. My mind feels no shame at the flinch; it is the body that reacts instinctively, the emotional self that has been trained since birth to look out for judgment and contempt.

So there I was, holding within myself the constant conflict between familial history and my mother’s advice on the one hand and my own observations and experiences on the other, sitting on a chilly terrace on wooden folding chairs, making small talk with a woman who embodied, to my eyes, the successful wife-mother-WASP-yuppie.

Meredith was the daughter of one of those women whom my mother would avoid after moving to the town where we still live—the mothers of the other children at our local school, the mothers who knew what to say, what to do, and what to wear. My mother avoided these women, never making a single friend in our town or from our school, because she dreaded ostracization, gaze aversion, flinching. Like these women, Meredith seemed complacent in her own identity and looked satisfied, more than satisfied, with her own family, their spacious home, their big golden dog. Her living room had a grand piano in one corner, windows traditionally curtained with heavy drapes, a large, finely worked carpet in dignified shades of blue and cream. Family photos in Tiffany frames adorned the Ethan Allen side tables artfully placed around the room. And this person—someone versed in thoroughbred culture, someone harking back to the American version of blue-blood heritage—saw the charm I wore and flinched.

It was so small that the entire thing, gold casing and pearly tooth, could fit easily on my pinkie fingernail, yet so powerful that it could elicit a flinch—a flinch with the ability to bring forth a self-consciousness that, only shallowly buried, seems always lying in wait.

Excerpt from Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures by Marianna Marlowe. Copyright © 2026 by She Writes Press. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Portrait of a Mestiza is our September 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick. Join us Thursday, October 1 at 8:30 p.m. ET for a Substack Live Q&A with Marianna Marlowe. Click here for a reminder.

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Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. After devoting years to academic writing, her focus now is creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review, among others. Her debut memoir, Portrait of a Feminist, was published in February, 2025 with She Writes Press. Her second memoir, Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures, was published in May, 2026.

Before I could actually read, I memorized entire picture books and performed them from memory while turning the pages at exactly the right moments.

Everyone really should have known I was autistic at that point…

But it was the 90s, so I went on masking hard, and my caregivers and teachers praised me for this freaky skill.

Meanwhile, I grew more and more frustrated as, one by one, my first-grade classmates actually learned how to read. I balled my tiny fists and tried to force my eyes to make sense of the letters on the page that allegedly represented the sounds that words were made of.

Months later, things finally began to click. Instead of feeling proud of myself, I began immediately plowing my way through chapter book series like Little House on the Prairie, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club to make up for lost time. I fell in love with characters and fictional worlds, and with the thrill of closing the back cover of one book and starting the next one again and again.

In my high-control religious high school, I could only choose from the approved curriculum or the church library. I was at the mercy of my parents to take me on special trips to the local library or Books-A-Million.

So when I showed up at university and fell in step with the smart, honors journalism students who came in with college credits coming out of their ears, I learned a cruel lesson that reading isn’t always just reading. Sometimes it’s social currency.

My first boyfriend loved Dostoevsky, and he wasn’t very nice to me. Reading the Russians was a way for me to win the favor of him and his friends.

While earning a minor in British literature, I spent my spare time diving into the culturally-relevant, male-driven modern classics I’d missed. For me, it was the era of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nabokov, and all the way up to Vonnegut and Palahniuk. I loved the way my peers’ eyes lit up when I mentioned I’d read these prestigious authors. The books were fine.

College also meant spending hours watching young girls who were much more self-assured than I was, talking about their favorite authors and books from their bedroom floors on this interesting new website called YouTube. From them, I learned all about Looking for Alaska by John Green, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, and, of course, a little series about a boy wizard by She Who Must Not Be Named.

For a while, I saw consuming this kind of content as a guilty pleasure, because the books they were talking about weren’t literary enough.

After college, with my first job, a first-generation Kindle, a tiny amount of disposable income and more free time than ever, I started reading an average of 200 books per year. During COVID, it was more like 300.

It was also during this time that I noticed the proliferation of book content on YouTube and other social media platforms. While my elder-millenial stubbornness keeps me from creating an account, I still feel BookTok’s influence on the platforms I do participate in. There are just so many “besties” babbling about what they’re reading. I love it!

These days I’m a marketer, and I make all kinds of online content for my amazing, inspiring clients. So, wouldn’t it make sense for me to make content online about books? On paper, maybe.

But I can’t!

I just can’t bring myself to talk about books on the internet. I’ve wondered if it’s because I don’t value my own voice and opinion enough. Maybe my strict high school and Dostoevsky-loving boyfriend killed my spirit for it?

But I don’t think that’s the real reason. If you scroll back to early Twitter, or stalk my ancient LiveJournal, you’d know that I’ve felt okay about expressing my opinion for a long time.

Now, though, reading feels like something for my personal, offline life. My relationships with online book creators are purely parasocial, and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want reading to become a performance. I don’t want it to be branded, optimized, and subject to any algorithm.

What I care about most is the books themselves. The books and like three people.

I dumped Dostoevsky Boyfriend fast. And after I broke up with another person who only read the sports section, I wrote a list of the qualities I wanted in a partner. The first was, “well read.”

Joke’s on me, though. My husband is six feet tall. He likes all of the specific pizza toppings I put on my list. He’s funny and kind. But he’s also been reading Dune for three years so far with no end in sight.

However, he will lovingly listen to me drone on about my favorite stories and hold me when my favorite characters die and laugh when I read him Princess Donut’s sassy dialogue from the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. He’s always down for any on-screen adaptation I beg him to watch.

He’s not upset that I don’t have a literary niche. That’s what I loved so much about those early creators as well. They weren’t brands. They were just bookish people figuring out life and sharing whatever they wanted. Their carefree attitudes toward posting made sense back then. In today’s algorithm-ruled world, I envy it, and attempt to channel it both online and off.

For me, reading will never be a performance or content. It’ll just keep being a major part of life, which I’m also still figuring out as I go.

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Caroline Newton started her career reporting in newsrooms, built social audiences and websites for universities and startups, and now helps nonprofits and healing practitioners tell clear, brave stories through the work of her own communications agency. After six years living abroad, she’s now currently based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. She writes about this transition and about beauty, power, belonging, and care in unstable systems at Anchor & Drift.

After the graduation ceremony, I met my parents in the lobby of their Beverly Hills hotel, a swanky place, my father had called it. A few steps up from their usual Marriott or Holiday Inn because my mother had forgotten to make a reservation and everything with a more reasonable price tag was already booked. How the hell did ya forget? It’s been on the calendar for four years, for Chrissakes. My father’s voice echoed off the crystals dripping from the massive chandelier over our heads.

He ordered drinks and shrimp cocktail for him and my mother. Even though I’d been a vegetarian since the sixth grade, he double and triple checked I didn’t want one (Who doesn’t like shrimp cocktail?). I watched him finger the box of Tiparillos in his coat pocket while my mother passed over presents wrapped in the blue and gold of my university: A portfolio with spaces for a legal pad, business and credit cards, a pen with my alma mater’s name, and a crest in gold on the navy cover. A leather shoulder bag with my initials burned onto the outermost flap, so you can lug around all those legal briefs and whatnot at Georgetown next year, my father boomed, though we both knew this was his first time seeing it. A baby blue box with diamond studs that I’d lose within the year. Yet another gold cross, this one with a rose in the center, to remind you of what’s important, my mother whispered.

I brought you something, my father said as we waited for my mother to return from changing into something warmer (Los Angeles not warm enough for you? my father had asked her retreating back) before heading to dinner, another swanky place, this time in Malibu. I remember the shock of surprise at his words, the way it spread from my chest like melting butter on the English muffins my mother ate every morning, filling in all the holes and gaps.

From under his chair, he pulled a binder. He used the same two-inch maroon binders for everything: tax documents, house projects, medical information, legal documents, family papers, circuit board designs, work orders, client projects—each one in a separate binder, so that they ringed his office and bled into the back rooms, towering over us like bricks, each with a label written in his cramped letters.

He shook it at me when I hesitated, and I gripped it, taking it from him slowly, with two hands, as if it were something holy.

I thought you might want this, to see what’s what so you can keep it going—for your own records—now that I’m done.

The words made no sense until I opened the cover. And even then, I had to study the spreadsheet, pages long, at the front, then flip over the divider, behind which receipts had been taped onto paper and placed in plastic sheet protectors, stacks and stacks of them, filling the binder to bursting—the last ones, resting on top—bills of sale for the cross, the earrings, the shoulder bag, the portfolio.

It’s good to keep track of your expenses.

My father’s voice floated somewhere over my head. The melting butter in me turned cold, hard. It froze me in place, my eyes fixed on the numbers blurring before me. His hand landed on my shoulder, unfreezing me.

Okay, I breathed out. I looked up at him, but he was looking across the lobby.

There’s your mother, he said, stepping away from me. Do we have everything?

I slid the binder into the shoulder bag. My mother gathered the used napkins into a pile and handed me the extra sweater she’d brought down from the room. In case you get chilly, she’d said.

That’s everything then, my father said, looking toward the door. And with that, we walked to the valet, the heavy corner of the binder banging against my hip with each step. I still have it, carried from apartment to apartment, from my first condo to this house, where it sits, tucked in the back of my closet, the weight unchanged.

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KC Courtland makes her home in Northern California, where she earns a living as a substitute teacher and spends the rest of her time lost in stories—sometimes the ones she reads, sometimes the ones she writes. Away from the page, she can be found painting with more enthusiasm than skill, stretching into yoga poses of questionable grace, or curled up with her two cats and loving spouse.

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:

“In Praise of Answered Prayers” by

“I will love this hallway” by ,

“Inside the Collection: Austin Quinlan” by , The Dry Down Diaries

“Declutter Your Car” by , The Declutter Queen

“The Secrets in My Mother’s Nightstand” by Sophia Glock,

“Too Many Books?” by Alex Vadukul, The New York Times

In this deep dive into how she thinks about her belongings, Pratt, now the editor of Another Jane Pratt Thing, shares the backstory of having multiple storage spaces and why she hasn’t visited them in years, her approach to saving both personal and professional things, why she’s just as likely to give away a beloved object to a friend as keep it (even if she sometimes regrets that decision), how she gets a new perspective on her home when she needs to relax, and why she believes objects emits vibrations.

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

About our guest:

Jane Pratt graduated from Oberlin College and was the founding editor of the iconic Sassy magazine at age 24, and has since gone on to edit the magazine Jane, the website xoJane, and currently, Another Jane Pratt Thing. She hosted Jane Radio on SiriusXM for six years and is the author of the books Beyond Beauty and For Real.

Another Jane Pratt Thing

Instagram: @janepratt

Instagram: anotherjaneprattthing

Sassy shirts online store

Finders and Keepers will be taking a summer hiatus and will be back in the fall for Season 2!

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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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