On the built-in bookshelf in a small room in my apartment sits a ridiculously large ceramic piggy bank. Its white ceramic complexion is decorated with hearts, stars, and splotches of color made by dipping a sponge in paint and pressing onto its surface. There is a thin black painted smile, a painted pink snout, and two small black dots for eyes.

On the side it reads: Oinky, The Pig.

Oinky sits among a few other objects on the shelf. A miniature drum kit, three signed baseballs in display cases, a plastic cup with Jiminy the Cricket on it, filled with tiny plastic ducks. These items were carefully curated to be kept out of storage when I moved into this apartment from the condo where I raised my two boys. This room has no windows as it was built into the original layout and is where one child sleeps when he comes home from college. I have LED lights that illuminate the playful memories and can be seen from the pull-out couch where the other one sleeps when he’ is home at the same time.

Oinky is comically big for a piggy bank, and impractical, yet here it sits. My youngest received a small silver piggy bank when he was born that could fit into the palm of your hand. I have no idea where that is. Likely it was purged alongside so many other things that were so easy for me to part with. I’m a constant de-clutterer. I live in downsize mode. I get rid of anything that isn’t being used. I scanned the kids’ art, and they were asked to sift through their rooms yearly, getting rid of things they no longer wanted, clothes that didn’t fit, schoolwork that’s relevance had expired. I routinely go through closets, drawers, and cabinets, reorganizing, tossing, and updating.

I love throwing things away. I love giving things away.

But Oinky remains.

I need two hands to move it. If it was used as a piggy bank, and it was full, you wouldn’t be able to lift it; I’m certain of this. The bright paint of the stenciled stars and hearts are smudged around the edges, and the little legs that support its globe-like body are painted without a plan, two purple, one blue-green, and one seemingly a mix of all those colors.

I tried to get rid of it.

It would sit in the clear-out pile, time after time.

But I couldn’t do it.

The sentimentality surprised me.

I couldn’t even understand why.

I don’t remember making Oinky.

But I can imagine their little hands, dipping sponges in the paint, stretching their small bodies to reach it in the center of the table as we created something new, together. The four of us, as it would’ve happened before my divorce. I imagine us admiring our work, and the giggles that came when naming it. I do remember that for a little while, we saved some coins in it. Once a dollar bill was shoved in the slit up top and it took tweezers and patience to remove it from the bottom hole. Even the coins took some deft maneuvers to get them to land just right to drop out of the center.

Useless as a piggy bank, it became a decoration.

And over time, it became more. This giant ceramic impractical pig reminds me that I did play, even though memories skew to the constant balance of single parenting, working, and the endless to-do lists of motherhood. I continued to find fun things to create and experience, among the more tedious tasks of managing money, time, and emotions. It holds memories and possibility, instead of coins and dollars. Keeping it, and wondering why, gives it life as it searches for new meaning.

I imagine when my kids have their own places and less real estate on my shelves is thoughtfully curated for them, Oinky the Pig will remain. It will have a prominent place like a piece of contemporary art, the personal equivalent of a Jeff Koons balloon animal. It will be an intentional part of my décor, reminding me of resilience, playfulness, imperfect parenting, and the invisible, and surprising, magic that can be found in the impractical.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Sara Lavan is a dancer who has always loved to write, or maybe a writer who got distracted for a while with dance. For a while, she found a way to blend the two. She built a career creating programs that center creativity, community, and well-being. Sara fills her life with all things dance and movement, and considers words part of that rhythm. She is in her third act after many life changes, including her kids going off to college.

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:

“Living with found fragments and meaningful objects” by , Cultivating Color

“Practical Tips on How to Place Art in Your Home” by , Art for Breakfast

“Acquiring New Things Won’t Make You Happy - But Maybe This Will” by , The Life Edit

“happier at home (in Amsterdam!) with Snigdha Bansal, who’s discovered ‘joy in the sisyphean struggle of keeping house’” by , Be Less Careful

“I took the first step to living like a minimalist and it felt surprisingly unsatisfying” by Tanza Loudenback, Business Insider

All through high school, college, and my early twenties, I made intricate photo albums that showcased my life in a way that wasn’t reflected in my mom’s family albums. My friends and I snapped candid shots of each other: at school, at parties, at Baskin-Robbins. I sent away the disposable cameras in paper envelopes, and when the prints arrived, I pasted them in albums, carefully labeling each photo, giving each page a block-lettered title, often including items like concert tickets or magazine cut-outs.

When asked what items I would save in a fire, I always said my photo albums. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer, so I had a strong urge to document my life. I wanted to remember what I was doing, what I was wearing, who I was with. I knew one day I’d get old and forgetful, and I’d need a concrete way to remember the details of my youth.

When digital photos became the norm, I stopped making physical photo albums, but I lugged my albums with me everywhere. Took them to New Orleans after college and to DC after that. When my boyfriend and I decided to move cross-country, I hauled the box of albums to Seattle, where we put it directly into a storage closet. When we moved to Minneapolis a year later the box went, again, directly into storage. Or so I thought.

After Minneapolis, we moved to Maryland, and, one day, I went looking for my photo albums. I was writing a young adult novel, and I wanted some inspiration from my high school years.

But the photo albums were nowhere to be found. I tore through all the boxes in our storage unit, but they weren’t there.

I refused to panic. They’d turn up eventually. Or so I thought.

Some months later, I was on Facebook and noticed there was a hidden section of messages: a place for messages from people I wasn’t Facebook friends with. I started scrolling through years of messages, mostly spam.

But then there was a message that stopped my heart. It went something like this:

Hi Eva. This is Laura from ABC Moving Company in Seattle, Washington. I found a box at our warehouse that must have fallen out of one of our trucks. The box was partially open, and I could see it contained photo albums. I figured whoever they belonged to would probably want them back, so I hope you don’t mind that I looked through the box and figured out your name. I can keep the box here for you for a few weeks. Or, if you let me know your address, I can ship it to you.

“Oh my god!” I shrieked. “Oh my god, my photo albums!” I was filled with a rush of adrenaline that quickly turned to dread when I looked at when the message was dated: almost two years ago.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I messaged Laura back, wondering why the heck she’d contacted me on Facebook. Didn’t the moving company have my contact info? Except, no, they didn’t. When we were living in Seattle, my husband had been my boyfriend, and we’d had different last names. It was his job, anyway, that had arranged for the moving company.

Laura’s reply came, and it was what I had feared: When she didn’t hear back from me, they’d gotten rid of the box.

I messaged her back something like, “Got rid of…as in you actually threw it away???” I couldn’t fathom it. I simply couldn’t comprehend that someone could take my photo albums—all those years of hard work and precious memories—and toss them into a dumpster.

How could the movers have been so careless? (But why had I not packed my treasured albums in the car, safe with me, on our drive to Minneapolis?!) Equally frustrating was the fact that I could have gotten the box back had I only checked my weird Facebook messages. Most depressing of all: My photo albums were truly gone forever. Now I would have to rely on my memory alone to recall the specifics of my youth.

I’ve lost other things I really loved: earrings, sweaters, a favorite lunchbox. But losing my photo albums brought on a sorrow I’d never felt about any other material object. It felt like losing a piece of myself. I had an ache in my heart for months. Even a year afterward, when I thought about the lost photo albums, pain settled in my chest.

When my high school and college friends heard what happened, they scanned their old photos and emailed them to me. Some were photos of my teenage self I’d never even seen. Their efforts didn’t make up for the lost photo albums, but it helped. And, like all loss, time made it easier to bear.

The Facebook message happened about ten years ago. I still think about the photo albums, but much less often. When I do, I no longer feel sorrow. I think, Gosh, it sucks I’ll never be able to show my daughters my prom pictures, but…oh well. Because, in the end, even our favorite things are just things. Turns out I still have the memories, after all; I can even conjure up images in my mind of some of my favorite pictures from those lost albums. Plus, I’ve taken a lot of great photos since then. The loss just doesn’t feel as bad as it did initially.

You know what else? I’ve started making physical photo albums again. They live on a shelf in my living room, so I can keep a close eye on them. But if there’s a fire, I’ll prioritize saving my kids. And my cats.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Eva Langston received her MFA from the University of New Orleans and is represented by Ali Lake of O’Connor Literary. She is a writing instructor and the creator/host of the podcast The Long Road to Publishing, which was recently named one of the best podcasts about the writing business. Eva lives in Maryland with her husband and two children, and her writing resources newsletter on Substack has over 7,000 followers.

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:

“I’ve been selling my Mum’s belongings.” by , Life Before Plastic

“Things That Are Better Secondhand” by , Long Live

“The Le Creuset dutch oven” by

“living inside our bags” by , please employ me

“Wanted: Lost T-Shirt, Perfect Green” by Heidi Fettig Parton, Essay Daily

“Winter Coat” by Isaac Amend, Brevity

In the corner of my bedroom is an old desk in the Queen Anne style. I’ve moved it from apartment to apartment, house to house, coast to coast, over the past fifty years. I think of it as my desk, but one could debate that.

It is called a secretary writing desk and has cabriole legs reflective of the Queen Anne period. It’s made of walnut and has a drop-down front that conceals cubby holes and small drawers where I hide keys and such. Below the front panel is a drawer that spans the width of the desk. It’s not a very practical piece of furniture, and I don’t know that it has any monetary value, but I like the look of the graceful S-curved legs that were popular in the 1800s, and it blends well with my other bedroom furnishings.

In the late 60s, when I was a student at The Art Students League of New York, I shared a furnished railroad flat with a ballet dancer who studied at Carnegie Hall. The desk was in the front room next to the only window in the apartment. I slept in that room, which led into a middle room where Carol slept and endlessly practiced her leg extensions. Directly behind it came the kitchen and finally a bathroom. No hallways, no doors except for the bathroom. It was an old building, probably built about 1900. It’s possible that the desk predated the building.

Our apartment was four stories up and cheap. An Italian restaurant took up the first floor. We had lived there for a year when Carol was offered a job with the Philadelphia Ballet Company, and I decided to move in with friends a few blocks away.

Furniture was always being relocated from one apartment to another in the building. Most of it was old and in bad shape. Sometimes I saw pieces tossed out next to the garbage cans for pickup. Since I had no furniture of my own and had always liked the desk, I asked our building manager if I could take it with me. I should make clear here that the man had a serious drinking problem and had always been flirtatious with me. He lived in a dark and slovenly studio on the second floor with a wife who rarely spoke.

He said yes to my request and a neighbor helped me carry it downstairs and maneuver it into the back seat of a large taxi that took me to my new digs. Some weeks later I received a letter from my former building’s management company demanding return of the desk. Apparently, someone was paying attention to the furnishings. I was told to report to the corporate office, located near the Flatiron building, on a specific day and time. It never dawned on me that I could ignore the summons.

On the appointed day, I showed up at the office and met with Mr. Greenspan, a tall, thin man with a long narrow nose and a heavy New York accent. He was probably in his fifties, which at the time I thought quite old. I sat down in a chair across from his desk. He called me a thief and threatened to have me arrested. I immediately burst into tears. I’d never before been accused of stealing anything. Embarrassed and ashamed, I was terrified that my parents, whose address and phone number were listed on my rental application, would find out. In between sobs, I hemmed and hawed about how I came to take the desk because I didn’t want to get the manager in trouble. Greenspan suggested I pay for the desk. I no longer remember the amount, but it didn’t matter, I had no money.

In the end, I dashed out of his office, red-faced, having agreed to return the desk. Mr. Greenspan said he would get in touch about how, when, and where this should take place. I no longer had a key to the building. The manager was rarely around to open the front door, and I couldn’t leave it on the sidewalk or carry it up four flights of stairs to my former apartment.

Weeks passed and then months as I waited anxiously to hear from him. But he never got back to me, and the company never contacted me again. That’s why the desk has remained with me all these years and how it happens to reside in a corner of my bedroom. Mr. Greenspan has probably long departed this earth, and I don’t think the company would any longer have records of the incident. It is said that possession in nine tenths of the law. So, I suppose I should finally accept that the desk belongs to me and let go of the unease I still sometimes feel when I look at it.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Marcy Kelly worked in communications and press relations at US government agencies and nonprofit organizations before transitioning to creative writing. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have been published in magazines and collections. Seek Higher Ground was featured as Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine. Essays, on topics including grief, trauma, and loss, have appeared in online publications. A script she co-authored received a best screenplay award from the Producers Guild of America. She studied creative writing at UCLA and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Antioch University. Marcy lives in Los Angeles, hosts Meet the Author events, and is involved with charitable causes. www.marcykelly.net

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:

“What Drove Me To Buy These Striped Sweaters?” by , NEVERWORNS

“What Survives” by , Spirals

“A tale of two teakettles” by (Note)

“My wife, our campervan, and me” by James A. Lomastro, Boston Globe

“The Most Expensive Dinosaur Just Sold for $50.1 Million” by Julie Brener Davich, The Wall Street Journal

What kills me is that the bus route is printed on the old ticket, a purple square of paper I bought at the Rebellious Jukebox record store for five bucks. The five-dollar price tag kills me too. Most concerts were twelve bucks in 1990, but Fugazi made their shows all-ages and cheap.

I was 19 when I rode the city bus to that Fugazi show at Lake City Concert Hall, a horde of Seattle punks spilling from the seats: Mohawks, leather jackets and pierced faces, a few understated kids in plain flannels and Chuck Taylors and Levis like I wore. “Grunge” hadn’t been coined yet. This was a year before Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Some of my friends in the D.C. hardcore scene told me this great band was coming through, so I’d bought a ticket without once hearing a Fugazi song.

I was a queer kid and I wasn’t sure if there were other queers on that bus, but riding to that concert was one of the first times I felt less alone in my life.

It was a soul-killing, arduous task to be out and queer in 1990, a time when we gay people were excommunicated from the human race. I’m not exaggerating when I say that gay people were not considered to be human beings in the 90s. We were clocked as monstrous creatures by mainstream society, where thousands of parents disowned thousands of sons dying of AIDS in lonely hospital beds. Instead of family, we Gen X queers had friends. Our friends were our world.

My Seattle friends in the punk/straight edge scene knew my story, that I had dropped out of college in Arizona, the only state I’d ever lived in, and followed a woman here, to this city where I knew no one, and then...she married her boyfriend. My friends knew I was in love for the first time, then flattened with devastating heartbreak. I hadn’t yet been in a mosh pit, but my friends knew this Fugazi show might just be my cure.

Now, I’m 55 years old and that little square of purple paper serves as proof. A kind of Gen X. I.D. It reminds me what little 19-year-old Molly managed to do. My parents paid my first month’s rent and then expected me to make the next month’s payment or come home. I had to land a job quickly. I was getting resumes copied at Copy Mart when I saw their for-hire sign and just started working there. I made five dollars an hour making 3-cent copies for lesbians from the Wild Rose bar around the corner and I hung out with the punks I met on the job. I was living like a full-fledged adult at age 19. Only now can I see how young I actually was.

I didn’t know that I had arrived in Seattle at a watershed moment in American music.

I knew that I’d followed love here. I knew that I’d followed a woman here and that we both were in love with music and were both following that music and that intense love for it to Seattle.

These days I also still own a cassette tape of Nirvana’s Bleach, the Sub Pop album that preceded Nevermind. That object comes close to meaning for me what the Fugazi ticket means, because, like a paper ticket, a cassette is proof in a format that’s not manufactured anymore. And that cassette is the closest I have to some proof that I attended the Nirvana Motorsports show in October of that year, proof that I was there to see Nirvana with the Mudhoney drummer on stage and Dave Grohl in the audience deciding if he wanted to be in the band.

This is probably a good moment to ask myself why I need and keep proof of anything. Is my 90s archiving a weak, desperate part of my 55-year-old self that clings to a nostalgic past? Am I just trying to prove that I was, for a brief, fleeting moment…cool?

Sure. Alright. That’s part of it. Because I was barely two years out of high school when I went to that Fugazi show, and in high school I’d been a freak and an outcast. I got ridiculed everywhere I went. Being cool in high school would have meant feeling safe.

I’ll cop to it: All of us high school losers keep proof of our living well as the best revenge.

But that Fugazi ticket stub also means this: my first time moshing, all of us balancing and swaying as we wait for the band to start, all packed in, sweaty body to sweaty body, our feet nearly slipping off the wooden arm rests, my friend Mary trying to put a contact lens on her eye as we jostle and sway. Bam! The bassline pounds and the first chords rip out. The moshing is this weird miracle. The friction of the fast, gutty melody disintegrates the boundaries of our bodies into fusion and collapse and frenzy. We are angry kids drowning in bliss. We are the roar of a fierce, unstoppable lion, not bodies, not flesh—we, all of us, become pure sound, liquid sound, a mighty flood ripping giant trees from the earth.

My ticket stub says that for the first time in my life, on June 1, 1990, I felt truly alive.

Unafraid.

I knew I could kill my depression, belong with people, and live a life worth the hassle.

Now in 2026 as my beloved country collapses under dictatorship, ruled by total dicks who are the same total dicks from 80s high school, I can grip this ticket between thumb and forefinger, feel the grit of the cheap construction paper, and find the fierce youth I’ll need for the fight ahead.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Molly McCloy is a four-time Moth slam winner and Lambda Literary Fellow. She won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” contest for nonfiction and The Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press who will publish her memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth in September 2026. Her work has been featured in O Magazine, excerpted in the Blue Mesa Review and Foglifter, and broadcast on the Best of Risk! podcast. She earned an MFA from The New School and teaches writing for the awesome students of Pima Community College.

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 vinyl collector with one rule – he can’t keep anything.” by

“Collector’s Lot” by

“bare bones living” by , writing out loud

“For These Millennial Fountain Pen Fans, Community Is the Real Collectible” by Rachel Myrow, KQED

“You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don’t Take My Mix Tape” by Kera Bolonik, The New York Times

“My Deranged Quest to Hunt Down a Viral Pumpkin-Head Gumball Machine” by Joshua Lyon, Wirecutter

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“Toy Story” by , Shaved Meats, Piled High

“Have I Got Too Much Stuff?” by

“The Philosophy of Everyday Objects” by , The Memoirist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“The Safety of Objects” by , The Hopeless Millennial

“THE DEATH-PUDDING CONTAINER” by , The Keepthings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“LOSING MY WATCH” by , What Comes Next?

“You Can’t Buy Memories” by

“What Dolls Taught Me About Being Human” by

“Downsizing” by , The Middler

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

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

The black jacket hung in my closet for over six months. It didn’t want to go anywhere because though it was brand new and had so much potential, it couldn’t get over its own sordid origin story. Last Black Friday, my father was visiting my city, parading the newly purchased jacket around my living room.

“It sells for $250. Guess what I paid for it?”

“Not a dime over 50 bucks,” I said.

“48 bucks.” He exploded into laughter.

Two days later, on his way back to Toronto, he died in a car accident. He never would end up wearing that jacket. Out of all his belongings, it was the hardest thing to get rid of because it was simultaneously his and not his. And mine, but not mine either.

My father being of diminutive size, and I his closest fit, the jacket naturally came to me. I didn’t have the heart to wear it, so it sat in my closet like a dog at the shelter hoping to find an owner. In the months after the accident, the jacket was unaware of the hurricane of activity around it. After my father’s sudden passing, I went through a rampage of cleaning and donating. Grief makes you want to shed life. The more I purged, the more things kept coming out of crevices. It was as if the rooms in my house had cervices that had been birthing stuff when I wasn’t looking.

In the aftermath of a close loss, you begin to see the transience of life and to a degree, the pointlessness of possession. The knowledge that one day you can be an entity with things to its name and the next, a body that requires an identifying tag, puts ownership into perspective.

It was strange to learn that seventy years of my father’s buying and owning could turn into a single car trip to Salvation Army.

In my parents’ home, the story was similar. My mother returned to her place with a new set of eyes for everything. She was mass-chucking stuff to the curb and giving away her prized possessions—purses, jewelry, clothes—like Halloween candy. My mother, Extreme Hoardress, First of Her Name, Mother-of-Dragon-Eggs-purchased-at-the-flea-market, who still had my first birthday candle and my adult brother’s baby bottles, had now experienced that the shelf-life of this life isn’t written in permanent ink and if it is, whoever wrote it had smudged it to keep us committed to the game instead of quiet-quitting at some point.

My mother hadn’t heard of the idea of Swedish Death Cleaning but that is exactly what she was doing: simplifying her life and affairs so things would be less burdensome for her children one day. These days when we ask if she wants to go shopping for a change of scenery, she waves a hand effusively, rejecting the notion. “I am done,” is what she says. What she means is that the expansion phase of her life has come to an end. She is now a receding wave. And receding waves can try and sweep objects from the beach, but they will have to acquiesce them when they return to the ocean.

I expected that the flurry of decluttering in my own home would leave a kind of void in my heart, like the emptiness that hung in my father’s closet. But what it did was create a sense of unburdening. As if to handle the weight of grief, I needed to drop sandbags—belongings that no longer served me. I also became much more intentional about the acquisition of new things. I now think long and hard before making a purchase and consider whether it will significantly increase my quality of life or if there is something I already own that could do the trick.

When I do buy, I spend money on what brings joy and comfort: teas, books, fresh flowers. And plants. I began collecting perennials for my garden: roses, irises, peonies. Things that find a way to live. And continue giving. And remind me of my father’s kind hands planting roses in spring.

In my cultural and religious upbringing, there is a lovely concept of sadqah jariah, the giving that keeps on giving. The idea is to use your resources on something that keeps generating benefit, and thereby giving you blessings, even after you are gone. Donating to build a water well in drought-prone areas is one. Planting trees that provide shade or fruit is another. Transferring your knowledge to someone is yet another. Even though objects you own will technically be of benefit to someone after you pass, they weren’t purchased with that initial intention.

With this thought, I hope that that the flowers I have planted will continue to spread beauty and joy, even after I am no longer the guardian of this land.

As for the black jacket, it found a home. When my father’s nephew visited from out of town to pay his respects, he discovered the hard way the mercuriality of Canadian weather and found warmth in the arms of a jacket that was simultaneously my father’s and not his, and not mine either.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Ain Khan is an emerging Pakistani-Canadian poet and writer based in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Thimble, DarkWinter Lit, The Republic of Letters, New Verse News and is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2.

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:

“Being a Collector: On Owning Objects” by

“How Did I Get All This Stuff???” by

“Unmatched Adventures TMNT and Collection Reflections” by

“The Necklace Youn Yuh-jung Loved, Lost and Replaced” by Amelia Diamond, The New York Times

“Our Longing for Inconvenience” by Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker

The tiny clasp on the silver metal box snapped so hard that when my fingers were short and tender and I was adventurous enough to pry it open, my brave forefinger would come away pinched and painful. But I loved to open this rectangular box of slides, a kid-scale suitcase with a handle, which was rather like my father: slim, compact, single purposed.

The box contained slides from my father’s life before he met my mother. There was an entire row of Kodachrome images of his French girlfriend on a beach, at a picnic, on a French city street, her dark hair coiffed. He took no pains to hide these from me, or us, but my sisters were too little then.

The drawer in the sideboard where the box lived was a Pandora’s box all my own. My mother shoved photographs into that drawer, full sets of class pictures we never bothered to cut up and share, except the obligatory pictures for our grandparents. Fat red envelopes of photos developed at K-Mart all during my high school years were a reminder of my own past. I visited the contents of this drawer every time I came home from my life in faraway places because there was evidence of my father and his early courtship with my mother. There was even a photograph of me as a baby, in a lake, laughing. I love that one.

Once my mother rid herself of much of what had been her life raising the four of us girls on her own, both before and after my father left when I was 14 and my youngest sister was 3, this box was up for grabs. She must have known I wanted it and every single photograph in that drawer of the sideboard, which she sold at a garage sale for cheap. She dumped the contents into a packing box and kept it for me in the basement of her new house with her new husband.

Eight years later, when I too married and gained a house, the packing box of photographs and the slide box were the first things I took from that well-ordered basement where everything was shelved according to daughter, or date, just as tidy as the rows and rows of peaches and strawberries they froze in plastic baggies for their winter Grape Nuts breakfasts.

In my basement, the box sat waiting. It waited for my kids to get big enough to shake my foundation, big enough for me to need to get a handle on my childhood, which I sought to do through writing. The slide box became a compass of sorts. I’d grab a slide and peer at it with a flashlight or up against my desk lamp. It felt too consequential to invest in a slide viewer, or better yet, an Epson slide reader which converts these old images to a digital file that I can enlarge on my desktop and see details I never knew existed.

Now I have that.

How my father carried his cigarette in the outer corner of his mouth, smiling around it. My mother was so skinny. How most photographs of me as a baby don’t show me smiling, but with a rather surprised look on my round face. Well, I was smiling in the one I like best, that slide of baby me on a rock in Gilas Lake. I still smile in lakes.

I have digitized most of those images. Peered at the French woman and wondered where she is now. Does she think longingly about her American GI who worked for American Express during the war, who broke it off perhaps when he was dishonorably discharged for something he never mentioned? Does she dream of my father still? I wonder about her, belted skirt, bandeau top, the military parade they watched with gunfire that created gusts of smoke my father caught with his camera. A camera I never knew.

There is one slide of my father at a hunting camp, a bottle of Dawe’s Ale on the shelf above his head. He sits in a bed next to his buddy, who holds a lit cigarette between his toes as he reads, legs crossed in a figure four pose, orange hunting cap slung on his knee. In a grungy white t-shirt, the guy tucks a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey next to his chest with his elbow. My father in a striped pajama top sits beside the toe-smoking reader and strums a guitar, his head tipped. Again, something I never saw him do. The side table is littered with an ashtray, a wallet, and a deck of cards. This is an image I never could make out until I got the Epson, until my fingers where strong enough not to get pinched.

Share

Leave a comment

Submit your Object-ives essay

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Suzi Banks Baum is a protector of the imagination, a nurturer of attention. Entirely obsessed with marigolds, Banks Baum’s interdisciplinary work exists at the crossroads of literary and visual art. Her award-winning writing appears in Hypertext, The Dunes Review, The Good Life Review, Walloon Writers Review and the Guild of Book Workers Journal. Her mixed media work is included in Collage Your Life by Melanie Mowinski. Raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Suzi teaches book art and daily creative practice in her studio in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Learn more at suzibanksbaum.com and @suzibb on Insta.

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

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The Archive of Ordinary Lives” by

“Why I Still Keep My Mother’s Lanz Nightgown” by , What We Keep

“I Gave Away My Backpacks, Then Wept at Their Absence” by

“Rocks” by

“Her father hoarded. When he died, she inherited his house.” by Madeline Mitchell, USA Today

“WAGs Love Their Crocheted, Bedazzled N.B.A. Merch” by Alisha Haridasani Gupta, The New York Times

Things were not a thing in my house.

The emphasis was never on accumulating objects, but acquiring experiences. “Your house can burn down, everything can be taken from you,” my mother would say as she tugged my rambunctious hair into a ponytail. “But no one can steal your memories.” You would think I’d been raised by a wartime refugee, not a middle-class English teacher from San Antonio, Texas.

But from the time I could trace the topography of veins on my mother’s chestnut-brown hands, there was one object that transcended experience: a diamond ring whose shine was matched only by its size—2.36 carats. It is, as they say, a chonker. The ring is an octagonal cosmos of cuts and infinite angles. And it carries the weight of the women who’ve worn it through generations.

The story goes that my ancestors were minor royalty (my grandmother Gertrude got a kick out of saying she was descended from a German baron) before they were forced to flee, driven out by the mostly bloodless German Revolution preceding the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919. At least, this is what I’ve reconstructed based on family lore and the timeline of my maternal line’s immigration to America. Also, thank you Ancestry.com.

As my mother tells it, the family was tipped off by a “loyal servant” that a mob was gathering to ransack their home and, I’m assuming, do them physical harm. To escape, the women sewed jewels into secret pockets within the folds of their dresses and set out as if on a pleasant ride through the country. They never returned, heading instead for the coast, where they boarded a ship and sailed to America. The diamond ring is the last of this legacy, handed down from one woman to the next until, eventually, it came to me.

I feel the thick gold band with the tip of my thumb and think of my grandmother. Gertrude, or Trudy as she was called, lived through the Depression. Her mother died when she was 15, so she canned spinach at the Del Monte factory in Monterey, California to help feed her brothers. Yet she held onto this precious jewel that told her: You are still worth something.

I don’t know whose fingers carried this ring before my grandmother or how many women gazed into the blinding universe of its Old European cut. But I can feel them, sometimes. They are young, running through the woods on skinny legs, halos of unpinned hair glowing in sunlight. They are rough diamonds, raw and wild, until the world demands they be cleaved, girdled, polished, and inspected—the same process the rock on my finger went through to become something of value to the world.

Was my grandmother wearing this ring when, at 63, she picked up a gun and ended her own life? I don’t know. I do know she was in pain, both mentally and physically. I know she inherited a legacy that demanded resilience. I know each one of us is only so strong. And I know the weight of this ring rests more lightly on my hand than hers.

It was over dinner on my 40th birthday, more than a decade ago, when my mother passed the ring to me. Since then, it rarely leaves my hand. Some would save it for a special occasion, but I don’t believe it was carried this far and at such a cost to live its days in a small, dark box. No one’s going to put this baby in a corner. And, frankly, I need it. It’s the one object I feel naked without. My own personal ring of power.

My relationship with other jewelry? Strictly casual. Necklaces and earrings go AWOL on the regular, with barely a second thought or tear shed. Even my wedding ring is gone. But this ring remains well-kept and coveted until the time comes for me to pass it on.

When it does, my hope is that the next woman to wear it experiences less of the burden—and more of the beauty—than any who came before.

Leave a comment

Share

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

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

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

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Stuff I don’t want to own,” by

“Against Decluttering” by , Geek Out

“Decluttering Is How You Get Your Time Back” by , Marusya’s World

“Daughter surprises her dad with ‘prized possession’ he sold 30 years ago to help the family” by Heather Wake, Upworthy

I was raised by magazines. As a child, nothing beat the thrill of the day’s new mail. The glossy sheen of the latest issue gleaming atop a stack of bills and coupons that bared little meaning to my adolescent mind. I’d pore over “spot the difference” spreads in Highlights and collage bedroom walls with celebrity crush-laden pages of Seventeen. I could rattle off the names of dozens of defunct titles I adored, but one subscription outlasted them all: TV Guide. A fresh issue was like catnip to my as of then undiagnosed autistic mind. The magazine was a highly organized, perfectly structured manual that aligned itself with my hyperfixations on pop culture minutiae. I couldn’t get enough.

After all, this was the 90s cable heyday and channel surfing was an art I had no mastery of. I’d randomly stumble onto a Lifetime movie of the week, one already halfway over, without knowing its title, or when it began and when it was ending. Or I’d catch a Nick at Night rerun of Bewitched with a special guest star whose name would forever elude me. Not knowing was beyond inconvenient. It was a maddening, meltdown-worthy frustration, one that could lead to brain-bending rumination and skin-picking fury. One which could be rectified by referring to that life raft of a magazine, the almighty TV Guide.

The gridded schedules of shows spoke to my needs for not only structure and routine, but also expectations and predictability. To know not only the lineup, but the exact plotlines of NBC’s “Must-See TV” Thursday or ABC’s family-friendly TGIF was a balm. Would the week ahead have a Kimmy Gimbler-centric episode of Full House? Was I stuck with a rerun of Seinfeld? Who was the musical guest on SNL, on the off chance I could stay up til midnight that weekend? I took solace in finding the answers in those perfectly packaged pages. It was more than a reference guide. It was a road map.

The annual fall preview issue was a behemoth. Double the usual length, filled with picks and predictions for the television season ahead in an age when the fall held real meaning and significance to the cycle of a show. Laden with splashy art deco graphics and a colorful layout, it marked a time of transition in TV that coincided with the start of a new school year. A season symbolic of new starts, one that could lead to surprise hits and inevitable flops for both the networks and me.

How I envied the treatment those shows got. If only my fall could have a “preview” reassuring me that I’d ace chemistry, like Frasier sweeping the Emmys, or that fifth period lunch wouldn’t be a social disaster tantamount to ill-conceived, short lived Friends spin-off Joey. I craved the power of critical prediction only America’s leading entertainment publication could provide to soothe my anxious mind.

Decades later, several issues still remain on my bookshelf, surviving moves from college dorms, first apartments, and an eventual home of my own. Each one is a reminder that no matter where I end up, I’ll always have a pocket-sized piece of pop culture nostalgia to guide me on my way.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Jessica Gentile is a writer and librarian based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Esquire, among other publications.

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The “problem” of too many books” by , LIVING SMALL

“What an Heirloom Is For” by

“Take a picture. It’ll Last Longer.” by

“My Super Very Much Most Prized Possession” by , Super Very Much

Objects Quarterly Volume IX: Other people’s objects, litter assemblage, creative tools by , The Art of Noticing

First piece of art hung in new apartment (Note), , Room to Grow

“The Objects We Keep for Love” by Tammy LaGorce, The New York Times (via Objects Quarterly)

“I Tried the “Wheel of Chores,” and It’s the Smartest Decluttering Trick I’ve Ever Tried” by Lizzy Francis, Apartment Therapy

“Smartphones, Dumbphones, and Delusions of Platform-Building” by Maggie Mertens, Scratch

“Dmitri Young built a legendary card collection then sold it all — his tips for collectors” by Caleb Mezzy, The Athletic

Slippery Soap, a character from Blue’s Clues, still lives on the edge of my bathtub. He is smaller than he used to be, worn down from years of use, his lavender color faded and his edges rounded smooth. My son is college-aged now, but if I pick his figure up with wet hands, he still slides easily along the tub, as if motion is his natural state.

When my son was three, baths were hard. He was afraid of the tub, but he was even more upset by what came after. When the tips of his fingers wrinkled in the water, he panicked. He didn’t like how his fingertips looked. He didn’t like that his body changed without warning. Each bath ended in distress.

So I made up the Wrinkle People.

The Wrinkle People, I told him, only came out after a bath. They were shy and kind and only appeared for a short time. They lived in the wrinkles at the tips of his fingers and disappeared as soon as the skin smoothed out again. The only way to meet them was to get clean. If you waited quietly, they would come.

I kept my hands in the water while he bathed so the Wrinkle People would visit me too. At the end of each bath, I lifted my son from the water, wrapped him in a towel, and we waited together. When the wrinkles appeared, we touched the tips of our fingers together. I told him how lucky we were that the Wrinkle People had come for both of us, that they could feel connected, that they were part of our family too.

The problem was getting him into the tub in the first place. My son loved Blue’s Clues. He watched it closely, memorized it, acted out all the characters. Slippery Soap was his favorite. He would imitate him, shouting “Whoa!” when things slipped or fell. I noticed this, and I followed it.

I bought the little Blue’s Clues bath toys so Slippery Soap could come into the tub with him. Slippery Soap was how I got him into the water at all. We both knew Slippery Soap loved baths. I gave him a voice. Slippery Soap slid along the porcelain, shouting “Whoa!” when the water splashed. He needed company. He needed a friend. He knew about the Wrinkle People and could help us find them.

Once my son was in the water, the conversation began. My son talked to Slippery Soap. Slippery Soap talked back. “Whoa!” my son said. “Whoa!” Slippery Soap answered. I kept my hands in the water the entire time so the Wrinkle People would visit me too.

Baths stopped being a battle. Slippery Soap did his job quietly and well. The Wrinkle People came and went. My son grew older. The rituals changed.

Slippery Soap stayed.

Years passed. My son found new ways to move through the world. He learned how to stand on a stage, how to listen and respond, how to trust timing and instinct. He is now enrolled in a comedy improv B.A. program at Columbia College in Chicago. I don’t trace a straight line from Slippery Soap to where he is now, but I know the Wrinkle People belong to that story too.

And to tell you a secret, sometimes even after all these years, when I’m sitting in the tub, I pick up Slippery Soap and softly say, “Whoa,” just to remind myself of all that we’ve been through.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Listen to podcast Finders and Keepers

Nettie Reynolds is an essayist and playwright based in Chicago. Her work explores caregiving, family life, and the quiet rituals that shape how people learn to live with one another. She writes personal essays about attention, adaptation, and the ordinary objects that carry memory. Nettie is finishing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction through The Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.

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

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading about possessions:

Ode to a wax cherry gift by , AFTER/WORDS (Note)

“Your Kids Will Inherit a Beautiful Archive of a Childhood That Never Happened” by

“Five Ways I Remember My Mother” by , Bite-Sized Storytelling Boost

“Family Stuff” by , The Loneliest Places

“What I Really Want for Mother’s Day is a Tray” by , Our Amagansett House

“The Art of Gifting Thoughtfully” by , Folded Napkins

“I paid $1,000 to get my house under control” by Julie Kling, Business Insider

“The perfect shopping day in New York” by and , The Scumbler

“Isabel Allende and Her Mother Told Each Other (Almost) Everything” by Anna Martin, The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast

“Lost and Found in the Subway: Dentures Galore” by James Barron, The New York Times

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s true. Something visceral happens when we view a beautiful image. Something emotional, deep-seated, often physical, happens. It’s like being suddenly awestruck.

That is how I felt when I found two long, forgotten photographs of my mother, tucked inside a file box, buried for almost 70 years.

I’d gone to Sun City to help clear out her home when she died suddenly in 2015. Later, I was told she sat down after phoning a friend and, in a second, was gone. She didn’t suffer. For that, I am grateful.

My mother and I had a very difficult relationship my entire life. She was a demanding and critical parent, often verbally abusive. Growing up as an only child, she had been spoiled and fit all the key points of a narcissistic personality. She sometimes blamed her plight on her two young daughters. Her constant consumption of alcohol didn’t help matters any. After a binge, she often said the most disturbing things to us.

She once told me I was an ugly, scrawny infant at birth. WTF?

One night, on a summer break from college, after consuming staggering amounts of booze, she pointed her finger at me and said, “I know why you’re so f+++ked up. I left you home alone when you were a baby whenever I went to the laundromat.”

“Charming,” I retorted. “You’d have lost custody if done in this day and age.”

The night I was getting ready for my senior prom, she barged into the bathroom and started bullying me about my flat chest. She then said her body was ruined after my birth. Her sagging breasts were my fault.

Who says these things to a daughter?

So why couldn’t I part with the two professional photographs of this woman, which had been taken by a Des Moines Register newspaper photographer in the 1940s, that I discovered and hauled home to Long Island after her house was ready to sell?

Both photos were ruined, almost beyond repair: rolled up, riddled with cracks, rips, and age spots. Still, there she is, a young, lovely twenty-something posing for a local Des Moines, Iowa artist for extra money. The clippings pasted to the back were proof.

Sitting in an old cane chair, she’s draped in an exquisite, embroidered silk kimono, her thick black hair streaming down her back, a celestial beauty, looking somber while the artist works.

I was compelled to save them.

A new photo shop had opened in town, so I called to ask if they did digital photograph repair.

They did. I took them in for restoration with no concern about the cost.

A few weeks later, a shopkeeper delivered them to my home. The restoration was excellent, far beyond what I had imagined, without a single flaw, just perfect.

I quickly logged on to Amazon and ordered two 18" x 22" large black wooden frames complete with matting. They were the ideal complement to my mother’s black-and-white 1940’s photographs.

Everyone said I was a fool for having these ancient photos repaired, especially since the woman was no longer living, and what’s more, paying about $200 a piece for the restoration.

I disagreed. I needed to honor this woman who bore me, as difficult as she may have been. I simply needed documentation of what could have been before her life got in the way, before age, motherhood, and alcohol were her undoing.

Today, these two photographs of my mother now grace the walls of my apartment. I admire them every day.

Sometimes people ask, “Who is that lovely girl?”

“That’s my mother,” I say, “when she was young, hopeful, and full of promise.”

Despite our tangled past, I’m glad I own them. They depict a brief moment in time. They are a valued, tangible homage to the woman who gave me life.

Share

Leave a comment

Read our essay archives

Upcoming Open Secrets events

Dianne Moritz, a former teacher in Los Angeles, is a bestselling picture book author with five published books, hundreds of poems for kids, and poetry, essays and memoir pieces for adults. Her book, 1, 2, 3 By the Sea, has sold over 117,500 copies and is still selling after twelve years. She has joined the ranks of Chicken Soup authors, with her essay “The Late Bloomer,” in their book, Just Say Yes, released in July 2024. Follow Dianne on Facebook and Substack.

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

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading about possessions:

“My first crack at Swedish Death Cleaning” by , @ Home in the World

“Getting rid of what I love” by , Spark

“Shoplifters of the world, unite!” by Cleanup on Aisle Five author Ann Larson at

“A White A-4 Paper That Warms Me Like an Old Friend’s Hug” by at

“How my commonplace notebook has enriched my experience of reading” by , A reading life

“The baggage I carry” by , My Inner Monologue

“The Biscuit Tin Dossier” by