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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Flowers Against Darkness” by , Inhabitable Images

“Minimalism: A Love Story” by , Burned Haystack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“Collection: Hands” by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin cooks often.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, can I have a piece of gum?”

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“Upcycle Files” by , Preschool Maximalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s good to keep track of your expenses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“In Praise of Answered Prayers” by

“I will love this hallway” by ,

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

“Declutter Your Car” by , The Declutter Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“Toy Story” by , Shaved Meats, Piled High

“Have I Got Too Much Stuff?” by

“The Philosophy of Everyday Objects” by , The Memoirist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

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

“The Safety of Objects” by , The Hopeless Millennial

“THE DEATH-PUDDING CONTAINER” by , The Keepthings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“LOSING MY WATCH” by , What Comes Next?

“You Can’t Buy Memories” by

“What Dolls Taught Me About Being Human” by

“Downsizing” by , The Middler

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

In the first week of January, I receive a package in the mail. It’s from my mother, and my stomach twists when I pick up the hand-sized bubble parcel.

As is our custom, I video call her to open it. She is visibly nervous, which only confirms my suspicions about the belated Christmas gift.

I’ve always had a problem wearing jewelry. That is, I don’t wear it. Any piece, even if I bought it myself, fully enamored with it and filled with ambitions to change my ways, only lasts a few weeks at most before it’s finally set down and forgotten or relegated to the “special occasions” box.

As with anything about me, this isn’t entirely true. I have seven piercings, each with a semi-permanent, plain, black or steel installation. But when it comes to other common adornment locations—my neck, wrists, fingers, even ankles—they’re unoccupied more often than not. That hasn’t stopped my mother; the piercings give her hope.

I pull the palm-sized box out of the mailer, and she immediately launches into her explanation. It’s more or less the same explanation as always.

About every other year since I moved out at 17, I’ve gotten something like this: girly necklaces, elegant rings, and delicate anklets, all in bids for me to keep something sentimental on my body. She’s desperate to have this connection with me—something matching, something meaningful. I refused to get a matching tattoo of a stock image raven with her.

This year, she says again that she knows I don’t really wear jewelry, but she thinks this one is more my style. I suppose she’s right. It’s more androgynous and rugged than the last attempt, being a thin, braided black rope with an unassuming brushed silver and glass pendant. When I slide it on next to my watch, a thing I don’t really like to wear either, but need for practical reasons, it doesn’t look a bit out of place. In the pendant is a tiny photo; If I look through it just right (“or use your phone’s camera!” encourages the tiny card in the box), I can see a tiny picture of her and me inside. Well-practiced at it by now, I hold back a grimace. I don’t like that picture of us, and I don’t like the bracelet.

I do what I do every year this happens. Before we hang up, I thank her and I tell her I’ll wear it. Maybe this time I mean it. I’m 1,500 miles and an ocean away and she hasn’t managed to get past her anxiety onto a plane since I was in high school. I know where the desperation for connection is coming from.

Safe from the camera, I look at the shipping price printed by the post office larger than my address on the package. I’m back in school and unemployed. The shipping alone could have covered a week of groceries. Three months ago, everyone asked me what I wanted as a gift. I told her the same as I told everyone else: I just need cash right now. The grandmother I still talk to sent me money and wool socks. Even my father, notorious for insisting on unwanted gifts that demonstrate no understanding of his kids’ actual interests, sent me what I’d asked for along with my favorite candy. But my mother? My mother sent me the same gift I’ve never wanted any of the times she’s tried, no matter what it looked like.

In some squirmy part of my brain, someone points out that it’s a little different this year. For the first time, she can’t get in the car and stubbornly drive herself and her dog hundreds of miles to come see me on holidays. In some sharp, irritated part of my mind, something points out that this should make it easier not to wear her familiar present. She’d never be able to know.

Despite that logic, I wear it. I’ve been wearing it. The stupid, expensive thing. I hope it breaks. I hope I lose it in the frigid sea. I hope it snaps on a summer hike when I’m arm-deep in a berry bush. If she’s lucky, it’ll break but I won’t lose it and I’ll throw it in the keepsake box. If she’s not, it’ll be another piece of sentimental litter somewhere. Either way, she’ll buy me another one, and then I won’t want to wear that one. But maybe, by then, I’ll have a new excuse not to.

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R.R. Blackwood isn’t sure they exist in the real world, and they’re not sure they know how to write anything but research papers. That doesn’t keep them from trying, in desperate defiance of the STEM-centric world they’ve ended up in. Their personal writing was published once, when some adults were impressed by the poetic capacity of a child, but hadn’t dared to try again until they’d grown some skin that could take a few rejections without breaking out in hives. They have a potted plant collection, a caffeine addiction, and a hard-won, white-knuckle optimism about the future.

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:

“The Photo That Changed Me” by

“In case of fire, pack a life.” by

“Please Pick Up, We Found Your Scathing Letter” by , My Sandwich, My Choice

“I was one vintage Alfa Romeo away from being a completely different person” by

“Why You Still Have Nothing To Wear.” by , Consider This

“How many different places have you called home?” by , Settling

“I found a stranger’s journal. Its contents changed me.” by Liz McCaffery, The Boston Globe

I love my mother. We talk often. She celebrates my victories, listens to my whining, and only sometimes still worries about me—a nearly-forty-year-old woman—being out after dark.

That’s why I bought a sword. Sort of.

My mother is afraid of knives because of how one was used—literally—at her throat. She’s afraid of a lot of things because of the childhood she survived, with the kinds of abuse people don’t like sharing.

Parts of her split, but not all of her. And she grew claws. They show whenever she or her children are in danger, real or not. I now understand that, to someone who’s experienced trauma, even everyday distresses can activate those deep-rooted survival-honed parts of the brain. And children are great at causing everyday distresses. In the distance of one breath, my mother can be a gentle breeze and a hurricane. I learned to walk on eggshells to please her because life became safer when she was happy and obeyed.

Growing up, we never kept a sharp knife in the house. We owned one large chef’s knife that was dull as a spoon with dents on its spine from where my mother used a honing rod to whack it through vegetables rather than sharpen the blade.

So she wasn’t happy when I, her 13-year-old daughter, asked for the money to buy a mail-order sword from a medieval enthusiast catalogue. It was a sleek, historical replica of an Irish hand-and-a-half sword with a full tang (a metal shank continuing the blade through the handle), real leather grip, and durable spring steel. At the time, in the early 2000s, it cost nearly three hundred dollars—a lavish price for a kid who spent Christmas money before she got it.

At least I had the good sense to ask for a well-made, historical piece that would last a lifetime rather than an overpriced souvenir. Knowing how much I loved medieval history, I thought there was a chance she would be willing to gift me the blade. Of course, she wasn’t, but she invited me to use my own money. If I had any.

I saw her move and parried. She thought she could thwart my plans without being the villain because she didn’t believe I could save enough. So I did the logical thing: I opened a bank account and an Excel spreadsheet to track my savings.

For one year, I noted every five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bill handed to me. I rolled coins and returned pop cans. Every cent went into the spreadsheet. Any other item my mom said I’d need to purchase myself returned to the store shelf. I needed that sword. I needed it, I thought, because it was cool, beautiful, interesting. I needed it to help me pretend I was Queen Gwenivere, knighting Lancelot, or to pretend I was the knight herself. I needed it to cut a hole from where I was to anywhere else. I needed it.

At the time, I couldn’t conceive of a mother who could hurt me. I danced around the eye of the hurricane, thinking its raking claws were there to keep me safe while they mauled others. Sometimes I tested comments like, “Maybe the cashier didn’t deserve to be yelled at,” and her wide eyes turned to me. More often, she aimed her words at herself, like a gun to her head. I was right, she couldn’t hurt me.

I felt loved. She’d flatter herself with how smart and creative her daughter was, but when those words were tested, a new reality formed. Every ask to walk to a friend’s house involved a fight. She hyperventilated at the thought of her naive child walking alone past the woods. Her daughter couldn’t imagine the killers lurking in our family-friendly suburb. She’s weak. She can’t protect herself.

Eventually, the panic bled into me. Driving became a constant test of my likeliness to kill myself. Adulthood became a measure of the ways in which I was unprepared. What if it snowed? What if I lost my way? What if someone really was in the woods? How could I best life’s challenges? I’ll never know. I didn’t try.

* * *

In the quiet safety of my bedroom, I made up worlds where I wielded wands and lightsabers. A sword—a real-life sword could be the tool to keep me safe in her dangerous world. Swords made people strong. Dragonslayers carried them—knights, soldiers, underestimated hobbits.

After a year, my coffers were finally full. I mailed a check for the weapon’s value, plus shipping, handling, and tax. Two months later, my mother hovered, thin-lipped, by the doorway as I carefully unpackaged the long cardboard box. She couldn’t watch, but she couldn’t leave me unattended either.

I pulled the sword from an oiled bag and delicately wiped off the protective grease. It really was sharp. Lifting the blade, I learned I’d need to build muscle to hold it outright.

“Ay, Dios! Be careful!” My mother flinched. I smiled.

* * *

I don’t display it. Twenty-four years later, it sits in the corner of my office, where mostly only I see it. I never made time for a combat class or bought a plaque to hang it over the mantle.

Everyone who finds it marvels. Is that yours? Is it real? So cool. It is. But that’s not why I keep it. It’s a promise of who I want to be when I grow up—someone strong enough to cut their own way through the woods at the end of the street—someone strong enough to defy their mother. I don’t want her claws. I want to buy my own sword.

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Catherine Cornell writes poetry, essays, and unfinished fantasy novels. For “work” she edits mental health writing and fiction, formats magazine layouts, and entertains people experiencing cognitive decline. You can see some of her work in Dreamweaver Narratives Magazine. In a past career, she won awards for her theatre set designs. She currently owns the sword and three really cool daggers.

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:

“What’s Your Prized Possession?” by , A Need to Know Basis

“Hi, my name is Ed and I am a memory hoarder” by

“The mess behind the scenes” by , Spilling the “T” with Tiffany Dawn

“thrift month: secondhand shopping isn’t the problem, fast fashion is” by , unflattering

“Keepology” by

“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses” by Sam Anderson, The New York Times

“Groom Who Found Rare Pokémon Cards Able to Pay for Entire Wedding After Selling Them at Auction” by Charna Flam, People

My brother Paul and I navigated childhood for twelve years under the same roof, but in adolescence, our family unraveled and spun apart. We have travelled wildly different paths since then. Our infrequent conversations could be contained in a single day in which we failed to find common ground. Then the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus put a period on the possibility that we ever could. Paul’s death at sixty-four meant that we would never share an actual laugh, compare our children’s endearing eccentricities, commiserate about, well, anything from our father’s heavy drinking days to our lesbian mother’s contributions to women’s liberation.

I will never know his demons—forged out of some extreme notion of Christian good and evil—that led him to expel me, his lesbian sister, and our mother from his family pantheon. And he will never know mine—a murky stew of self-doubt and recriminations that I can never be good enough to deserve love, that people I love always leave.

Once, when we were both middle-aged parents, we briefly overlapped at our dying father’s house. We were cleaning up the apples that had fallen and were fermenting beneath a pair of heirloom Rhode Island Greenings who reliably birthed them year after year, their sharp, vinegary smell stinging our sinuses, sun glinting through the canopy and dappling the soupy blobs underneath like butter on an apple crisp. Every attempt to speak of something I thought safe—what kind of car did he want to buy? Did he do any fishing now that he lived on the Gulf Coast?—somehow always ended with Paul’s admonishments that we (I was never sure if he meant humanity in general, or Mom and me specifically) had been expelled from the Garden of Eden and that there was only one true path to redemption, which was to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our savior, a path I had not taken.

This was not a conversation; it was an impromptu hellfire and brimstone sermon delivered by my little brother more at me than to me; it was a repeat of the one he delivered at my mother’s deathbed a decade before. Where I saw nature’s bounty and the sacred cycle of life, he saw eternal damnation. There was no opening for conversation. I fell to shoveling up rotten apples in silence. As siblings, as members of a family, albeit a divorced and reconstituted set of families, we more closely resembled the family shrapnel than far-flung loved ones.

Words, in the end, failed us.

And yet. When we were teens and no longer living together, Paul took a shop class in school. At Christmas, one that required visits to two parental households in two states, Paul presented me with a beautiful chopping block: light and dark strips of maple and oak that he had expertly cut, sanded, and painstakingly pieced. The edges were rounded and the bottom was fitted with four rubber feet. I don’t remember what I gave him. It was our last Christmas together.

I have started every meal of my adult life on Paul’s cutting board: five decades, nine households, and an infinity of recipes. It is redolent with thousands of cloves of garlic. When I had in-laws, I had to remove bags of groceries and purses with nasty bottoms from it because it seemed to call incoming dinner guests to place such things upon it. It has that kind of magnetic charm.

Its once perfectly flat surface now features two deepening depressions where I have repeatedly pressed a blade into it in a relentless percussion of slicing, dicing, mincing, cubing, quartering, trimming, coring, and peeling. I can no longer roll out biscuits because the rolling pin cannot make contact with these deepening hollows.

When I learned Paul was on a ventilator and would not survive, I swept my hand over the gentle dips in the cutting board in a soothing motion. I thought about how, a half a century ago, he selected lengths of oak and maple 1x2 boards with intent. How he crafted them into this workhorse of a lifetime, one carefully measured cut after another.

I felt my brother speaking to me in the language of blade against woodgrain. A call and response. A cadence of cuts. A correspondence carved in wood, a Braille for siblings who could never see through to each other’s hearts.

Not long after Paul died, I took my knives to be sharpened and mentioned to the cutler that my cutting board was no longer a flat surface. As he wrote out my ticket, I chatted to fill the silence. “It’s hard to get a good cut.”

He offered to sand it smooth.

“No, no!” I replied instantly. “It’s a story.”

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Kris Kleindienst is a writer, queer elder, and bookseller. She has come recently to literary nonfiction after twenty-five years as a columnist for her local LGBTQIA+ newspaper and fifty-two years as the owner of Left Bank Books, served concurrently. She believes that objects, particularly ones made of organic materials, hold significant spiritual energy when we slow down enough to pay attention. The kitchen is her holy place. She is working on a family memoir and is always saying she will post more regularly on her 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 on possessions:

“I Figured Out Why I Love Tiny Houses So Much” by , Old Mom Things

“10 unusual ways to use the empty notebooks you keep buying” by

“Vintage Inspired Amp: part 1” by , Vic’s Amps

“Lena Dunham on the Retail That Raised Her” by , Shop Rat (run by )

Writing travel notes by

“Why young Americans are buying $200 notebooks from a store in Paris” by Megan Sauer, CNBC Make It

“I’m a Professional Thrift Shopper—These Are the Items I Wish People Would Stop Donating” by Ashley Poskin, Martha Stewart

It’s August, 1990, Indiana University. College classes start in one week. I’ve already noticed that my clothes are not quite right. They’re cute, but it’s as if I missed some internal memo about Rugbys, Doc Martens, and rainbow belts. I was able to secure the belt at the college head shop, but the other items remained way beyond my budget. Plus, where to shop? The Indiana University coeds—at least those who seemed comfortable in their skin—and I didn’t seem to be shopping at the same mall. They were shopping from consignment stores or catalogs, glossy promises of afternoon sailings and playing catch football with their extended family, or hiking deep into the woods in all iterations of fleece.

A day before classes started, I called my older-by-two-years cousin to ask what she wore on her first day at Ball State. She laughed, said she didn’t remember and that it wouldn’t matter. “Just wear a cute pair of denim shorts and a tank, and you’ll look cute.” God love her. That wasn’t helpful. My shorts were too long and not casually cut off the right way. They lacked fray, and they were white. My rainbow-striped espadrilles (to match the belt) weren’t the proper footwear for at least six miles of walking. By midday, I was so cold in the air-conditioned lecture halls that I longed for the embroidered IU sweatshirt I’d spotted in the bookstore.

I couldn’t ask for more money. Mom, Mr. Pell Grant, one scholarship, and I were barely paying for college. The last Target trip, prompted by a “I NEED A CUTE MIRROR AND SHOWER BUCKET” meltdown, had exhausted my budget.

Alas, a loophole. At the beginning of each semester, I’d get a refund from the Pell Grant for the money left over from my classes. I’d run out and immediately get the must-have of the moment. I distinctly remember walking from the bursar’s office to the shoe store for Birkenstocks. I was buying my college uniform.

That first semester of that first year, I got hold of a J. Crew catalog and ordered an anorak, in lake blue and The Same Rugby Everyone Wore. Strategic, as an anorak can be worn daily. It transmits both preppy and peppy. It matched my eyes. It covered up my Greek-letter-free sweatshirts. It was warm, but not too warm. As soon as I put it on, I felt like I fit in a bit more, and hid happily in it.

The consignment store was super close to my dorm (as was the mall, ironically). During Mom’s first visit, we walked down there and had the time of our lives. I bought my witchy skirts and oversized sweaters. I got a pair of vintage Levis. Lots of black. I was learning a different look from the Goth kids, but didn’t want to ape their vibe either. But flannel was most certainly a friend. Oversized flannel shirts, anorak tied around my waist, and a pair of leggings—here I come, Finite Math.

By the end of my first semester of college, I’d lost 10 pounds, four pairs of acid wash jeans, and everything with shoulder pads. I’d also lost any hope of securing the true uniform of fitting in: Greek letters on my clothes. I rushed sorority after sorority (22 in total!), wearing my mall-fancy clothes and looking around every Tudor-inspired living room, wondering how the hell I could afford to keep up with the Kappas. I clocked lots of J.Crew.

I kept wearing the anorak, but I let go of trying to look like a sorority girl. The one place I successfully fit in: The gyms: the HPER (The School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation) gym, the townie gym for fancier cardio machines and, when I could afford it, the uber-popular, mildly sadistic fitness studio for step class. I purchased the athleisure uniform of the day, a white V-neck Hanes shirt over a sports bra and Lycra shorts. Fitting in while working out was my secret sauce, until it cost me more than an entire J. Crew collection: my health and happiness.

In 2017, I checked myself into a residential eating disorder treatment center, at age 45, wearing an Athleta hoodie I got at a consignment store, plus joggers from Target. I was sporting my armor, again. A week later, I was sharing memories of an intermittently tear-filled and violent childhood with the nurse, the only woman close to my age in the house, a hilarious Black woman and Army vet. She looked at me, slobbering in my paper gown during weekly weigh-ins, and said: “Girl, you had me fooled. You walked in here, with your Lululemon and your cute lil sneakers, and I thought you had it so good.”

Recently, when Indiana University made it to the college football playoffs, the anorak was tied around my waist at the airport en route to Miami. Not red and white, but definitely my college colors. I wore it to the parking lot of Hard Rock stadium, where I tailgated with my college boyfriend and his friends, whom I’d last seen 29 years ago when we broke up after one very sad year living together in Chicago.

I’d taken a Xanax, a weed gummy, a knee brace, and an Uber to meet up with my old crew. What would we say to one another after all these years? Would they see how I’d recovered? Note that I was actually eating the crudités and salsa, or my actual ass peeking out of my cut-offs? We hugged, laughed at all the Botox, and compared medical procedures. One friend asked about my husband, a Syracuse grad, cheering IU at home with our dog. When the temperature dropped, I pulled on my anorak.

“That’s the jacket, isn’t it, Mandy?” my ex said, calling me the name of my youth, immediately recognizing both the old and new me. I no longer needed it for protection, but it sure felt good to be seen.

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Amanda Long is a nationally syndicated features writer and locally loved massage therapist who writes about what moves her, nostalgia, and her recovery from an eating disorder.

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:

“I Spent $2,000 on a Birthday Gift for My Boyfriend—His Face Fell When He Opened It” by , Newsweek

“I decluttered my dream and then this happened” by , The Intentional Home

“Picking Up the Pieces After Mom’s Deportation” by Andrea González-Ramírez, The Cut

“Suleika Jaouad’s Love Letter to a Two-Hundred-Year-Old Farmhouse” by , Garden & Gun

“I joined a decluttering challenge and got rid of 496 items in a month. I made a point to not throw anything in the trash.” as told to Lauren Finney Harden by Mesha Griffith, Business Insider

“How to Declutter Without Creating Waste—and Where Unwanted Items Should Really Go” by Rae Ford, Martha Stewart

“Maximalist Design Can Make It Harder to Sell. These Homeowners Don’t Care.” by Laura Hine, The Wall Street Journal

I don’t recall what possessed me to toss the T-shirt in the first place. Maybe it was a simple mistake, or the casualty of a chaotic move, or an attempt to reinvent myself as someone too sophisticated to cherish a concert souvenir bought with a sweaty handful of hard-earned five-dollar bills in 1994.

But at some point during my 30-plus-year love affair with the band Blur, I divested myself of the T-shirt I purchased the first time I saw them. It wasn’t because of a change of heart. If you asked any version of me between then and now—church camp Melissa, high school burnout Melissa, bitter bourbon-slurping Melissa, sanctimonious yogi Melissa, peace-seeking middle-aged Melissa—what my favorite band was, I would have said Blur without a second’s hesitation, every time.

The tee bore the iconic cover imagery from the album Parklife: two snarling greyhounds racing for the finish line, snapping jaws caged and eyeballs showing white, with all the U.S. tour dates listed on the back. The printing on the shirt never lost a certain chemical smell no matter how many times I washed it. In line with the hip-hop inflected aesthetics of the early 90s, I chose a size XXL despite my weedy teenaged frame.

I wore it hundreds of times, but my daytime T-shirt use dropped way off once I left my twenties behind, so I didn’t much feel the loss of the artifact until two summers ago. Blur played a huge reunion gig at Wembley Stadium in London in 2023, and there was no way I was going to miss it, transatlantic travel be damned. Blur never caught on in the U.S. the way they did in much of the rest of the world, so the show was going to be the first time I was ever in the company of so many other true believers—people who might have been impressed by a 30-year-old concert tee.

As I planned my trip to London and cursed whichever Melissa had pitched the treasure, I started poking around online. Cheap and obvious knockoffs could be found without too much effort. Deep in the bowels of Grailed, though, I found it. I was convinced that it wasn’t just a shirt from the tour, but that it was THE shirt—my shirt, somehow having traveled from a thrift store in Pennsylvania to the high-end resale closet of a Tokyo hypebeast. I swore I could smell the weird printing chemicals through the screen.

I had already shelled out for plane tickets to see a concert—in for a penny, et cetera. And what price nostalgia, after all? Well…$495, plus shipping. Even as a profligate superfan, I choked on that.

In my heart, though, I tried on what it would be like to be a person who owned a 30-year-old T-shirt that I’d initially purchased for $15 and then purchased again for a car payment. When I’m trying to talk myself into buying something beautiful but pricey, I run two scenarios: I picture myself enjoying the item for the rest of my life, and then I think about being on my deathbed, gasping, “If only I’d died with $150 more in my bank account!” And then I usually buy the boots.

But I don’t actually wear T-shirts outside of my house, so I gave up on the notion of taking on an extra freelance assignment or two to buy what would essentially be a single-use item. Spending all that money to fake authenticity would have been breathtakingly uncool—a grave insult to the very not-uncool teenager who first bought the shirt.

The show was magic. (I wore a hand-me-down Blondie tee with the sleeves ripped off, upon which no one remarked.) This, my fifth time seeing Blur in concert, was a high point of my life—and I’ve done some amazing stuff during my little blip of time here on this planet. It was a connection with 15-year-old Melissa, a kid who was getting ready to make a lot of poor decisions but, one night in the mid-90s, saw something exquisite and beautiful and knew it was real.

I bought two shirts at the Wembley gig, one with two roosters that looks hip and slightly mysterious, and one that has the tour dates but kind of looks like Chicago Cubs merch. If I’d had the Parklife T-shirt on at the London show, a few strangers might have commented. Would that have been worth almost as much as the flight there? And would it have mattered to anyone at all if it was a cheap knockoff, or a stupid-expensive re-buy, or the actual original shirt?

Luckily for me and my mediocre impulse control, the archival original seems to have sold. I can’t find it online anymore.

I’ve recently found some fakes—excuse me, “reprints”—on eBay that are much higher quality than the janky ones I was browsing before the 2023 show, including one with the U.S. tour dates on the back. I could even buy it in XXL for old times’ sake. I’d wear it around the house, and my millennial husband would roll his eyes and call it “Gen X cringe,” but the hit to our bottom line would be less than a mid-range brunch.

I think, though, I’m going to let it go. I regret throwing out the original, sure. But I don’t need a T-shirt to know with absolute certainty that my favorite band has always been the best band, and to be proud that I clocked that completely as a fifteen-year-old knucklehead.

Let me know if you see it back up on Grailed, though.

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Melissa Meinzer began her writing career in the alt-weekly world in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Find her online at melissameinzer on social platforms and on Substack at .

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:

“I think I am a soft hoarder.” by , Soft Crafts by Ella Emhoff

“Five Things I Regret Buying” by , The Life Edit with Shira Gill

“Stack Stories Vol. 01: A Study in Sentimental Things” by

“Stop Pinning. Start your own book of images” by , Popular

“How to create a more emotionally safe home with ADHD” by , The Dopamine Dispatch

I roll my eyes at horoscopes.

Tarot cards are for the gullible.

Ouija boards? Never.

A belief in the supernatural is simply not me. I believe in an evidence-based reality, not magic and mysticism. Yet there is one thing in my life experience I can’t rationally explain.

****

Already a budding introvert in kindergarten, I preferred watching from the periphery while the neighborhood kids played tag. They shrieked and ran; I favored observing junk mail distribution to mailboxes. Presents for everyone, my five-year-old brain interpreted. Brilliant! I waddled home and drew a stack of Crayola artwork. Taking my ten drawings, I marched right over to the first house. I stretched to lift the big metallic lip and threw one inside. The heavy thud made me blink. Most went to neighbors I knew, the leftover to the ones I didn’t.

Perhaps I was prematurely entrepreneurial. If so, it would only be a temporary trait. Nevertheless, I added my block-lettered name in case someone wanted to reward my efforts with candy. It therefore didn’t surprise me when, several hours later, my mother entered the living room, the phone receiver between her cocked shoulder and a questioning face. “Yes, Lotte, I can send her over.” I only slightly knew our Danish neighbors, but I slid off my chair and fearlessly walked to the Kristiansens’ house, eager for my sugary compensation.

I found Lotte waiting at the door with a silver necklace, the pendant in the shape of an “L.” She knelt to give it to me and said, “This was mine when I was your age. Now it’s yours, Sophie.” She must have noticed my puzzled face and added, “We will say it stands for Love.” I prized it immediately. It was the first thing I ever earned. The necklace wasn’t a gift; it was my first paycheck. I didn’t have the terminology then, but I felt empowered.

The first time I lost it was in junior high school. The necklace was part of my daily outfit except during PE, where all jewelry was banned. While changing into gym clothes, I tenderly placed it on the top tier of the rusty steel locker. This time, it slipped into the cracks of the non-flush sides, the metal clinking on its way down. I lunged to stop it, but it was too late. The necklace slithered into whatever abyss was below. Stunned, I overcame my fear of critters and tried to pry my fingers in the gap. Nothing. I was distraught. That necklace was my identity. Over the years, it had been everywhere I was. I couldn’t believe it was—poof!—gone.

I trudged into gym class. The teachers, by some uncanny miracle, began class by announcing that the 40-year-old locker room would be renovated starting next week. Was I on Candid Camera? I looked around, but the others had already started playing basketball. On Monday, I stood at the changing room construction site with my outstretched hand.

Over the following years, the “L” pendant developed a green shimmer on its edges, saying a thing or two about my teenage hygiene. It was also a good indicator that my beloved jewelry probably wasn’t sterling silver after all. But its value was never in the material; it was the reminder of my first sense of self-value.

The second time I lost it, I was a high school senior. Over spring break, I flew to visit family in South Carolina. Upon arrival at the gate, my aunt expressed relief I had finally given up on that horrible necklace. My hand flew to my chest, but it was empty. “It must’ve fallen off in flight.” I said in horror, panicked.

I dropped my bags and ran back against the exiting crowd. Reaching my seat, I patted down the cushions and cracks. Empty. I wedged myself in the leg area to get a better view of the floor. Nothing. I knew I had to disembark the plane; the stewardesses were coming over to usher me out. I passed row after row of trash, mainly discarded wrappers and bunched-up blankets. Then something eerie caught my eye. About ten rows up from my seat, I saw a gray-silver pile in the aisle. I jumped on it. Could it be? The pendant had taken a blow from the many people filing over it. Even the angle of the L had changed to from 3 to 4 o’clock. But it was back.

Home from college one spring, I took our labrador retriever to a school field after hours. I pulled out a tennis ball and chased Brandey back and forth across the vast acreage otherwise used for soccer games. Walking home, I felt the breeze was just a bit too cold and my neck an ounce too loose. I slowly put my hand to my thorax which confirmed the “L” was gone.

This time there would be no way I could find my jewelry, not in four acres of grass. Yet I couldn’t abandon my necklace or my hope. I simply had to try, even if there was no chance of a supernatural coincidence. I turned around, approaching the field on my knees and parting the first grassy tufts. This was a futile approach. I admitted defeat after 15 minutes. I had to accept that it was gone.

I stayed on the ground a bit longer, lacking the energy to get up. Brandey raced over with the ball in her mouth, expecting another round. “Sorry, girl,” I replied. “Let’s go home.” I took the slimy ball and patted my pockets for a tissue. Nothing in the outside pockets, but maybe the inside pocket. I dug deep.

My hands felt something hard in the shape of an “L.” I was whole again.

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Sophie Berghouse still has the old necklace and a new respect for the inexplicable. The meaning of “L” has expanded to luminous, lively, laudatory, lucky, and importantly, laughter as she launches herself into life. Apparently, she packed alliteration into her carry-on.

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 $2 Bowl With An 800-Year Paper Trail” by , Unfiltered & Fed

“Just wear the damn thing!” by , Slouching Towards Bethnal Green

“CYS #065: The perfect pair of earrings to wear with a navy sweater” by , Consider Yourself Cultured

“Hollywood woman decorates apartment with Oscars red carpet found in dumpster — and one winner now wants scraps for mementos” by Kathleen Perricone, Entertainment Weekly

“My dad made the biggest jewelled egg in the world. The obsession would destroy his marriage, family and fortune” by Serena Kutchinsky, The Guardian

“How to streamline your wardrobe this spring – including with the 90/90 decluttering method” by Sally Newall, Country Living