My mother died a year ago and such is the slow pace of probate, it’s only now that her estate is being released and my siblings and I are being called to collect what she left us. There we are, wandering through the house of our childhood, six floors of white stucco London packed with memories: the Babar and Celeste keyrings that sat on the playroom shelves, the nursery school paintings framed in the kitchen, the plastic photo cubes on top of the dining room cabinet with sides enough for all five of us.

I loved the blue glass architectural modal of revolving doors that was kept out of reach on the high glass shelves. I loved the kitchen table, a repurposed butcher’s block the bore the scars of knives falling. And what about the Corbusier chairs or Hitchens landscapes? The multitude of 18th century writing desks or ivory inlaid games table? The china dogs from our grandmother’s house that growled from the glass cabinet in the drawing room?

Chattels—the items chosen specifically by the dying for those who’ll carry on living—are singular in their message. I think you’ll love this necklace, says the surprise gift of the gold watch chain that used to belong to my mother’s father. Or This sculpture always reminded me of you says the machete of a mare and foal that once caught the sun on the windowsill of our weekend cottage. Or even, I know you always wanted this chair says the child’s velvet seat that took up a small corner of the landing.

What all chattels say, irrespective of value and meaning, is, When I was drawing up my last will and testament and sharing out my possessions, this is what I thought of when I thought of you. So, mum, wherever you are, a year gone and your homes emptied, what were you thinking when your eyes alighted on the two scariest paintings in your collection, and you decided they were for me? And why did you think I’d want them?

My mum’s departure was a fight to the death, socks in her fists to prevent her nails biting into the skin of her palms; she did not go gently. I sat by her bed in that last week, blessed and holy in its passing; she and I had reached a peaceful accord, whatever could not be discussed (and that was everything) dealt with between me and my therapist. She was leaving behind two houses packed to the gunnels with beautiful furniture, a great deal of it inherited down the long ancestral line of my dad who’d died 18 years earlier, and a gallery’s worth of art.

Both my parents were patrons of the arts, supporting students at two of the most prominent London art schools, City and Guilds and the Royal Academy, for decades, and our homes were filled with degree show work, some worth a great deal, others, not much at all, as well the pieces they’d invested in over the years and given them by friends. Of the many, many choices she could have made (Mum, I could have thrown a dart blindfold and hit something I loved,) she chose for me the two paintings I hated the most, and which had literally haunted my childhood. It’s almost funny.

Let me take you into them. Exhibit A: The Two Sisters (see above). It hung on the turn of the stairs in our London home, the stone treads providing the challenge of a leap and the banister something to swing off as I took the steps two at a time to get past their staring eyes. The sister in front (I made them sisters) holds her hand to her mouth while her gaze is fixed on the viewer. Her side-eye glance speaks of being caught mid-sentence saying something she mustn’t, which is both apt and ironic given the fine mist of Do Not Speak which drenched our home.

Does she know that another woman stands behind her beyond the window? Is that expressionless and faded other a version of the sister in the foreground, her shadow self, her actual flesh and blood, or just some identikit stalker who haunts her? Are they in cahoots? Does foreground woman even know that background woman is there? And why is she wearing my mother’s dress?

All this and more I would block out of my thinking on the multitude of times I took the stairs, going up worse than going down as at least when descending this final flight, the swing of my arm on the banister turned my back on the ghost figures. Did my mum know I hated this painting? Had I mentioned it, and in her latterly muddled thinking, she’d confused horror with love?

All things are possible, including a deep dark subconscious desire to remain vaguely unaware of who I was. The walls of my mother’s denial were thick. She lived in rooms allocated to prevent truth seeping in and ruining careful constructions. I, who have spent my professional literary life dismantling those walls, was the one person who did speak. Maybe this was a message. But had she known me at all, she would have known it would only drive me to speak more.

Exhibit B: Owl Steals Baby. Where do I begin? A huge, bird-like creature swoops upon a frightened woman, intent on whisking her child away. The creature is without emotion. The woman attempts to shield the child from the claws approaching, her expression hunted, sorrowful, exhausted and yet knowing. She doesn’t look surprised. She looks as if this cat and mouse (owl and baby) threat has been going on for a while; as if the creature has swooped at her across hill and plain, tormenting her again and again as she runs.

And what’s the deal with the church? Is the artist making a statement about God? Was my mother? Was this her way of telling me she loved me or another amusing attempt to scare the shit out of me? I don’t remember where the painting hung, but I can tell you, mum, that it is in my top ten list of Least Wanted Paintings Ever.

Shall we put the messages together? Do Not Speak + I Tried to Protect You, and now we’re getting somewhere. Granted, I’m making this up; I have no idea what she was thinking when her red pen hovered over the photocopied list of chattels and with shaky hand, she wrote Ellie next to these two disasters. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe she’d entirely lost her mind. It’s possible she was bored or tired and just wanted to get it over with. But pulling the thread of intent is more interesting, so let’s do that.

I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse; the perpetrator, a lodger, the fact something my mother and I never discussed. Or even acknowledged. My mother was a great one for hints and looks and cryptic asides, usually with the aid of some literary reference. You know what Pepys would have said in response to refusing a plate of spinach. No, mum, I don’t know what Samuel Pepys would have said, and I still don’t like spinach. Or Montaigne delivered with raised eyebrows and a knowing glance at no one in particular because no one knew what she was talking about.

So given that light, The Two Sisters and Owl Steals Baby are right in keeping. Here you are, darling; in my death I deliver another two cryptic crossword clues for you to figure out and decide that I loved you, which I know she did, and that I tried to protect you, which I know she didn’t. As if the entire thing was a Sunday morning puzzle, and not a life-ruining box of complex PTSD that I have had to unpack and made sense of. It’s hard not to feel that she didn’t care. It’s easy to surmise that her complex desire to stay in the dark trumped everything. I know that throughout almost all of my 54 years with her, she neither saw nor heard me, and these two paintings sum that up. But luckily for both of us, her legacy of message wasn’t the end.

The day before she died, I was sitting by her bed as usual. She’d entered the no-speaks era of leaving: eyes closed, breathing feint and erratic, nails becoming blue, life dancing away and only a pulse in her neck to show for it. With a suddenness that made me jump, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me, sat up, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the forehead, drew back, looked me in the eyes again, kissed me again and just as suddenly was gone, returned to the no-man’s-land of corridors and tunnels and maybe a light at the end of it.

Mouth open, jaw slack, breathing erratic and feint once more; had it happened? But every pulse of my nervous system said that it had; my mother had seen me. She’d already chosen her chattels, already with shaky hand signed my name beside scary paintings 1 and 2, too late to change what I didn’t know was coming.

But does it matter now? Not really. Not in the coming months when her will was read and our email inboxes became choked with documents of material message. In her closing hours my mother discovered one more thing she owned: the ability to see, to recognize, to acknowledge the person before her, and this split-second awareness she gave to me. It’s all a child ever wants from a parent; it is the most valuable of gifts. It throws all else into shadow.

In the year that’s passed, I’ve walked about our childhood homes, free to put a sticky label on things I want irrespective of her choosing, but I’ve found I want very little. The Babar and Celeste key rings. My nursery painting. The kitchen table’s too big for my kitchen. My niece will give a home to the Corbusier chairs. And the paintings? As I said, no thanks, mum. Joke or message, you can keep them.

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Eleanor Anstruther was educated at Westminster School, but dropped out of university, to travel the world where she was lost and found for twelve years. When she inherited a farm in southern England, she set up a commune and began to write. Her debut, A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books), was a finalist for the Desmond Eliot Prize & Not The Booker. Fallout (Empress Editions), a punk-hearted coming of age set at the iconic women's protest camp of Greenham Common in 1980s England, will explode into the world April 21st. Pre-order now. She now lives not quietly at all between London, Surrey, and the south of France. Find her on Substack at The Literary Obsessive.

I pulled open the hotel blackout curtains to discover a swirl of snowflakes. The storm had begun earlier than predicted and I could see that the upper parking lot was already covered with at least an inch of snow. I’d been lazily flipping channels in my pajamas for the previous hour, but, seeing this, I quickly got dressed and started stuffing clothes randomly into my roller suitcase and into my hanging bag. I needed to get on the road immediately. The drive from Lake Placid, New York to Manhattan was over five hours, even on a clear day.

Were my new shoes facing in opposite directions? Was one of them on its side? I knew they were kicked off with exhaustion the night before. Maybe one had spent the night by the TV while the other landed under the desk. I’d ponder this configuration for several days. Square-toed and stylish, I’d purchased them expressly for this work trip, spending a bit more than I should have and trying to justify them as an investment. They were an early-career attempt, I can admit, to put my best foot forward. I was 29 years old and working hard to become a full-fledged adult.

Though I’d wanted to splurge on room service that last night, I didn’t let myself. Instead, I’d peeled an orange from breakfast that looked far better than it tasted, and ate the rest of the mixed nuts I’d been snacking on all week. Then I’d fallen into the deep sleep of someone on the other side of a stressful event. I was a figure skating coach who’d been trying to make a good impression, to prove to myself and others that I was capable of shepherding teenagers and their families through a rigorous sport. But my athletes hadn’t placed as well in this competition as they would have liked. They were disappointed and so was I. I didn’t know if they were disappointed in me, as their coach, but I was certainly blaming myself.

Even though I’d been a competitor for many years, it was difficult to understand the judges’ scores, which have always been a bit mysterious and highly subjective, despite the numerical underpinnings. It was my responsibility, on this side of the situation, to interpret the results and help them improve. I was making my best attempt, but it felt quite possible I wasn’t cut out for this profession. Some reassessing and regrouping had to be done; I just needed to get home first.

The glass door leading out to the parking lot was at the end of the hallway at the back of the building. I paused, realizing I couldn’t get both pieces of my luggage across the slippery lot. I decided to leave my small rolling suitcase right by the glass door and come back for it.

I swished my sneakers across the concrete like the skater I once was and swung my big, folded-over hanging bag into the back seat. I turned the car on to warm it up and get the defrost blowing. Then I sneaker-skated back across the lot and opened the glass door.

My rolling luggage wasn’t there.

I jogged down the hall. Maybe someone saw it sitting there and tucked it away for me somewhere. I’d been outside only a minute, maybe 50 seconds. There were no guests and no staff members in sight. No housekeeping carts, no room doors propped open.

I remembered that my car was currently running with keys in it. If my luggage was just stolen, I didn’t need my car to be stolen as well. I ran back out, less gracefully this time, now slipping.

After I turned the car off, I raced to the front desk to report what happened and to see if anyone had turned my luggage in. While they called housekeeping, I glanced toward the street where the snow was accumulating. I didn’t have the money to get stuck here and stay another night. I was daunted by the sum already on my credit card. I wouldn’t be able to pay off what was on there unless I figured out how to get more clients. This prospect felt unlikely given the competition results.

Though I didn’t want to, I had to leave the hotel without my luggage. Surely it was somewhere on the premises, but I couldn’t stick around any longer to pursue it further. Yes, yes, they assured me at the desk, they’d call if the bag turned up.

They’re just clothes, I told myself as I cleared off the rear window with my forearm. They’re just things, I told myself as I put my key in the ignition. Of course, in order to appear professional that week, they were my nicest clothes. I’d rushed my packing after I noticed the snow, so I had no idea what ended up in that missing bag and what was in the one I still had.

Out on the highway, the wind picked up. Engorged snowflakes flew sideways toward the windshield. It was like driving through a tunnel of white streaks. This was now a full-on blizzard. I clicked my wipers to maximum and sat with my back extra straight, tension hardening like cement in my shoulders. I knew I shouldn’t be driving with visibility so low, without being able to see what was ahead. I wanted to pull over, but I didn’t want to get stuck then freeze to death. I wanted to find a hotel, but I couldn’t put any more money on my credit card and I wasn’t seeing any signs for any hotels anyway. I wanted to call my mom—she’d know what to do—but I couldn’t take my hands off the wheel to dial the numbers.

I focused through tears on the tire tracks made by the car in front of me, imagining that this driver was guiding me forward. We were in this together. In the squall, I cringed while imagining someone else: a person, whoever it may be, pulling my dirty socks and underwear from that suitcase. “I’m an idiot!” I said aloud, clenching my fingers tighter around the wheel. I’d heard the announcements in airports many times: Do not leave your bags unattended. Why would I do that, even for a short time? How could I be so foolish? So irresponsible? This was a stupid mistake on top of a bad week, serving as further proof of my incompetence.

The snow turned to slush as I got closer to New York City. I lugged that hanging bag up five floors into my tiny apartment. Though I was exhausted, I unzipped it to take inventory of what I had left. I still had my striped dress and my blazer. One of my favorite sweaters was gone, along with a polka dot button-down I’d had for a long time. Also not there: a wool skirt, the battered copy of Middlesex I’d been reading, a scarf my mother had given me for Christmas, and more items I couldn’t immediately recall. Yes, they were just things, but I felt vaguely violated anyway. There was now a weird hole in my wardrobe.

Would any of my clothes even fit the person who now had them, or were my belongings already tossed in a dumpster? Maybe someone just needed a suitcase. Maybe they thought there’d be some jewelry or other valuables in there.

I dug around in the zipper compartment and found one of my new square-toed shoes. But I didn’t find the other one. I dropped the shoe on the floor beside my futon. No reason to put it in the closet if it didn’t have its pair. I didn’t want to just toss it in the garbage either. I looked down at it, feeling sorry for this inanimate object, and myself. I didn’t know who’d taken my bag. I didn’t know if I was going to get it back. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to course-correct my career. My existence seemed riddled with unknowns.

Suddenly, something gurgled up within me. All the tension of that drive and the confusion around the bag started to release into the room, almost like a mist. The missing items started to feel inconsequential in comparison to my anxiety about work and the bigger things I had to figure out. The fact that the separated shoes weren’t doing either of us any good now seemed more ridiculous than anything else. “Enjoy my dirty underwear and my one shoe!” I cackled, with no one in earshot.

A few weeks later, when it was clear that the hotel wasn’t going to call with news, and that the mystery was going to remain unsolved, I finally threw out the shoe. A few months after that, I turned 30. In the following years, I learned that a lot of excellent things can occur in life and a lot of horrible things, too, far worse than a missing suitcase. I realized that we often don’t know how a given event happened, or why, and we may never find out.

Nonetheless, I managed to grow professionally and personally and continued to put my best foot forward. I coached many athletes to outcomes more positive than we’d experienced on that trip. Since that rushed moment in that hotel hallway, I’ve of course made many other mistakes, but there’s one thing I’ve never done again: I’ve never let a bag out of my sight, even for a second.

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Jocelyn Jane Cox’s book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice (Vine Leaves Press 9/30/2025) explores motherhood, sports participation, and caregiving. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, Good Men Project, WIRED, The Offing, The Linden Review, Cleaver, Litro Magazine, Penn Review, and Colorado Review. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and now lives with her son and husband in Nyack, NY. More information at www.jocelynjanecox.com and on her Instagram (jocelynjanecoxwriter).

If you tell people that you’re going an entire year without buying a single stitch of clothing, if they care at all they are generally some combination of skeptical and impressed. I know this because during the 12 months I recently spent abstaining, I missed few opportunities to interject my undertaking into conversation. This was partly to establish some accountability, but mostly to brag.

I knew it would be hard and I was more worried than I care to admit about my underpants supply. I figured if I could do it, though, my strengthened resolve would stick with me even beyond the year. Maybe it would be a hard reset on the buying habits that had been making me feel so queasy and out of control.

My big, beautiful internet is full of cats and first-day-of-school pictures of my great-nephew and weirdly satisfying videos of pet lizards shedding their skins. Yours is different, but you love it too. The price of admission to this warm bath of delectable content is merciless thrall to a mighty algorithm to which we voluntarily bare our souls, allowing every click and lingering gaze to be monitored and monetized. We teach it what we love and what we fear. Armed with this insight, it manufactures a sense of lack specifically tailored to our unique combination of insecurities. Then it presents us with a convenient purchasing opportunity in the exact size and shape of that lack, a button for our little rat paws to smash that sends a fleeting hit of dopamine straight to our grey matter.

We know, intellectually, that it won’t work, that the shapeless, formless want won’t ever be sated. “Enough” is fiction, and all this endless insurmountable longing has been painstakingly engineered by our technocratic overlords.

Maybe your algorithmically assigned fetish objects are woodworking tools or candy-colored insulated tumblers or expensive skincare products. Mine has always been clothing. I genuinely love apparel as craft, art, and a means of self-expression, but it’s not a simple or clean love. I cloak myself in a loud, high-femme style in the hopes that I will one day achieve “pretty” sufficient to allow me to take up space in the world without some version of permission that will never come. I’m convinced on, like, a cellular level that there exists a dress or a pair of shoes that, the moment I buy it, will render me so perfectly lovely that I emerge from the carapace of self-loathing I’ve built up over the decades I’ve spent marinating in mass media and the male gaze.

Hook. Line. Sinker. I know better. I do.

The environmental degradation and human misery associated with the fashion industry is far from a secret, but the wretchedness of it all is neatly elided for the consumer. After a one-thought, one-click purchase, a three-dollar designer knockoff blouse from a fast-fashion company travels across an ocean from a Chinese sweatshop to an American doorstep, dissolves after two washes, and then gets landfilled or “donated,” which means another trip across an ocean to get dumped onto a once-beautiful beach in Ghana. The mental gymnastics required to not see any of that journey beyond the ’fit pics ought to be staggering, but the experience is rendered sterile and seamless for the buyer.

I don’t participate in fast fashion, and I know there’s an element of privilege at play in that choice. For most of my life I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to buy quality clothes and take excellent care of them. There are articles of clothing currently in my rotation that I bought during the Clinton administration, but excess still finds me. I own ten pairs of dapper oxford shoes and a half-dozen fitted grey wool sweaters, which is a plainly excessive collection for someone with just the two feet and the one torso.

So, an experiment. A challenge. I decided I would go birthday to birthday without buying—no clothes, no exceptions. Perimenopausal chaos started right on time for me, so I knew going from age 45 to 46 without buying a single pair of drawers might be a tall order. I decided not to be an underpants martyr, but I hoped to avoid activating my one allowed exemption. I stocked up, blew out my candles, and braced myself.

Dressing for a year with no novel options led me to recombine hardworking favorites in new ways, some of which were fabulous and some of which were not. I have done a C minus job of darning a few holey socks, which is not impressive but not a failure, either. A fifteen-year-old grey cardigan-style Yohji Yamamoto dress with demolished elbows is back in action after hours of painstaking and occasionally painful sashiko patching—a Japanese style of visible mending where countless tiny stitches affix patches over damaged fabric. I conquered a few stains I thought were permanent. I was vividly reminded of why certain garments stay in the dismal dark at the back of my closet. I learned that I have so much more than enough, and that almost none of my buying is in response to genuine need.

The main effect of cocaine, I ‘ve been told, is a profound and immediate desire for more cocaine. Even if you’ve never done so much as a bump, though, I’m going to guess that you know about want on want on want, a never-ending narcotic scroll through empty and unslakable longing that replicates itself forever. Dating apps, online pornography, streaming services—all these marvels of technology leave us ever thirstier, never quenched. There’s always a better option just a click away, and perhaps this one will turn out to be the one that provides the elusive perfect fit.

Spoiler alert: It will not.

We live in an environment that nurtures greed, a sludge of unmet and unmeetable desire created and stewarded by men who have spun our sad longings into galactic wealth for themselves. That feeling of bottomless lack is exactly what these new-world titans want for you, and it dovetails beautifully with the effortless opportunities for compulsive consumption with which they have surrounded us.

But I did it. I resisted the siren song for an entire year. Sometimes it was torture, like when I watched a criminally underpriced Dries van Noten dress get snatched up quick on Poshmark, never to appear again. It didn’t take too long for the volume to turn way down, and for not-buying to become automatic.

Right after the year was up, the immaculately curated vintage shop in my neighborhood was having a big sale. It seemed like the perfect way to emerge from my self-imposed period of asceticism—more sustainable and certainly hipper than tossing down my zero-balance Nordstrom card. I looked through their entire stock and tried on a shirt, a skirt, and three dresses, but I couldn’t pull the trigger on anything. I’d given myself permission to go utterly apeshit, and nothing seemed worth taking home.

That failed sortie gave me hope that I had uncooked my brain, at least a little bit. But that was months ago. My algorithm is relentless again. It has noticed that I’ve been giving precious eyeball nanoseconds to well-crafted cotton shirtdresses and high-end lingerie. Oh, you like that signet ring with Medusa on it, do you? How about these cashmere socks? Won’t they make you feel like less of a middle-aged punchline with a burgeoning spare tire? What if it’s 15 percent off? Hey, take another look. Take another look. Another. Another.

I’m repulsed by how much I’ve bought since my birthday. All told it’s not that much but, other than a pair of replacement running shoes, I needed precisely none of it. The circus was right there all along, just waiting for me to look at it again.

Nothing I learned in my year away from retail was particularly groundbreaking. The Buddhist tradition has been pretty clear for millennia that bottomless desire is at the root of most forms of suffering. I didn’t transcend anything so much as I muscled through, but for 376 days I yanked a tiny bit of power back from our lust-farming overlords. It was barely enough to be symbolic, but it was more than nothing—and to me, that was worth missing out on any number of Biggest Sales Ever.

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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 @meinzermelissa.

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, I found myself having lived in three different countries, with nearly a dozen different mailing addresses in just a few short years. The bulk of my belongings, though, remained in my parents’ home, tucked away in a suburban town. I only kept the necessities with me—living out of suitcases, backpacks, duffel bags, and totes—sharing clothes with friends when I found myself unprepared for bad weather or special events. When I made it home for the holidays or in the summers, I’d declutter a bit at a time, feeling emotionally detached from the things there, and focused on swapping out seasonal clothes to suit the next leg of my travels. I certainly felt unattached, and when I looked around, my environment reflected that approach, so I called myself a minimalist throughout my travels.

When I went off to Canada looking for work, I reasoned that I could survive the Toronto winter with only one pair of shoes (my signature sky-high platform boots, of course), and one all-purpose coat for any and all occasions. I lived in black, each shirt matching with each pant, and a season’s worth of clothes all fitting in a slim carry-on, agnostic to the breadth of situations that awaited me. Yet if asked about the thousands of voice memos cluttering my iPhone’s storage space, I was entirely unwilling to part with even one.

I left for Greece, where I briefly lived to support an aging relative, with a single modest suitcase and my threadbare backpack, despite the months I knew I’d spend exploring, cleaning, learning, playing, working. Fortunately, I also had over 10 gigabytes of saved text messages amassed over a decade to keep me company. Did I ever go back and read through those conversations from another life? Certainly not. On some level, I knew I never would. But the compulsion to gather and store fragments of days long gone remained strong—far stronger than my need for physical possessions—and I found myself unable to press delete.

This era of transience ushered me toward a minimalist facade that was truly ignorant of the mountains of stuff I had amassed over the years: my digital “belongings.” In those days, I also couch-surfed often. In the homes of gracious friends, semi-estranged aunties, and sordid summer flings, I saw ways of living all across the spectrum. There were messy sentimentalists with trinkets strewn all over, tidy young professionals in sterile little spaces, and every sense of style in between. Sometimes the bulk of their belongings were tucked away in closets, sometimes it was more akin to an organized chaos. Sometimes I even felt that the few contents of my bag might be a disturbance to their stuff-less existence. In the case of one woman who seemed so neat and tidy, I was afraid to unpack a single item, lest I bring a sense of lived-in-ness to the seemingly sacred minimalism of her apartment.

But for every single living space I became privy to, I saw another side too, one that seemed consistent no matter the aesthetic, no matter the tax bracket, no matter the material sensibilities of the person it belonged to. The universe contained in electronic devices was always expansive and rich. The tidy woman lived on her laptop: a compact MacBook that, upon startup, revealed a veritable circus of shortcuts, documents, photographs, notes-to-self all contained within her cluttered desktop. Those neat, self-proclaimed minimalists scrolled through endless camera rolls to show off hundreds upon hundreds of images snapped in Prague or the backyard.

Good friends of mine all bonded over the wealth of nonsensical old entries in their notes apps, going back years. Gigabytes of data stacked up, in documents, downloads, and drives. I had my hair cut by a woman who told me she hangs no art on her apartment walls because she likes her space to feel “clean.” She receives a message and below the dozen notifications that have piled up, the most extravagantly-colored illustration springs to life on her screen’s background. I imagine she has dozens that change out like a slideshow, one after the other to decorate the space where she spends most of her time.

Unlike clothes, books, or furniture, data is forever. It can be preserved; it’s seemingly eternal, yet far more malleable. I considered myself neither a hoarder nor a minimalist—always sporting a healthy fear of the spatial commitment that having a lot of stuff seemed to impose, while still appreciating gadgets and mementos too much to eliminate them from my life.

In the digital realm, though, I’m certainly a collector in every sense of the word. And in recent years, I’ve learned that you probably are too. My laptop is a treasure trove of all the musings and memories that I’ve accrued from work, school, and play. I have meticulously organized my Google Drive into color-coded categories, considering the “stuff” there to be far more integral to my personality and life than most of my real, physical belongings. And from glimpses into the digital lives of others, I’m pretty sure we’re all headed deeper into a future that looks just like this.

Gone are the days of limits on your virtual “stuff.” Instead of flipping through a fifty-page phone book and replacing old entries on the finite pages with recent ones, I press plus and my infinite Rolodex gets a plus-one. The number of contacts in my phone for people whose names I can’t even place is nearly in the triple digits. It’s easy to keep those numbers “just in case” when my capacity for them seems unending. Even the most minimalistic personalities in my life have inched toward an expanded idea of what makes “stuff” essential; we don’t feel the weight of our things like we did when they filled bins and boxes. I found myself wondering, when every photograph is digitized, every document scanned, and every last letter archived, can any of us really consider ourselves minimalists?

As I emerged from the phase of wayfaring and sought to settle down with a long-term job and a single place of residence, I reconsidered the evidence of the life I had lived. I could certainly keep dozens of virtual tickets and pop-ups nestled in my Apple Wallet. I could keep my email registered to hundreds of mailing lists and loyalty cards, keep the messages exchanged with exes, professors, and pen pals from eons ago. I could even keep the hundreds of meticulously crafted playlists that I had accrued over years and years. Unlike ticket stubs, boxes of letters, and eight-track mixtapes, though, it was almost out of sight, out of mind.

I had already filled my life to the brim with invisible clutter. I couldn’t stick these virtual train stubs in a scrapbook. Which trip were they from, anyway? I feared losing access to my highly-curated Spotify account, yet at any given time I was only listening to the three or four most recent playlists I’d made, and there were dozens I’d likely never play again.

My mess was tucked away in my pocket, but it was there, always; it had unbelievable power over me and my life. As I approached a new era of living, I grappled with why I couldn’t bear to part with digital artifacts when it had been so easy for me to go on without my physical ones. That old question about what I’d grab when running out of a burning building had lost its edge.

So, one by one, I reevaluated my needs. I wanted to get to the bottom of what served me rather than indiscriminately acquiring more and more e-clutter with each passing day. I feared that at the rate I’d accelerated to, I’d have terabytes of digital possessions by the time I hit thirty. It started with purging text chains that were nearly a decade long. One with my childhood best friend was over seven gigabytes on its own, and we were still of the generation that didn’t have access to cell phones until our teen years. Nostalgia sinks its teeth in deeply, though, and I couldn’t bring myself to delete the documents and notes we’d shared on late-night sleepovers in our hometown.

The act of culling in the virtual world was antithetical to the ritualistic feeling of clearing out my physical space. Back in my childhood home, I had a yearly practice of cleaning out my closet—selling dresses if they had the tags on, donating gently-used coats to the local church, feeling lighter knowing I’d given new life to that which weighed me down.

This culling was entirely different. My virtual clutter had value to me, and me alone. In this arena, deletion was a singular moment, the click of a button which quite literally erased any given item’s existence. There was no second life to be had. The community center always hosted clothing swaps, book swaps, mug swaps, but no data swaps! No one wanted my stuff, so I had to make the choice to either continue accruing it or just let it vanish. I pressed delete, and was left feeling ambiguous, if a little lighter. A little less tethered to my devices. A little more free.

Now, the next great hurdle of my digital collections will be my archive of voice memos. I remember recording my grandmother telling stories of her village before she passed, but in going back to listen, all I’ve found is notes to self, grocery lists, and recordings of concerts that I can’t even place.

The real problem is how few of the documents have been labelled with titles or notes. With almost 40 hours (22 gigabytes!) of recordings to sort through, I’m taking on that project one piece of media at a time, maintaining the minimalist mentality as much as I can. It’s become so easy to CTRL+S everything, yet my cyber archives grow faster than ever. I suppose taping fragments of my daily life has always seemed like a perfect way to capture whatever’s important at that moment in time. I’ve begun to see clearly how that endless capacity for storage had me carried away; doesn’t every good moment of life feel important? When those mementos can be made constantly (in recordings, photographs, or otherwise), then they blur together, none of them retaining their importance.

The events of life unfold to be lived, not memorialized. So, as I move forward into a world where the capacity for e-clutter is rapidly expanding, I’ve started to think twice before holding onto so many digital souvenirs. I’d rather live life once, through my eyes, than a million times played back on screens.

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Catherine Economopoulos is a multidisciplinary creative from Greece, who can usually be found in Athens, Chicago, or Toronto. On hiatus from the wonderful world of academia, she spends her time working, writing, reading, making, conversing. More work can be found at economopoulos.net.

At a summer barbecue in 2004, a friend from the library where I worked stood by my fireplace, scanning the framed photos on the mantle. Her gaze settled on a floral box about the size of a tea tin.

With a playful nudge, I bumped her shoulder and asked, “Do you want to pet my cat?”

When I picked up the box labeled “Orville” and held it out to her, she flinched. “That’s so morbid!”

It was morbid, but my dark humor masked the lingering grief of losing my sweet, blind tabby the summer before. Orville’s ashes may have been the first to rest on my mantle, but he was neither the first—nor the last—pet I would love and lose.

My childhood dog, Jarvis, died when I was twelve. My mother thought he was a peekapoo, though he didn’t look like one—short-haired, thirty pounds, and nothing like the fluffy dog she had expected. He was meant to be the family pet, but he chose me as his person. He met me by the door when I got home from school, slept at the foot of my bed, and followed me everywhere. Even his name came from me, borrowed from a beloved stuffed bunny. He was my shadow, my constant companion, until the night he wasn’t.

I woke up thirsty and found Jarvis sitting in the living room, his breathing heavy, his eyes glazed, tongue hanging out. I tried to coax him back to my room, but he didn’t move. He just stared at me with an expression I’ve never forgotten. I was just a kid—unsure, unprepared. So I went back to bed.

By morning, he was gone. My parents left with him and returned alone. My mother’s eyes were red-rimmed when she told me, “It was his heart.”

I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

I hadn’t known to worry that Jarvis might die. His loss was a shock, made heavier by the resentment I felt when my parents brought home a new dog just a few months later. To me, it felt like they were trying to replace him—and my heart couldn’t take it. I never bonded with the new dog, Muffet. It wasn’t her fault, but there were days I couldn’t bear to even look at her because my heart was broken over the dog I had lost.

Decades later, I still can’t let go of my pets. Over the years, I’ve collected tins and urns, each holding the ashes of a beloved companion. Orville was the first. He died in the summer of 2003 while my husband was deployed with the Navy. I held him as he took his final breaths, then sat there, lost in grief, unsure of what to do next. In tears, I called a friend.

“What do I do with him now?” I asked.

She gently suggested cremation.

A week after Orville’s death, I brought his ashes home in a small decorative tin, tucked inside a gift bag with a certificate of cremation—an oddly cruel (and yes, morbid) sort of gift. Unsure what else to do, I placed him on the mantle. Five years later, my calico cat Annabelle joined him, followed by Wilbur, Orville’s grumpy brother, in 2010. Henry, our pre-kids dog, passed in 2011. Grace, a stray I rescued and rehabilitated, died the following year. As the mantle grew crowded and my toddlers searched for “Gwace” under the bed, I moved the remains to a cabinet.

Out of sight, out of mind. For my children, at least.

When we moved in 2016, I packed them all, four cats and a dog, into a box labeled “Pet Stuff” and brought them with us to our new house. By then, we’d buried small pets in the backyards of two houses—hamsters, gerbils, finches, a parakeet, even a kissing fish named Leo. But these ashes came with us and, once unpacked, they went into the back of my closet tucked inside a grocery bag.

That’s where my five-year-old son found them one day. “What’s inside?” he asked, probably hoping for candy or birthday presents.

“Just some old pet stuff,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie—the bag held not just cremated remains, but also collars, clay paw prints, condolence cards, and even a clipping of Henry’s fluffy blond fur.

I’ve only recently begun to consider that my inability to let go of my pets might stem from the trauma of losing Jarvis so suddenly. His absence was so final, so shocking, in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Maybe that’s why I feel an unexpected relief when I bring my pets’ ashes home—it gives me a sense of closure. But now, years later, the tins and boxes still sit in my closet and I don’t know what to do with them.

With every loss, I second-guess myself. Was it the right time? Could I have done more? Would it have made a difference? I’ve had to make difficult choices for most of my pets, deciding when their suffering was too much. It’s a crushing responsibility, made bearable only by the belief that it’s the kindest thing I can do when all other options have been exhausted. Almost every time, I’ve been there in their final moments, whispering love and apologies as they slipped away.

I was six months pregnant with my youngest son when we lost our dog Henry. Sitting on the floor of the vet’s office as he took his last breaths, I fought back tears as I told him what a good boy he was and how much we loved him—so much that, eighteen months earlier, we had given our oldest son his name as a second middle name. My youngest son never got to meet Henry, but he has often said he feels like he knows him from our stories and photos.

In July 2018, we lost the first pet in our new home—Savannah, our twenty-year-old curmudgeonly cat, who died in my arms late one night. My kids were old enough to understand death and grief, and while they were understandably sad, they were also a little freaked out by the dead cat in a box in the laundry room. Savannah’s ashes soon joined the others in my closet, resting alongside her best friend, Henry.

Four years later, we lost Clementine, our eleven-year-old “pound puppy,” whose health had been declining for several years. An in-home veterinarian helped her pass peacefully, with my ten-year-old son and me by her side. In that moment, my focus was on him; he had asked to be there, and I wanted to make sure he was okay as we told Clemmie we loved her. Afterward, I cried for days. When her cremains were delivered to my doorstep in a box, I put her collar and paw print in the velvet bag with the container holding her ashes and added her to the growing collection in my closet.

Now we’re down to two dogs—Barnaby and Piper—and one cat, Jasper. They’re all close enough in age that I worry we’ll lose them like dominoes in a few years. I’ve sworn, no more pets, but my husband isn’t convinced. To be honest, I’m not sure I believe it myself. I said I was done with cats when we were down to just Savannah, unwilling to face that kind of loss again. But then Jasper—my scrappy, ginger stray—ran straight into my path as a kitten and, instead of bolting when I got out of the car, ran to me.

Who am I to say no when a pet chooses me?

A few months ago, we lost our longest-living pet. Lola, a blue-crowned conure, had been with us since 1994. She had briefly belonged to two other people before we took her in, completely clueless about how to care for a parrot. It was a learning experience for all of us, and Lola never hesitated to let us know, loudly, when we got it wrong. Conures can live up to thirty years, and she surpassed that by at least a year or two, so her death shouldn’t have been a surprise. But the suddenness of it, following the onset of a respiratory illness, was still heartbreaking.

Her small blue-gray urn now sits on a shelf. Every day I say “Good morning” to her, and months later, I still catch myself expecting her to chirp back. Some days, I swear I hear her.

Now that my kids are older, I’m thinking about bringing the other pets out of the closet, too. But I don’t know what to do with them. We’ve talked about burying them in the yard since we don’t plan to move again—but what if we do? After carrying them with me for over twenty years, will I regret leaving them behind? I’ve also considered combining their ashes into one larger urn engraved with their names, but it feels wrong to mix pets who never knew each other—or worse, ones who didn’t get along in life. Am I overthinking it?

Paralyzed by indecision, their ashes remain as they always have—tucked away in the closet, except for Lola. A steady reminder of love, loss, and the countless goodbyes that never, ever get easier. Eventually, I’ll have to decide what to do with them so my children don’t inherit that choice. Would it be wrong to have their ashes added to mine someday—or is that a morbid thought? For now my pets will stay with me—because keeping them close is the only thing that feels right.

I only wish I could have Jarvis with me, too.

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Kristina Wright has written personal essays for a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, Business Insider, The Girlfriend, and Narratively. She is a regular contributor at BookBub and writes a monthly column for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Kristina lives in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, two teenage sons, two Goldendoodles, and a ginger cat.

My fiancé, Josh, and I watched a muted rainbow of suitcases glide past us on the baggage claim carousel. Our well-used suitcases now in hand, we awaited two cardboard boxes labeled “Raymond” in my handwriting. I was tired after the flight from Baltimore to Salt Lake City but keyed up for the week ahead; I’d be introducing Josh to my natal family and to my ex-husband, Raymond, and his new family.

Our COVID masks hampered our usual banter, but I tracked Josh’s posture and gestures as he marveled at how many blond children wandered past, how many double strollers circled. As the cardboard boxes slid-thumped onto the baggage claim carousel, I noticed Josh straighten his back, then look at me. My shoulders tensed, my right leg jiggled, and my fists clenched. I shoved them in my pockets, then met Josh’s eyes. I know. I stepped forward to retrieve one box; he grabbed the other. Now was not the time to revive the squabble.

Six months before, I decided to move in with Josh. We had to pick which items from my basement storage would make the fifteen-mile drive to his place. Moving has never been a big deal for me; I can make a home wherever I am. I’ve been able to downsize and take items to the trash or donation bins as needed. But there was one group of a dozen or so boxes I was particularly unsure about.

“Will, look at me,” Josh said. I met his eyes. “I love you. We are not bringing your ex’s shit to my house.” I glanced over at the boxes, jaw tense. I’d been asking Raymond to take his boxes for months. He had never been the type to deal with the past. When we were married, he would wait until the last minute to pack his things for a move, leaving no time to organize or decide what to keep and what to let go.

If you asked Raymond, he’d say we divorced because I came out as transgender. But that was just the catalyst. In the “before times”—before I realized I was a man, before I knew how to label my gender dysphoria—Raymond and I met at Brigham Young University in 1998. Just home from his missionary service, fresh-faced, glowing, he was ready for a wife. I’d never had a boyfriend. As good Mormons, we married young, nineteen (me) and twenty-three (him), but we look like high schoolers in our wedding photos. His brown eyes stare at the camera, his almost-black hair gelled sideways. My dark blond updo bursts out in sun-highlighted curls like a crown; my lips form a tight smile. Wedding guests called me beautiful. I answered with downturned eyes and a discomfort even I mistook for virginal modesty.

We spent our first Christmas at his parents’ California home. His mom pulled several boxes from storage and plopped them at his feet, insisting they were his responsibility now. No, our responsibility now. She explained that when Raymond departed for his two-year mission at nineteen, he didn’t pack up his room—just left a mess as if coming back for dinner. She bulldozed photos, school notebooks, baseball cards, and bric-a-brac into boxes.

Throughout our marriage, Raymond created more cairns of school papers, burned CDs, our son’s scribbled crayon drawings. When the towers threatened to topple, I channeled his mom and shoveled them into boxes. We hauled the amassed jumble from university apartments in Utah to Connecticut, then to Maryland as we progressed through grad schools and away from Mormonism. At each location, I disappeared the boxes into closets.

By 2016, I had a faculty position and a weekday rhythm punctuated by frenetic bike rides between the office, home, school, and the small town’s favorite café. My best friend and I convened semiweekly for lunch and to vent about work. One windy day, she paused a venting session, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Are you okay?”

I looked away. Why do people keep asking that? My internal tornado swirled too quickly to focus, to grasp any one thing, to create a coherent thought.

“I’m fine.”

Her fingers grazed my forearm across the café two-top. “You are not okay. You are a rubber band stretched too far—you’ll break.”

I booked a therapy appointment soon after. The first session’s homework: Draw a picture of your issues as baggage. Label them. We’ll unpack them together. I penciled in a suitcase (parenting), trunk (Raymond), chest of drawers (work), and armoire (both “Mormon religion” and “Mom”). The therapist pointed to additional shapes. “What about these? They’re unlabeled.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. She waited. “I—just—there’s more?”

That same summer, a family friend shared with Raymond and me that his teenager came out as nonbinary. I registered Raymond’s confusion, but I felt a deep familiarity. Masking my excitement, I grabbed a piece of metaphorical baggage and scribbled “gender” on it.

That box worked itself open in slivers over the next eighteen months until looking in a mirror or being called ma’am, which had always bothered me, now distressed me to tears. A gray fog obscured my future. It became necessary—inevitable—to leave the small town and transition: new name, men’s clothes, chest binder. After enrolling our son in a boarding school for his junior year, I moved to Baltimore in 2018 and reintroduced myself as Will, he/him. Raymond refused to join me in my new home. Still, I clung to the marriage that had now encompassed my entire adulthood. After six months of exchanging increasingly exacerbated emails, Raymond and I agreed to meet in a town in the middle to talk. Within two days, we’d agreed on a divorce.

I met Josh a year later, in the 2020 pandemic summer. Both five feet six inches with similar high-fade haircuts, we often get mistaken for each other. But Josh has blond hair, blue eyes, and an Alabamian accent, and I have light brown hair, brown eyes, and a subtle accent people place as “somewhere in the middle?” I proposed in the spring of 2021 as the first vaccines rolled out—love in the time of COVID. Now, I was merging my life with Josh’s, and my son had joined us in Baltimore. Raymond was sheltering in place in Europe with his new European wife and stepkids.

Raymond’s boxes burdened my brain and my basement, with nowhere to go—until he flew to town that same spring. I shoved boxes into my car and carted them to where he was staying. When I dropped off more boxes, I spied him through the glass of the front door. He was examining individual items like an archivist in a library’s special collections: holding Taco Bell receipts up to the light to decipher their ancient mysteries, peering into his past via three-by-five photos.

The morning of his flight back to his side of the Atlantic, he texted that he’d whittled sixteen boxes down to five and expected me to reabsorb them. “It’s not that much of a sacrifice to have a couple boxes in the basement,” he texted.

“Having them in the basement is one thing. Moving them to Josh’s is another,” I wrote.

“I thought you said he has even more space.” For me and my son, not for you.

An hour later, I met him and loaded up my car with his remaining boxes and several large, black plastic bags swollen with his junk—now categorized as garbage—before he zipped off. I dragged each bag through my long, narrow rowhouse to leave in the littered back alley. The third bag split as I pulled it outside; a glass shard from a broken picture frame had sliced through. Nudging the contents around, avoiding the sharp edges, I uncovered a snapshot from when we had dated: a teenager with long, straight hair, clear skin with no makeup, and a slight smile, looking away. I snapped a digital version of the picture and flung it back into the bag.

Raymond and I texted about his remaining boxes, but I swallowed my frustration. In mid-August, Josh and I flew to Salt Lake to introduce him to my family. I checked two of Raymond’s boxes for an extra $80. We lugged the boxes in a rental up to an RV campsite in Provo Canyon, where Raymond was vacationing. Josh and I arrived and stayed for an hour, chatting about nothing with Raymond, his wife, and her tween daughters. I coaxed his twelve-month-old to smile while trying to comprehend that my now nineteen-year-old son had a little sister, unconnected to me. The boxes rested there on the gravel outside my view. Raymond didn’t thank us. He never paid me back.

Four remaining “Raymond” boxes wriggled their way into the storage facility I shared with Josh. I pushed Raymond to plan for them, but he ignored my solutions. He never offered a counter solution except leaving them there “until I can get back to Baltimore or get a job.” Each time I visited the unit, his boxes taunted me.

Organizing the storage, I found memorabilia from the wedding: the diamond ring Raymond picked, the plastic rings he used in the proposal, dried boutonnieres. I touched the crumbling white and lavender fondant flowers from the cake. Raymond had insisted on a cake, and I had insisted he not smash it in my face.

In the wedding album, the “before” picture shows him smiling as he lifts a piece of cake. My face is pleading with him as I said, “No, no, please,” my right arm outstretched between us. I hoped maybe he was feigning a smash before switching to a gentle offering. In the “after” picture, my chin, mouth, and nose are smeared with chocolate cake and white icing. He’d picked the chocolate layer on purpose, over vanilla and yellow. My face is contorted somewhere between a scowl and a fake-it-till-you-make-it smile. I smashed back, if only to draw the guests’ eyes away from my red-faced humiliation.

As I stood in the storage facility alone, my anger flared—twenty-two years delayed—and I let it burn through my body. I chucked the flowers, boutonnieres, and plastic rings into the garbage with a whispered “fuck you.” I resolved to ship Raymond’s boxes to his sister’s place in Utah, without bothering to tell him.

Josh pulled into the driveway as I Tetris-ed the boxes into the trunk of my red Corolla. He climbed out of his blue hatchback, loosening his workday tie.

“Did he finally agree to pay?” Josh asked.

“Nope.”

His eyebrows shot up. “How much is that gonna cost?”

I shrugged. “It’s worth it to me. I just wanna—” I thrust my hands forward, pushing the baggage off an imaginary cliff. He nodded and let himself into our house.

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Will Cole is a queer, trans man and an MA student in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. His work is published in Another Jane Pratt Thing, Baltimore Fishbowl, and Welter.

When I walked into the Toronto Downtown Record Show, I went straight to the punk section in the first booth as if it were preordained. I flipped through the discs with purpose even though I had no agenda. I stopped to admire a beautiful pressing of Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. Technically it was a record sale, not a show: here was no spectacle, just a few pricey bootlegs and rarities displayed proudly behind a dealer. In the end, I left the $80 This Is Hardcore behind. I chose Eat to the Beat by Blondie, Runt by Todd Rundgren, and a Dolly Parton record my husband doesn’t want to ever hear to the same magnitude that I don’t want to hear the Deep Purple record he bought.

In that stalemate between Dolly and the Deep lies marriage—the tension between knowing what you can quietly live with and what will lead to an argument, and fantasies of solitude. My husband isn’t a great or prolific hater, but he’s committed to abhorring reality TV and country music. I like both. But I cannot stand anything with a whiff of prog, and I'm choosy about the undifferentiated category called rock.

I saw a gorgeous new box set of Bob Dylan’s back catalogue remastered to play in both stereo and the original mono. "Blonde on Blonde," the record dealer, Nick, said to me. “That’s the one that really works on mono. Life changing,” he said, and I found myself nodding.

“Of course, because it’s the sparsest,” I said. “There’s too much going on in Highway 61 for mono to capture it.” Across from him my husband was with a dealer had who a milk crate full of Led Zeppelin concerts on cassette he’d found at a garage sale. We talked about how tape culture is dwindling in the digital age, but vinyl is having a resurgence.

“Audiophiles,” I said with a healthy dose of scorn.

“Customers,” the dealer replied.

This is how it started. I was 16, five-foot-two, dressed in ratty men’s shirts I wore as dresses, black tights, and wrestling shoes. I lived on Long Island in what is usually called an affluent suburb, where the houses got progressively bigger and grander as you drove from the Long Island Expressway to the rocky beaches of Long Island Sound. It had been a bedroom community for Broadway stars in the 1920s and had a spirited KKK march in the 1930s. The population when I grew up there was roughly 70 percent Jewish, families who had trod the familiar path from Eastern Europe to the tenements of the Lower East Side to the middle neighborhoods of Brooklyn and finally to Long Island, only for my generation to glamorize the tenements of the Lower East Side and zealously gentrify the middle neighborhoods of Brooklyn. I longed for a life without someone constantly doing the math about where my GPA was relative to the other kids in the clutches of the gifted and talented program. I kept my music habit to myself, with the exception of a few guys in bands I was friendly with and an all-consuming crush on a guy I'd run into at a Robyn Hitchcock show.

Record shopping fueled me in my awkward yet obdurate teenage years: it was a way out of the simmering social pressure of the suburbs, a space far from the leafy neighborhoods and quaint main street of what the locals called town. The city, of course, was New York. The stores in Manhattan I hit regularly—Bleecker Bob’s, where a Ramone or two were often hanging around, listening to bootlegged garage rock, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the remnants of skunk weed. The hidden 99 Records that specialized in British imports nestled on an East Village side street. It was closet-sized and sold Doc Martens, which were also hard to get as they too were import only. At Sounds on St. Marks, the staff were all churlish man-boys who would Old Testament judge you if you bought the wrong record; if you asked to see something on their bootlegs and rarities wall and didn’t buy it, they practically spit on you.

This was all in the days of indie rock, pre-Nirvana and pre-alternative as a category. There weren’t that many of us, maybe a few hundred people who followed indie bands and each other. I’d see those Sounds guys at shows and make reluctant eye contact, but they had no interest in a high school girl. I suppose that sounds like taking the moral high ground not only in life but in your infinitely superior musical taste. I admit snobbery came with the territory and fueled a round robin of heated arguments between customers and staff.

I learned about records and about the men who love them at a long defunct store called Prime Cuts on Northern Boulevard in Little Neck, Queens, across from a McDonald’s with a sad playground in front. On paper, Prime Cuts was a hostile environment for a teenage girl, but I never felt unsafe there. The worst that could happen was one of the guys would question how I could think Songs in the Key of Life was better than Innervision. A Stevie Wonder throwdown never hurt anyone, and in those disagreements, I found I had a strong voice and liked to use it.

The guys at Prime Cuts were in the same ilk as the guys in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: highly opinionated, medium correct, low on tolerance. I was young enough to be arrogant, too, to think my opinions mattered as much as theirs. Before I could drive, I had to rope a friend into taking me there; and most of the guys I hung out with hated it there because of the wrath of the staff.

The other girls at my high school didn’t have the passion for music that would lead you to afternoons getting lectured about Krautrock or the importance of Gram Parsons in a thick Queens accent. I liked listening to them speechify, and I wasn’t pretty enough for that to be a distraction. When I’d best them with a song name, or date, or other bit of trivia they’d tease me; but as it happened more and more, I earned the unlikely respect of the scruffy and prideful Prime Cuts staff, guys with many more records in plastic sleeves than females to talk to. They even let me make fun of the life-sized Bruce Springsteen cutout from Darkness on the Edge of Town which was as sacred to them as Jesus on the cross. It was an act of defiance to have Springsteen watch over your store on Long Island, where the hometown favorite was Billy Joel.

As the record show reminded me, I am still happiest idly rummaging through the crates. I am happiest when I am forced to think quickly back through Todd Rundgren’s discography. I am happiest when I banter and parry with doughy guys wearing semi-ironic t-shirts behind a folding table with crates bursting with possibility. I am a shopper: I research everything from the stickiest Band-Aids to the best sourdough bread. But record shopping fills a hole: first, it takes me back to one of the first places I felt like I belonged. Second, it's home, of a sort; I love it like I love my husband and my dog, who make my home life feel like a life and not the series of lonely apartments I'd had in New York. To bottom line it, I was cool at the record show, and who doesn't want to be cool? I left feeling like the woman these men wished would talk to them back in high school.

I also still think about the gatefold in that copy of This Is Hardcore I left behind. Gatefolds are the great secrets of the vinyl world, where you open the covers and fall into another world. If we meet again, I'll take it home.

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Lisa Levy is a writer, essayist, and critic. Her work has appeared, among others, in the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the CBC, and LitHub, where she is a contributing editor. She was the Noir/Mystery editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, created the crime content for LitHub, and helped found and conceive of Crime Reads, where she is also a contributing editor. She is presently working on a book, Funeral in my Brain: A Biography of Migraine, a narrative of the author's 20-year chronic-migraine life, as well as the lives of other sufferers; a hands-on examination of migraine treatment that is finally evolving; a consideration of creative works by migraineurs from Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud; and a paean to the solidarity she has found in the joining the ranks of migraine patient-advocates.

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lost Found Kept: A Memoir

It’s a hot and sticky day in early July 2016 when I pull up and park on the street in front of the Willowbrook Road house, looking around to make sure my mother’s dinged-up Toyota isn’t parked in the crumbling driveway. Old mail, circulars, and some plastic bags seep out of the closed garage door. A waterlogged pile of newspapers is solidified near the empty trash can beside the house. The front door is covered with ivy, and I can barely see past the untrimmed arborvitae for a glimpse of the envelopes stuffed in the mailbox which hangs by one hook off the brick wall. All the window shades are closed. The living room windows are blocked by overgrown evergreen bushes that twist and turn against the house, hiding what’s inside.

I’m trying to remember the names of the neighbors, most of whom I haven’t seen for thirty years. The Morgans in the red house with their wild little boys I babysat. Annette and Jeanette Barry, the shy Mormon twins around the corner, rode our bus and wore long skirts. Jim and Neola Reese, the first Black family in the neighborhood lived in the house next door since before we moved here in 1973. Across the street diagonally, the Gallaghers, where I know Kathy, our honorary younger sister, still lives with her mother and oldest brother. She had four brothers, but one, Joey, was killed in a car accident when I was in college.

I’m feeling wilted from the humid New Jersey summer and tired after the fifty-minute drive from Havertown, Pennsylvania, a suburb west of Philadelphia where I live. I’m glad my mother is not home, so I can get out of the car. Over the past twenty years or so, I would occasionally drive by the house on a stealth mission to see how it looked. I’d never linger, fearing she’d pop out and yell at me because I came by without her explicit permission. Nobody just “stops by” this house. My mother won’t let anyone come near the outside, much less invite them in. The day she had her first breast cancer surgery seventeen years ago, she was waiting at the curb, bag packed, for me to take her to the hospital. Neither my younger sister, who lives nearby in Medford, New Jersey, nor I, have been allowed to have a key for years. I have not been inside my childhood home since 1987.

I don’t want to be here now. Absentmindedly, I start my old habit of picking at the flesh on my thumb. I heard the question someone asks when I tell them about this. How is it possible you haven’t seen the inside of your mother’s house for almost thirty years?

“Well, it’s complicated,” I’d always answer. “You don’t know my mother.” Until today, keeping my mother’s secret has been mostly convenient for my sister and me, even though it’s strange to other people.

Through the years, Melissa and I have talked about what we will find when we’re finally able to enter the house. The carcass of our old cat, Samantha? Hidden treasure like piles of crisp hundred dollar bills pressed under her mattress? Our husbands, who have never been inside, tease us after a few beers that they are just going to take matters into their own hands and “burn it down” when the time comes. My sister and I joke that if my mother dies, we hope it will happen when she’s not at her house, so at least we’d be notified about it. There’s worry beneath our laughter. We’ve respected her autonomy. It’s her right to live as she chooses, including her decision to not allow anyone inside. But over the past year, there have been a series of incidents. First, there was her hospitalization for frostbitten diabetic feet after she shoveled the end of the driveway during a snowstorm. Then, there was the matter of her landline phone being turned off several times. Finally, she’s told my brother-in-law, Ron, that she’s running out of money. As I look at the filthy windows I’m asking, were we wrong to let her live the way she wanted? Should we have done something sooner?

It was never a bad house: three bedrooms, one and a half baths, an attic, kitchen, living room, dining room, and rec room downstairs next to a laundry room by the back door. A simple, white, split-level with some brick on the lower half, it had black shutters and a black front door. My mother placed a big brass knocker over a piece of wood to cover up the window and make the door more secure and private so you couldn’t see in. I was in seventh grade, old enough to understand she was trying to keep my stepfather out.

“It looks nice,” I’d told her when she asked me what I thought about the knocker.

Back then she did projects. And the house looked like all the other ones in the development, freshly painted, with a well-groomed lawn. The attached garage was big enough for a car and a clothes dryer, with some room left over for our bikes. The front porch was decorated with a frog statue and a frog planter with a geranium in it. Today I can see the planter from my car window, above the broken steps, empty of flowers and shoved back in the corner of the landing.

I walk up the driveway and around the side of the house. An unpruned tree leans over the chain link fence that somehow has been bent downward so the gate to the backyard doesn’t work. I push back some big branches to squeeze myself through, trying not to tear my dress. A mosquito bites my bare calf, and I slap it, cursing.

I was supposed to be at a party this afternoon with my husband, Marc, but when I called my mother this morning to wish her a happy eighty-second birthday, I found her landline was disconnected for the fourth time in six months. My sister is out of town, so I have no way to tell my mother that our plans to celebrate her birthday tomorrow have changed except to drive twenty miles over here and leave her a handwritten message.

“Fuck,” I blurt out. I slap another mosquito and step over more and more of those lumpy piles of newspapers that obstruct the path and are moldering into cement against the back wall of
the house. Where once there was a yard with my mother’s carefully planted flowers, now there is a jungle. I loved the pink, red, and yellow roses that separated our yard from the Reese’s. It was my
job to water those roses in the summer. I used to help weed around juniper shrubs on the little hill by the driveway, spread out in a pretty way so you wouldn’t have to mow there.

I take a deep breath. Do I really want to go further? I don’t have another way of communicating with her, so I don’t feel like I have much choice. I’ve come this far today, so there’s no point in backing out. I’ll confess, I’m curious. What is it like here?

There’s an empty, tall, blue recycling bin blocking the back door, and when I move it, I see most of the storm door’s glass is gone. I open it and notice the door to the inside has broken glass, too, as though someone has put a fist through it. I flashback to the time my stepfather axed down the front door of the Woodstock Drive house after my mother locked him out. My mother has stuffed this door with yellowing newspaper and heavy, shredded plastic sheets. Mosquitos are starting to swarm out of the bin which is full of stagnant water, and I’m sweating and slapping them away from my face.

I’ve prepared a birthday card, which I’ve placed back into its plastic sleeve because it’s supposed to rain, and I’m planning to tape it to the back door. My message inside the card is gentle. “Happy Birthday. Your phone is out again. Please call me about the time we are meeting tomorrow.”

What I really wanted to write is, Why the hell did I have to give up my plans and drive all the way here to reach you, and why can’t you just pay your phone bill like a normal person, so I don’t have to do things like slink around my old house like a criminal? But as a private practice psychologist I know how to use words that don’t escalate situations.

Twenty years ago, at a lunch, my mother turned to me and hissed, “I know you’ve been sneaking around the backyard trying to get in.” I was shocked at the time since nothing could have been further from my mind than going back to this house. It had taken years of my own therapy to be able to leave it behind. Her paranoia was something I learned to tiptoe away from slowly, the way you would avoid a grizzly bear standing up on its hind legs. I’d never been sure when it would chase me down and devour me. I denied I’d been back, and she looked at me with disbelief. She will know I’ve been here now. And she’ll know I’ve been “snooping” around because the last time my sister left her a note, she’d stuck it on the garage out front.

I keep looking over my shoulder. It’s creepy behind the house under the gray sky, even though it’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday.

“Who lives like this?” I say out loud.

I look at the wrecked door and start to tear up. Something is taking shape in the July humidity—a resolve, a rage, a sadness, a fear I don’t fully understand. It’s about what might be inside, but also what this house is telling me about my mother. I’ve seen pictures of houses like this. The dirty, covered windows, the tall weeds blooming all over the yard, the unopened mail—all signs of a life unraveling. I don’t know what I should do about the way my mother is living. But it’s clear to me that Melissa and I need to do something. My mother raised us. She was the parent who was there.

Excerpted with permission from Lost Found Kept: A Memoir (Trio House Press, 2025).

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Deborah Derrickson Kossmann is the winner of Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award; Lost Found Kept: A Memoir, published by Trio House Press. Her poetry, essays and feature articles have appeared in a range of literary journals and other publications including the New York Times. A licensed clinical psychologist who has been in full time private practice for more than thirty years, Deb lives outside Philadelphia, PA with her husband, Marc, and Sofia Carmela, a cat with a whole lot of “tortitude.” Find out more at lostfoundkept.com

I was in my mid-twenties and had just gone through a bad breakup, and while I worked out what to do next, I was living out of a few suitcases at my parents’ house. It was not just me in limbo: My stuff was too. All of it—furniture, sentimental stuff, books—was packed up in a storage unit. Or at least, it had been. On New Year’s Eve of 2018, that storage unit went up in flames. Everything was gone—everything but some clothes and one brown cardboard moving box marked “RANDOM” that for some reason I had taken out of the storage unit and stashed at the back of a closet. I had no idea what was in it, and after the fire, I didn’t want to touch it. As long as it stayed taped up, I could imagine it contained anything I wanted it to.

* * *

In the months after the fire, people kept asking me what I missed the most. They often assumed it would be a big-ticket item: furniture, jewelry, kitchen appliances. It sounded like a joke when I said that actually, one of the things that had really stumped me was that I had lost this great box of hair ties that were just absolutely, completely up to the job. They laughed, thinking I was using something trivial to deflect from how cut-up I was feeling inside.

We assume that because something is cheap, or because it is plentiful, then its value is null. Some cheap things are worthless, and some expensive things are very valuable. But we should not extrapolate further.

Someone who has never jumped to that conclusion is my granny. Everything is precious to her. In her kitchen she keeps a stash of lightly used teabags in case she wants a second cup. Fish skins are kept to feed the dogs. Rips are stitched, clothes are preserved, things are used over and over again.

I went to see her recently and she told me about how she came to be so careful with the things she uses. When she was a little younger than I am now, she lived in Cardiff with my late granddad, my dad, and my aunty. They were on a strict budget, feeding four people on one salary while saving to buy a house. As a result, they owned three teaspoons. Not six, not four: just three. It was all they could afford, explained Granny. She rummaged in a dresser and brought them out. They were still in perfect condition, with barely a scratch on them fifty-five years after they were bought. It makes sense. If you could only afford three teaspoons, you would look after them.

But her post-war carefulness is at odds with the world today. In the early 1960s she could only afford three teaspoons, but, at the time of writing, you can buy four teaspoons for $3.16 at the supermarket.

In her dresser there are plenty of other things, too, including half a dozen sets of crockery. There are delicate black-and-white coffee cups, chunky blue pottery, and a beautiful brightly painted tea set, which belonged to her mother and must be the best part of a century old. Granny and her sisters jokingly called them “Uncle Cyril’s dishes” because they only came out when he was visiting. She only rarely uses these sets now, and there is at least one that she has never used at all.

These sets were total luxuries, representing months of scrimping and saving. Since then, even more effort has gone into preserving them, keeping them in near-pristine condition, to make them last a very long time.

In fact, she looks after everything in that way. If you were to give her a supermarket-bought cardigan, she could still be wearing it, with a few hand-stitched repairs, twenty years later.

When you have experienced scarcity, it is very difficult to change your mindset. Whatever you give my granny will be valued, as she has developed an ability to see how something could be useful in a pinch—not surprising, given that she’s been in a few pinches before. Her resourcefulness and dedication make me feel abashed. I bought a set of six teaspoons two years ago, but somehow I now only have five. I have no idea what happened to the sixth.

* * *

A few days after the fire, I was beginning to get tired of feeling low. My eyelids were so swollen from crying, and I was getting tetchy from sitting inside too long. I wanted to leave the house, go for a run, and let some of the sadness inside me out. I have long hair that reaches to the middle of my back, so after putting on my running gear I went to get one of the hair ties lingering at the bottom of my handbag. But there was nothing there.

I went to find the big box of hair ties that had been on my bedside table before I moved. It was a clear plastic box of five hundred neon-bright hair ties: so many of them that I used them like water. I would forget a few at the gym, lend some to friends, leave a couple on my desk at work. However many I lost, there were always more left in the box.

And so I looked for the box, but I could not find it anywhere. It was not in my suitcase nor put away in the bathroom—I realized that it must have been in the fire.

I stomped my foot like a grounded teenager, so irritated that the one thing that stood between me and my ability to get out into the sunshine and feel better was a thin piece of elastic. I had taken them for granted because they were everywhere, but, as soon as they weren’t, the value of a hair tie became very, very clear. I went to buy another box of them later in the day, by which point the light had faded and it was too dark to go out. As I scanned and paid, I thought about other things that we take for granted. We might use a plastic shopping bag only once, when it could last for years. We pack for vacation and forget our sandals, so we pick up cheap flip-flops and, when they don’t fit in our suitcase, we just leave them behind in the hotel room.

But this is all such a new thing. We used to wash and reuse tin foil, or open Christmas presents with scissors so that the wrapping paper could be used again. So why do we now treat some of the most useful things as if they’re worthless?

* * *

Inside that question, there is another one hiding. Are rare things always so special?

One day, I was sent out on a story by the newspaper I worked for. I was to look around a new bank vault that had opened to serve London’s billionaires.

I was greeted in the wood-paneled reception by a woman with a shiny blow-dry and even shinier black stilettos. Before showing me around, she gave me a security briefing, explaining the extensive lengths they went to in order to prevent break-ins. There were cameras, scanners, and sensors, but all were cleverly hidden, making the space feel like a luxury hotel—with fresh flowers at reception, grand stone fireplaces, and a patterned ceiling.

The woman led me around, showing me what they offered. The smallest spaces they had were safety deposit boxes the size of letterboxes, big enough to store passports, documents, or a necklace or two. The largest were entire rooms, which some people set up with racks to hang clothes, others filling them with antiques. Some people paid thousands of pounds a month to store their things there, but it was worth it, the woman explained. If you owned a collectible watch—one of only five ever produced—would you really run the risk of wearing it? Obviously not.

I nodded, not sure what to say.

It struck me that the vaults were in some ways a very fancy version of the storage unit I had rented, but for storing eighteenth-century marble consoles rather than pine kitchen tables. And because these people’s things were so rare, they were more valued—in every sense of the word.

* * *

That night, I came home and opened my wardrobe to put my clothes away. The cardboard box marked “RANDOM” was there, as ever. Nothing about the box was special, really, except for the fact that it was the only one I had left, and because of its rarity, I had treated it well. Whenever I opened the wardrobe, I slowly ran my hand over the top of the box, removing any dust. A corner had been dented while moving, but I had pushed the cardboard in and down, back to where it should have been.

And while it wasn’t in a vault, it somehow felt protected behind the wardrobe doors.

It had been months, and I still hadn’t opened it. A few times, I had picked it up and shaken it to see if I could guess what was inside, like a child with a Christmas present. It was difficult to make out, but there was a dry shuffling noise that could have been paper, as well as the occasional thunk of something hard hitting the side. I was deeply, deeply curious about what was inside, yet I had never opened it up to see.

That evening, as I opened the wardrobe, I once again leaned down and pushed the dust off the top of the box, then ran a fingernail along the tape sealing it, creating a neat channel between the two sides on top. I could open it now; I could count the last fragments of the past. But I knew that, once again, I wouldn’t.

The morning at the vault had rattled me a little. I wished I had been able to afford something like that; I wished my things had been kept that safe. The best I could do now was take good care of what I had left.

In the first few months, I hadn’t opened the box because I was trying to avoid any sadness that would come with finding out exactly what I had lost: something I imagined as an irreversible finish, like a title card from an old film reading “The End.” Over the months, my resolve to keep the box closed and the question open had only hardened.

Perhaps those safety deposit boxes stored priceless jewelry I could never dream of owning. But that was it; that was all they contained. A definite, finite parcel of stuff.

On one level, what I had was less than that: so limited that it fit into just one box. But my situation wasn’t just constrained; paradoxically, it was infinite too. The possible contents of that box were endless. Keeping the box closed had turned it into Mary Poppins’s carpet bag—it held any number of things.

I noticed that a corner of packing tape had peeled backward, collecting dust and fluff on its exposed sticky side, so it wouldn’t stick down again when I pushed it. I went to the kitchen, pulled a roll of tape out of the drawer, and cut a length of it with my teeth. I stuck it over the loose corner, making sure it was shut.

Excerpted from Lost & Found: Nine Life-Changing Lessons About Stuff from Someone Who Lost Everything by Helen Chandler-Wilde, published by Chronicle Books 2024

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Helen Chandler-Wilde is a news and features journalist who has worked at Bloomberg, The Telegraph, and the BBC among other outlets. She studied social sciences and languages at UCL and has a master’s degree in journalism. Lost & Found is her first book.

When I was a little kid, we lived in a rented studio house on the outskirts of Bengaluru, India. The house was far away from all the fun things the city had to offer. I couldn’t wait to grow up, move into the city, and live the life I believed I deserved.

The house didn’t seem small until guests pointed it out to us, with questions like "How do the four of you manage to sleep in this space?" "Isn't this too small for your two girls?" "Do you want me to help find a house bigger than this, for just a thousand rupees more on the rent?"

My mother always had witty answers to these questions and smart solutions to any problem that came up because of space constraints.

One such problem was my tendency to obsess over certain “useless” things and hoard them compulsively. If it wasn't a bunch of keychains, it was the exquisite golden wrappers that came with Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolates. If it wasn't the wrappers, it was fishbowls. At one point, there were over twenty fish, in five separate glass bowls and jars. Ah, how my sister and I rejoiced when the fish gave birth to more fish!

My mother's solution was simple: A routine “inspection and trash out” of anything she didn’t approve of. This happened on Sundays when it was time for a deep cleaning of our house. She took my ever-so-diligent elder sister's assistance in completing the task, a sister who sometimes was my co-conspirator (as in the case with the fishbowls) and some other times was more than happy to dump my extremely cute but useless collection of Amul milkshake glass bottles in the trash.

I anticipated the time for inspection coming closer when the shelf assigned to me filled up or started to sag. I would stay home on those Sundays, hoping my mother would forget all about my hoarding habits. That never happened.

When it was time for inspection, my heart sank deep as I sat there helpless, crying, and sometimes throwing tantrums over how important the soda can lids were, or how I found the seashell inside the ocean waves when I randomly threw my hand into the sand while I was swimming. Or, the most delusional one, how I plan on using each keychain from my collection in the future—one for when I’d buy a motorcycle, one for when I’d buy my own bungalow house, one for my luxury car, and so on. The list was long.

Hoarding keychains seemed natural to me. They were more accessible as a kid with little to no allowance. More importantly, they made the possibilities of all my outlandish dreams seem nearer. They gave me a chance to be a part of my big future plans before I could even reach the future. I can’t fathom now how I truly believed I would get to do all those things in only a few years. I believed I could do it all if only these adults would let me do my own thing, but I never knew what that “thing” was. (Also, even if I did buy these fancy things, would I not want to buy new keychains?)

Back to my mother. She paid heed only to a sliver of my cries; for the rest she had no mercy. Trash had to be trashed out; a thousand chocolate wrappers were thrown away, and she wouldn’t spare them just for their golden shimmer. Seashells were spared if they weren’t broken. Boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes were tossed. The collection of dead butterflies was spared. Any other dead insect collection was thrown out.

I found ways to hide my things in the impossibly small space I had. Sometimes my sister helped me while other times, in classic sibling style, she ratted me out. I felt they were being too invasive of my space; they cared too little about the things that mattered to me. My adolescent brain felt the injustice of it all.

Now, many years later, we have come far from living in a studio house, and I have come far enough to understand their good intentions. My sister is happily married and I live by myself in a rented, compact one-bedroom house in the heart of the city, closer to work. We visit our parents in the outskirts, where they still live, but in a different house.

I don’t want to speak for everyone who hoards, but I attach dreams and plans to the little things that clutter up my space. Some are more realistic than others.

One of the keychains I rescued from my mother’s watchful eye has my name on it. It’s made of individual letter beads, stitched into a twisted line of two pink woollen threads. It dangles beautifully on my house keys now.

My dreams were different back then. I thought I would have achieved something noteworthy by the time I was twenty-five, that I wouldn’t have to worry about living in a too-small house. Funnily enough, when my mother visited my newly rented flat, she couldn’t help but genuinely ask, “Isn’t this house too small for you and your two cats?” I nodded. Then we both smiled at each other.

Like I said, my dreams were different back then. Grander. But life has its own way of lending itself to your dreams. Some keychains did fulfill their purpose, albeit in a different way. Some are still in my drawer, waiting to see the light of day. Or to go into the trash.

For better or worse, I have more space and freedom to hoard, just as I always dreamt of.

About two weeks ago, my sister came over to help me pack as I had to move apartments. So I was forced to take stock of my hoard in her presence. Turns out, I had more “useless” things than I needed in my cupboard, such as a collection of pine cones, seashells from various beaches of Southern India, seeds from different plant species, a book full of dead leaves, glass jars, a box of tiny boxes, clothes she had handed down to me five to six years ago (too small for either of us now), colorful plastic sunglasses, tiny animals from our school projects, and Christmas décor pieces from years ago. She helped me clear some of them by employing her old skills to work.

Coincidentally, in the same week, my colleague pointed at my desk and said, “I remember a few months ago there was only one box on your desk. Now it looks like you’re peeking out of a bunch of boxes, calendar, pouches, and all these.” She was referring to a pile of books I had stacked up above a box. I laughed.

Maybe it’s time for me to start doing my own round of “inspection and trash out.” Keep some dreams, share some of them, and trash out all the fluff.

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Priya Kalyanasundaram is a writer and an artist. She lives in Bengaluru with her two cats. She spends most of her time brewing coffee or tea and curling up with a book. You can find her on Instagram.

I opened the door to find a vacant restroom with every stall door ajar. I chose the one closest to the sinks, remembering a statistic I’d read years ago noting that the first and last stalls were the least frequently used. I looked in the toilet bowl to see remnants proving otherwise, but at least no “raindrops” sat on the surface of the lid.

I pulled down my pants, admiring my newly purchased pair of underwear, forest green silk that made my skin feel as luxurious as the fabric itself. I was proud of myself for finally upgrading my worn-in collection that still included thongs, bikinis, and boyshort-cut underthings dating back to my early high school days, which were now well over a decade ago.

When I was making my list of goals in January for the new year, my friend and I compared notes. Without knowing what existed inside my dresser drawers, she sternly stated, “This is the year we get rid of old underwear.”

My jaw dropped. How could she possibly know I, too, had been holding onto my favorites that were now sporting holes and tears from overuse and repetitive wear?

A melancholy feeling of nostalgia overcame me. Of course, my best friend and I had this in common. We’d found solace in our friendship that began around the same time our childhood bedroom mirrors reflected our freshly purchased teenage undies. We had experienced the cadence of pivotal coming-of-age moments alongside each other, and I found comfort in knowing I wasn’t alone in the struggle of letting go of something that once felt like this fresh pair of silky delicacies I was now wearing. Our high school underwear supported us in silence, which was how our friendship worked sometimes, too. Later that day when I was putting laundry away, I held onto each old pair for a moment before putting them in a pile on top of the dresser rather than in it.

A pair of indigo blue cheeksters (a Victoria Secret PINK style) that formerly had a repeated pattern of white skulls now sported a waistband with rips on either side on the back, almost like makeshift lingerie with a high-cut, thong-like “V” forming. Another pair was a perfect shade of mint green dotted with pinky-red roses and lace trim. Gray boyshorts with red and blue zig zags, sherbet orange stripes cinched in the front with a perfect tiny bow, and a bright green pair with cameras printed on them with the phrase “take a picture, it’ll last longer” and black lace detailing all sat in a sad heap, separated from their usual girl gang of underpants. They were cloth comrades who got me through periods, gave me an extra boost of self-assurance that no one else would see, and helped me love my body more. But, as someone who desperately aims to live in the present, what does holding onto something from the distant past say about me—and not just clinging to any old souvenir, but essentially gross, useless, decaying fabrics that no longer support my hope-filled future of womanly dreams?

Yet, as I held them, I saw them as remnants of concealed confidence that reminded me I could shine bright while remaining inconspicuous. Case in point: I was terrified my senior year of high school, knowing I’d signed up for a speech class that would give me enough credits to not have to repeat a similar humiliating course in college. My teacher was kind enough to let us choose if we wanted the class to put their heads down or turn backward in their chairs to ease us into what some of us considered our greatest fear as adolescents. As I stood up in front of the entire class, I didn’t have them close their eyes, but thought about the age-old lore of imagining them all in their underwear. Oddly enough, I found peace in the cotton-bred confidant hugging my cheeks, helping me stand tall while I used my voice for five incredibly long minutes of class.

Another time during these trivial years, a popular boy who I thought I was somewhat cool with called me “Double-A” as I passed by his desk, referring to my chest that hadn’t yet developed. Puberty is a damn awful time with no grace from peers. My heart sped up and my throat got tight, restricting my breath until I found my seat. As I let air fill my lungs, I rubbed my hands along the sides of my jeans to self-soothe, remembering that I was wearing underwear with lace that day. If only he knew just how attractive I was, he would have never said that to me. Even though I was young, awkward, and clumsy most of the time, I had opened the door to seeing myself as more than just a girl, but instead a secretly sexy teenager.

Tanning beds were another way to take control of how I presented myself to the world (PSA: I don’t recommend these now, as I’ve had a mole removed from overexposure, and they’re just not safe). I walked into the salon multiple days a week sporting a deep gray thong covered in pastel flowers and two little black bows, the only garment I wore so I could see just how tan I was getting. As I undressed in the room, I glanced at myself in the mirror before putting on my goggles and starting the tanning session. I admired my body, the freckles and moles, curves, and how wearing fun underwear made me feel even more powerful—that it somehow accentuated my physique.

Standing in the house I now own with award-winning photos, published articles, and degrees on the walls, I looked again at my freshly laundered memories. I appreciated each of their glory days as I folded them and placed them in the back of my closet. I was slowly moving on, replacing the old with the new, but still unable to fully let go of such comforting cloths. Getting to choose my underwear rather than my mom buying me a pack as a young girl was liberating, and releasing those early days of independence was hard. As an adult, it gets easier to use my voice, stand up for myself, and exude the confidence I no longer need underwear to provide, but on hard days where I fall short, my teenage favorites hold me, like a child being consoled by a parent when the world is too heavy. I was starting to realize this was an unhealthy (and probably unsanitary) crutch and falsity I need not rely on. Working to move forward, I spent close to half an hour at an intimates store picking out seven new pairs in gorgeous shades, cuts, and levels of softness.

Now, as I sit here donning a new modal-blend pair of periwinkle ribbed bikini cut undies, I wonder why I didn’t upgrade my drawers sooner. I’m grateful that I still find just as much joy in how theses fabrics simultaneously empower and comfort me while refusing to accept that I can’t be influential and bold even without them.

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Natalie Bickel is an energetic storyteller who moves people to action with her words. She has a bachelor's in communications with published articles in the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Darling Magazine, and more. She’s also the author of the YA novel, The Catalyst, and the children’s books, The Christmas Clue and The Volcano No One Could See.

Instagram: @natmosfear

Website: natmosfear.com

by Lynette Benton

Displayed at eye level on a glass shelf in a small boutique one Saturday were an orange and brown necklace and its matching bracelet. Both were made of many oversized orbs threaded on a slender, silky strap, the spheres arranged to give a pronounced three-dimensional effect. Attracted by the unusual design, I flirted with the pair. The owner—a middle-aged woman who had helped me with purchases on several previous visits to the store—hovered. She told me about the artist who had fabricated the jewelry from resin. Wasn’t it pretty? And wouldn’t that color look beautiful on me? Unlike women with fair complexions who denounce the color, all shades of orange look good against my brown skin: Clear orange. Burnt orange. Reddish orange. Pinkish orange.

But, sternly reminding myself of all the jewelry I already owned, I put on my gloves and resolutely prepared to leave the store. It was a dank November day with windblown rain splattering the pavements. My hand was on the door handle when I turned back; I would just touch the necklace. Try it on. I caressed it. I tried it on. Then I put it back on its shelf.

I was heading for the door again when the owner asked if I’d like to see the same necklace in a combination of grey, wild lime green, and a maroon so dark I thought it was black. This version was even more striking than the orange. I have a number of clothes and even earrings in that vivid yellow/green hue. Still, I thought I’d buy the orange and brown necklace, all the while knowing I didn’t have much to wear with it.

As if I were under the spell of one of those drugs administered to pre-op patients lying limp on gurneys to calm them on their way to surgery—the kind of medication that frees them from concern about what lies ahead—I floated over to the orange and brown necklace, picked it up, and carried it to the counter. The cold, wet street outside no longer existed. Life beyond the shop no longer existed. Nothing existed, except my new orange and brown necklace.

The owner rang up my purchase.     

I felt elated, which should have made me suspicious. Normally, the only time a purchase thrills me is when it’s something I not only want but also need. It has to be something that fills a gaping gap, an unsettling lacuna that will complete a vague picture residing in my head. In fact, my friend Bob often complimented me on my willingness to forego an item for years until I found the exact thing I was looking for. He happened to be referring to my living room area rug, a sparse design of red cherries and dark naked branches on a tan background. When my husband crouches on it to do his back exercises, he looks as if he’s stretching in a Japanese garden. It was the sixth rug I’d brought home to try out against our hardwood floors.

I sent a text to Joyce, a fashionable friend, and attached a photo of the orange and brown necklace I’d bought. I added a caption. “Take that, mean dentist who almost made me cry.” Joyce knew my periodontist had upset me the day before by badgering me to undergo an expensive and painful procedure he felt was necessary for my dental health. Despite the fact that I hold the term “retail therapy” in scathing contempt, whenever I have a bad time at the hands of a dentist, I look for a piece of jewelry to soothe myself. I’ve only actually bought an item once before: a woven silver and pewter necklace, and that’s with quite a few agonizing dental treatments behind me. To my way of thinking, that’s restraint.

Joyce thought I owed myself the orange and brown necklace.

After I arrived home from the jewelry boutique with my purchase, still uncertain, I considered exchanging that necklace for the green and grey one. Or should I buy both the necklaces? They were only $45.00 each, plus tax. I texted Joyce: “Is it too tacky to own the same necklace in two different color combinations?” She didn’t think so; the colors themselves made them look quite distinct from each other.

The next morning, before I’d even gotten out of bed, the word “greed” wriggled like a fat wet worm through my consciousness. I felt greedy. Rapacious. I thought of a card Joyce and I had laughed over. It said: “I’m not needy, I’m wanty.”  

My mother wanted things she saw, no matter how worthless they were. The salt packets and leftover bright yellow lemon wedges in restaurants. A paperback book she saw on a friend’s shelf. A napkin holder. She’d come right out and say, “Aren’t you going to give me that?” while I mumbled embarrassed disavowals to our host.

“She doesn’t need it.”

And to my mother, as to a toddler, “You already have that!”

I never related to that kind of acquisitiveness until the day after I bought the orange and brown necklace, never related to wanting so badly something in the same class as what I already had too much of, namely, jewelry. It’s happened before once or twice, but on those occasions, after I arrived home with my purchase I thought, “I really have enough of . . .” whatever it was and promptly returned it. Never had I felt as intensely desirous before. Never so ravenous.

I could only think of one winter outfit I owned that would go with the orange and brown necklace. One. The idea that I should have bought the other one tormented me, until I came to the conclusion that I needed neither of them and someone as avaricious as I certainly didn’t deserve either of them.

On Sunday, the day after I bought the orange and brown necklace, my husband, his sister, and I went on a nature walk in Ipswich, Massachusetts, about an hour from my home outside of Boston. When we stopped walking in the unusually warm sunshine for that time of year to enjoy the sandwiches, drinks, and Scottish oatcakes laden with butter and brown sugar I’d made, the nervous stomach I’ve had to coddle since childhood fluttered with anxiety.

I made a mental list of what this uneasiness could have sprung from. Partly it was about spending money on frivolities. My husband’s landscaping job in a small company had been shaky lately, mainly due to the owner’s poor health. Already too much of what I owned paired well with only one other item in my closet. I already had lots of clothes and accessories I seldom wore. I mostly worked at home so it wasn’t as if I had daily dress-up opportunities. And the necklace I’d bought was large. Emphatic. Not for everyday wear, and I live an everyday sort of life.

I continued weighing the questions: Exchange the orange necklace for the other one? Buy both? Return the orange and brown necklace, forswear the green and grey one, and feel righteous but bitter?

Aside from the issue of voracity and fretting over which necklace would go with more of my outfits, conflict like this made me call into question my very identity. For me, an item needed to do more than look good on me. An item even had to look good with my surroundings, as in the case of the area rug. It needed to display the right me, express the heart of me, the essential me.    

The shop would be closed for the next two days; that would give me time to make a final decision. My identity then tied to a beautiful necklace or two, the pressing question of who I really was hung in the balance.

But could jewelry ever tell me that?

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Lynette Benton is a creative nonfiction writer and writing instructor who teaches memoir and other creative writing classes in Greater Boston.

Three of her essays have garnered first prize or finalist status in literary contests. Three others have been anthologized. Her articles and personal essays have appeared in numerous online and paper publications and on a podcast. Most recently, her essays were published in Shenandoah literary journal and included in the 2021 anthology, Stories That Need to Be Told.

I’m packing up the remains of a journalism career that once consumed and defined me. When I began, my life’s work took up an entire room. Now it’s down to a couple of cardboard boxes. Even those are excess. I am left trying to figure out what, if anything, the physical detritus—the actual paper—of all those published words means.

Just to date myself, when I went to journalism school, your choices for a major were print, radio, or television. Yes, this was the 1980s, pre-Internet days.

Print was my focus. With my slight lisp, there was no way I would pursue anything that involved using my voice. Besides, I’d always had the sense that I better write things down. Starting at age eight, I kept a diary. I’ve filled huge plastic cartons filled with dozens of those journals too, but that’s a different story.

I started as a “copy girl” at the New York Times, and for those too young to understand what that means, “copy” referred to actual paper—in this case a cheap, tan stock. An editor would yell “Copy!” and one of us would run to the desk, pluck the article out of his hand (it was always a “he” back then), and run it back to the reporter with the hand-edited changes. Sometimes, the editors demanded fresh, blank paper. One particularly intimidating guy near the top of the hierarchy once lectured me that when he called for “copy,” he wanted his inbox to be filled ¾ full—not halfway, nor brimming to the top.

Quaking in my pumps (sensible but work-appropriate shoes), I reminded myself that I had a master’s degree from a prestigious university, and that fetching paper for this petty tyrant was just one more step on my road to a Pulitzer Prize. Ditto for when the managing editor asked me to get his shoes shined. That’s how it was back then, and if you didn’t want to be humiliated or bullied, you could got take your career aspirations elsewhere.

Anyway, I never got close to a Pulitzer Prize and eventually spent most of my career writing for a very non-prestigious regional section of the paper. Sometimes my stories appeared in the Metro or Style or the National sections, but not often. In the end, though, I wrote more than a thousand articles for the Times.

In the early 1980s, there was still a recording room, which you would call (on a landline telephone), read your story, and a secretary would transcribe your work and get it to an editor. Next, the fax was introduced. Finally, we were filing and publishing online.

But for two decades of my career, there was just paper. The paper. Here’s how I archived my stories: my husband would painstakingly cut out each article and then lay it out and paste it on a blank page. From there, one of us would xerox 20 copies.

My home office was lined with file cabinets filled with this stuff. I also kept printouts of all the background material for each story—transcripts of interviews, related research, and more. I even kept all my reporter’s notebooks— long, skinny spirals perfect for note taking. Holding on to this backup was professional insurance. What if someone questioned a quote? Or an editor asked for the source of a piece of information?

It wasn’t just the Times I wrote for. I published in magazines and eventually on websites. (As journalism migrated online, editors would often ask me to write for free, promising “exposure.” I didn’t need exposure, just a paycheck.) After starting my career during the print era, writing for online publications seemed ephemeral. It lacked not only the physical heft of paper, but also a sense of connection with the reader. A link may or may not be clicked, but a (literally) solid piece of writing laid out on someone’s kitchen table or bedside felt more intimate, with more of a commitment on both sides.

Anyway, now, after 35 years in our house, my husband and I are moving to a smaller place, and I’m forced to confront all of the stuff I’ve kept and accumulated. Downsizing is a cliché. Throw away the sweet, scribbled toddler drawings? (Not all of them.) Donate my old, fringed leather purse that now qualifies as vintage? (Yes.) How about the piles of crap my adult children are still storing in our basement? (No comment in the interest of family peace.) It’s difficult.

My office should have been easy, not as freighted with emotion as my other, more personal belongings. But it wasn’t. The first culling of the physical remains of my career involved tossing all the backup material for every article. Many had been written in the twentieth century, and the time for questions or corrections was long gone. Ditto the reporter’s notebooks.

Next, I accepted that I didn’t need 20 copies of every article. The truth is I didn’t need copies of anything. Every article that anyone has ever published in the Times is available online, preserved forever. There’s even an archive in the Library of Congress.

Still, I couldn’t completely let go. I kept one “hard” copy of each article, which brought the evidence of my Times career down to a couple of expanding file packets.

Two shelves of magazines I’d written for remained. Most of these magazines don’t have digitalized archives. Some are out of business. Out came the old-school scissors. I clipped each article and consolidated them into one archival photo box. The cut-outs looked pathetic, with the jump pages (i.e., “continued on page 93”) already curling at the edges.

A couple of journalism awards, all in cheap frames, went into the discard box.

One last cabinet to tackle. I’d published a book in 2012. There was a carton of the hardbacks in the basement. But there was still all the publicity material surrounding the release. (The book got a flurry of press on publication, had a short period of sales and then…crickets.) But the evidence is there—here I was on a local magazine cover, here was an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal, and here was a poster announcing that I would be speaking at a library.

What did all that work mean? Securing the interviews, figuring out how to structure the story, editors to please, deadline after deadline after deadline—nonstop stress. The slog of writing the book, the promotion, the anxiety over sales. Who was that person?

That is the question, I think, that makes dealing with the clutter so difficult.

When I was in the midst of my career, ambitious and driven, my identity was completely tied up with my name appearing in in all those newspapers. I loved the idea of the printing press, with thousands of copies of my byline coming off the machines. I’d see the blue plastic bags marked “New York Times” sitting at the bottom of driveways or on doorsteps, and think, There I am! My fragile ego was constantly stroked by people who recognized my name or who told me how much they loved this or that particular column.

My need to publish was relentless. It felt as if I didn’t exist unless I was in the physical paper. When an article appeared in print, I’d feel good for a few hours, but then feel myself fading. I’d start pitching my editor a new story immediately. Better yet, I’d already have a string of assignments lined up.

I feel a little sad for that former me. I let go of all that long ago. I’m older and I’ve been humbled multiple times. Honestly, I don’t even remember writing most of those stories. I no longer need my name in print to know who I am.

Most of all, I now realize that it’s all fleeting. Nothing is permanent. I could chisel something in stone, and eventually it will be worn down. And this, of course, isn’t really about the stuff or even writing, but mortality. We’re dust to dust—newspaper clippings and bodies alike.

In the end, I got my office contents down to three boxes.

Boxes, I suspect, that my kids will find one day when I’m gone, and they are clearing out our basement at the smaller house. I can almost picture the scene:

Daughter [picking up yellowing pages]: “Why did Mom keep this stuff?”

Son: “It meant something to her.”

Daughter: “Toss.”

Son: “I don’t know…”

Daughter: “You want to take this stuff to your place?”

Son [sighing]: “Okay. Toss.”

My thirty-year writing career doesn’t come down to its physical remnants, any more than a carton of old toys and baby clothes encompasses all that went into raising a family.

I’ve had a long career. I’m still a writer. I just don’t need the paperwork anymore to prove it.

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Kate Stone Lombardi is a recovering journalist, author, and current essayist. She was a regular contributor to The New York Times, a columnist for the regional section and her work has appeared in national publications like Reader’s Digest, Time.com, Parenting and more.

An eight-foot-long dark brown wood table occupied most of the space in the dining room of our red brick brownstone. My father said he found it in an 18th century French monastery. I always wondered, but oddly never asked, when and how he managed to get it from there to here.

The table’s surface comprised one seven-inch and one eight-inch slab inside six-inch side panes with beveled edges along the long sides and three-inch panels on the short sides. Two-centimeter-sized wormholes dotted the surface as did a few scars from ashes left by my mother’s cigarettes. The top also showed discoloration, presumably from use and cleaning. Curved, vase-like supports framed the underpinnings on each end and in the middle, connected by one long beam. My orange cat enjoyed squeezing himself between the three poles in the middle so I often had a book with me while I sat beside him.

Shortly before dinner (we called it supper), my handsome father—Papa—would arrive home from reviewing a jazz gig or teaching, hang up his sports jacket in his room-size closet, and trade suede loafers for shearling-lined slippers.

My mother—Mommy—would finger-comb her thin brown hair off her pretty, unlined face, pinch her cheeks, and put the tea kettle on. She never wore skirts and blouses because she found then-trendy hobble skirts impossible to walk, sit or even stand in. On the rare occasions when she bought a less than dowdy dress, she’d remove the price tags and labels, burn them in an ashtray, shove the dress into her small closet, then wear it, wrinkled, weeks later. My father would invariably ask, “Is that a new dress you’re wearing?”

“No, no, not at all,” she’d look down and say. “I’ve had it for ages. I haven’t worn it very often. I’m sure it didn’t cost much.”

After I washed my hands, my mother would ask if I wanted to set the table. Remarkably, it didn’t occur to me to say, “No, I don’t want to set the table,” until I’d been to college.

Food, Paris, and arguments surrounded the table. Two Utrillo paintings of Parisian street scenes hung on the wall behind my father. A white brick wall with a utility closet on one side, a fireplace in the middle, and a recess with a rocking chair and a telephone were behind my mother and me. My father sat at the narrow end in front of the Utrillo paintings. My mother sat on his left, and I on her left. We assumed that formation every meal of my childhood.

If the phone rang during dinner, my father would take off his glasses, put them on his placemat, and walk around the table to get to the phone. “Hello?” he would answer with an expectant uplift at the end of the word. We knew it was his sister if his voice lowered right away and he nodded, said, “Uh huh,” and little else. After her husband Leo’s death, she lived alone. I visited her one weekday afternoon and asked about Leo but she changed the subject. Her passions were ballet performances, operas, and knitting the dresses she designed for boutiques and magazines.

My mother prepared precisely three servings for each night’s meal. No leftovers and no second helpings. The largest serving was for my father, of course, and the second largest was for me. She’d put food on designated plates and carry them around the corner into the dining room. We usually ate frozen food or roasts.

Rather than discussing or exchanging ideas, mealtime often degenerated into ugly words. It might start with growls from Papa like, “I can’t believe we’re having Swanson TV dinners again,” after which my mother would sigh and say, “I don’t get home in time to make something more elaborate and you insist on eating precisely at seven.” To which my father would say, “Oh for god’s sake,” and my mother would burst into tears.

During supper, a black-and-white television set on a table against the wall across from the table always had the nightly news on and provided fodder for arguments about public figures and philosophical ideas. Papa would bang his hand on the table and rail about how stupid the Pope and presidents were. Mommy would say they deserved respect. If the argument went on for a while, she would go into the kitchen, gulp a few drags on a cigarette, then douse the stub in a black ceramic ashtray she hid behind the flour canister under the kitchen cabinets.

___________________________________________________________________________

Every Tuesday evening, my parents hosted a group of academics who argued about Catholic theology and dogma, what they should or should not espouse. The attendees would help themselves to mugs of coffee or tea set up on the small television table. My job was to carry a tray to each person and offer milk and sugar.

One of the two woman who came every week, a United Nations administrator, always wore red dresses, brown jackets, and pearl necklaces. She brought yellow flowers to the first meeting each month. Two Jesuit priests arrived together from their residence at a neighborhood Catholic boys’ school, in black gabardine suits and clerical collars. Weightier religious aura came from the German monsignor who swept in late, folded his magenta fascia and laid it on the table beside his tea; he always sat at the opposite end of the table from my father. Together, he and Papa wrote “In Our Age” for the Second Vatican Council, as well as several scholarly books and articles. “Ach,” he would say to me, never with a smile, as he helped himself to milk for his tea, “you are a good girl to attend for us. Danke, mein liebes kleines Mädchen.”

At least thirty people attended each meeting and sat around the table. Sometimes forty or even fifty.

Two decades later, my divorcing mother, moving out of the brownstone, offered me furniture she would otherwise sell. I had spent so much of my life at and under the table that I grabbed it despite worrying that such a huge piece of furniture would overwhelm my dining room. I wanted to have it with me, its memories and the people who lived around it. Running my hand along the wood, I could feel my cat on my feet, hear many voices, remember watching The Counterfeit Traitor with my father, and see my brother playing with his Greyhound bus and my sister with her Charming Chatty doll. I wanted it all.

The table fit in my dining room as if designed for the space.

I spent weeks arranging and rearranging the chairs I bought at a local furniture store, to see how many people I could fit at the table. I tried four on each side and two on each end, although that meant each person would only have room for a plate and a napkin. I never managed to fit more than twelve, not the forty or fifty I would have sworn were at my parents’ meetings.

I spent weeks and months trying to dispel strange emotions. I couldn’t eat without getting a stomachache if I sat where my father used to sit. I moved to the other end. That failed, too. I tried all the other places with the same results. 

I decided to make it my workspace instead of my food place and cheerfully sat down to write a story. No sooner had I written “the end” than I heard my father shout as he decried my grammar. I put my head in my hands only to hear my mother arguing that he should let me write what I wanted, not what he wanted, and that he was a pseudo-intellectual anyway.

The table was there to stay, so I needed to make peace with it. I moved my desk place all around the table, trying to find a place without their voices. When that didn’t work, I tried labeling the places at the table, naming each as characters in my story. Unfortunately, even they failed to banish the noisy visitors of the past. 

My children tagged me for Thanksgiving the next year. One group brought delicious vegan seitan turkey. Another brought shrimp and cocktail sauce. My brother baked a Russian babka. Eighteen of us crowded around the table, using my piano bench on one end so three people could sit there. We greeted my sister’s new boyfriend, toasted family members unable to join us, drank lots of red and white wine, and took lots of pictures. We saluted my parents, saying we missed them and loved their table, and their ghostly selves were welcome any time, but only if they let me work and eat without their interference.

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Anne Ulanov is a writer and document specialist. She wanted to write stories and essays starting from her time with Nancy Drew under the blankets with a flashlight, and wrote her first novel at summer camp on Lake Winnipesauke. She has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and literature from Smith College and an MA in sociology from NYU. She reviewed plays and wrote feature pieces for a local newspaper and won several short-short story contests. Now she lives in an exurban town within shouting distance of cooking of all kinds, thanks to the CIA (culinary not spy). She writes a blog, “Just One?”, about the joys and occasional downsides of eating out by oneself.

It was time to hang the vision board and figure out our next move. My partner Lee and I spent most of a Saturday afternoon with a whiteboard and marker laying out some ideas and finally came to an agreement. We’d decided we would leave the Bay Area on a road trip and sell or chuck all of our belongings, maybe store a few things with my sister, if we could. The thought of subletting our apartment came up but we both decided on a clean break, even though that would make the logistics more complicated.

Lee kept repeating this Sufi phrase, “You only possess what you cannot lose in a shipwreck” as some sort of inspirational thing to keep us motivated and on track. I still don’t really understand what it means, even though Lee wrote it out on a three by five card and placed it on the fireplace mantel for me to see every day. Unloading our gear was a slow process, so we started four months ahead of departure, chipping away at letting go of things in due time.

Lee was more of a packrat than me—moldy, scholarly tomes, weird little tchotchkes and family heirlooms, boxes and boxes of slides from previous travels and a projector were unburied from our hallway closet. Things that hadn’t been used or cracked open in years. I, on the other hand, had mostly clothes and some large artworks to contend with. I found temporary homes for most things I knew I’d want again one day but the other stuff was pretty easy for me to say goodbye to.

Friends were called to come over and take possession of things—books, plants, a few blank canvases I’d yet to cover in paint, ideas never manifested. There was a grassy area down the corner from our house in front of a big apartment building, a designated repository for used goods people in the neighborhood unloaded in hopes that those with lesser means might find them useful. Much of our stuff landed there. Our street, set between a city park and a main connector road through town, was a walkable corridor, and goods appeared and disappeared quite easily from that spot. We were grateful for that option, which was a time saver, to say the least.

On the day before we would drive away for good, we had a yard sale with the last of the trappings of a settled life, and I’ll tell you, I don’t recommend doing that on your last day in town. People will bargain you down to the bone in humiliating fashion and make you continually wonder what the value of anything really is. You discover attachment where you didn’t know there was any, as things reluctantly pass from your hands to a stranger’s. Neighbors we had never spoken to in the ten years of our residence there came out of the woodwork, suddenly holding a keen interest in us.

“Where are you going?”

“Why are you leaving?”

 “What brought you here to begin with?”

I imagined all the missed potlucks and backyard happy hours we could have had with some of these fine people, had we previously been more of a curiosity to them in our day-to-day lives, when it might have mattered. Our last night, having nothing in the house left but what we would pack in our van the next morning, Lee and I slept on the floor on our camping pads with a comforter over us, spooning and giggling over our lack of stuff and how weird it all felt.

We spent all of 2019 driving across the country, visiting friends and family, checking out new cities for the potential of eventually establishing roots, and exploring natural beauty in far-flung locales we’d always wanted to visit. We sadly attended a memorial service for Lee’s mom in Boston when she died unexpectedly.

All of our belongings, in its new definition, were reduced to the space of the rear of our van. We camped all over, including three weeks in Big Bend National Park, sharing our campsite every night with a curious, and earthy smelling, Javelina family. We graciously accepted invitations to stay in friends’ guestrooms, rented compact spaces on Airbnb, and found the occasional hotel room when we were left in the lurch. We scored housesitting gigs, taking care of people’s pets while they traveled. The beauty of having so little to keep track of was the epitome of freedom for us and every day was a new adventure, albeit days with many questions and choices in front of us to crack like a puzzle with many pieces.

We were in Mexico when Covid started rearing its ugly head. When Lee became ill all of a sudden, we got in the van and drove back across the border to Arizona. We had two housesitting assignments lined up, but it became clear from a news report on the TV in our rental in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that those would not happen after all. Everyone was canceling travel plans and staying put. Lee turned to me on a neighborhood walk and said, “We might as well just stay here and ride this thing out for a couple weeks,” but within days, we were on the hunt for a long-term rental that turned into a year habitation. We were still living with so little that was ours. Furnished rentals provided everything we needed and more. Our freedom was defined differently but it was still a life unburdened with excess.

Eventually, we were faced with a decision about what was next for us. A housesitting gig in Savannah, Georgia fell through and the one we had been covering was coming to an end. In a panic, we signed a lease on a house in a city we were not totally sure felt like home. But there was some part of us that had tired of using everyone else’s stuff. Tired of looking at their particular décor, sitting in their specific furniture, sleeping in their idea of a comfortable bed. We were absent our own signature in the dwellings we took up space in, even though they had provided a unique lifestyle with constant change and variation on the theme of necessary versus frivolous. Why did one person decide that ping-pong table was an important thing to provide but not a coffee maker, for example.

The day we moved into our new house in a new town, we wondered if we’d made a mistake. Faced with an abundance of empty space we would now have to fill up with all manner of things to make a home function, all from scratch, our stomachs took a flip. Forget pots and pans and kitchen gadgets, shower curtains and bathmats and towels, pillows and sheets and comforters—we had big furniture to buy. Oh, the horror of it all, not to mention the shock of the sudden expense. Had we thought this through? A bedframe and a mattress, living room furniture, a kitchen table set, a television, a washer and dryer, a lawn mower. Where do you start? How did we become such consumers?

We did our best to find used goods through locals on the move and thrift stores, but it still felt over-consumptive, a practice we had been so recently thrilled to have become no part of. Because it was still the tail end of an era where shipped goods were bogged down and yearlong delays were common, the stuff we ordered took months to arrive, trickling in at a random pace. Every other day, we’d return home to find a package on our doorstep. One of us would look at the label while the other guessed the contents of our latest arrival, what perceived hole this shiny new object would fill.

On month number three, Lee and I sat in our living room one night with a bottle of wine. A wooden tray from Bed Bath and Beyond sat between us. Ensconced in our collapsible travel chairs in an otherwise empty room, I turned to Lee. “You know we’re essentially camping, don’t you? We hardly need a house to do this!” We talked about how we might be setting ourselves up for comfort or simply setting ourselves up for a repeat of the past. “What if we want to go live abroad for a year or go back to being nomads?” Lee asked me. I shrugged my shoulders. The stuff of life should be simple pleasures like watching a sunset, having a riveting conversation with a friend, a beautiful meal with family. We sat silent for a moment, wondering what it was we actually possessed in that moment, in our new “shipwreck.” We had shelter. And a set of digits for UPS trucks and delivery people to bring us all our new stuff, one package at a time.

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Mary Corbin is a writer and artist based in San Francisco and a graduate of California College of the Arts. An arts columnist for 48 Hills, she is also a content contributor to publications around the Bay Area. She published her first nonfiction book in 2021 and a debut short story collection, Life Lines, was published in September 2023. marycorbinwrites.com

I ripped my wedding album apart last night. Page by page, tore out the photos that I cherish, left the repeats for refuse. I opened each leaf and pulled back the plastic that stuck to the adhesive onto which the pictures were mounted, wielding destruction that imbued me with a feeling of power. By the end, the giant white album—the spine of which had already cracked—was completely demolished. What was left was a three-inch tall stack of photos that I love, of people whom I love, taken by a friend whom I love, and the remnants of a day, 31 years ago, one of the happiest days of my life. 

Here were my parents, young and still alive. Here were my college besties, who have been by my side for every major event, happy and sad, throughout my life. Here was my sister, looking grown up. Here were my new in-laws, happy and beaming, lovingly welcoming me into their family. Here were all the people who were important, blessing us as we stepped together onto the glass to begin our bright new life together.

But the album had to go—along with the 40 other photo albums that take up four shelves in my bookcases. I also tore apart the honeymoon album, the baby albums, the albums of our lives before we had children, the albums of our lives after each of our three children were born. There were our own baby albums, and albums with photos from our teen and young adult years, before we met and decided to share our lives. There were bar and bat mitzvah albums, travel albums—from trips we had taken together and those that my husband took when he traveled internationally for work. There was the scrapbook of the demolition and rebuilding of our home. And the album for the baby who lived five days. 

The hard, desiccated shells now all sit in a pile by my table, looking war-torn. The pictures that sat in their pages are now aligned in neat piles, each album’s worth held together with a rubber band and a Post-it that notes the date span of the photos. They are being prepped for a new mode of existence: I am preparing to digitize my family’s memories. 

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Photographs connect us to our past and our future. They force us to stop and take a close look at what surrounds us. The photographer does this with the camera lens, framing a piece of the story revealing itself around them. The punctum—that small detail in the picture which captures the eye of the viewer and tells the story that is unfolding around the subject—is the key to photographic memory. We all look for the punctum in our lives, that which is the core to our story. 

In my house growing up there was a large, black and white photo of Coney Island, taken in the 1930s. It had been taken by my grandfather, a well-known twentieth century photographer, who died when my mother was two. The frame that held the photo was gold and ornate and the glass was dusty, obscuring the extraordinary detail of the picture—the water lapping the beach shore, the people wading, the sunlight hitting the rock jetty, glinting in the afternoon heat. You can’t see the bathing garb of the people, removing any time stamp; it could have been taken yesterday, or in 1932. The same picture hung over the fireplace in the home of my cousins. There wasn’t a particular punctum in the photo itself, but its very existence told a story, and it connected in ways to my family that I wouldn’t understand for many years. When my mother died, I took the photo, had it reframed and hung it in my own living room, where it reminds me that I have a story to uncover. 

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My husband was our family archivist. He captured the most important moments in our lives together, as well as the mundane. He always had a camera with him; he died before the advent of the ubiquitous iPhone camera. I am grateful for the memories of our family captured in the albums he lovingly collated. He was a scrapbooker, and our albums include not only pictures but also cards and other ephemera that came as part of those times. Sonograms and baby announcements. Response cards from our wedding. Specs and plans from our house build. Sympathy cards when our infant son died.

When I was growing up, my mother documented our family life. I have vivid memories of my mother ordering copies of the best pictures to send to our grandmother and our aunt. When we visited their homes, those photos were sometimes out in frames, sometimes in other photo albums. It made us feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves. 

But those photos stopped short when I was 13 and my sister was eight. Our parents were fighting. Our mother no longer seemed interested in taking pictures. Once she moved out of our house, all photography ended. There is one picture each of our high school and college graduations. 

My own family’s photo documentation didn’t stop when my husband died, six years ago, because we live in the age of the selfie. My three children take hundreds of pictures of themselves and their friends. I, too, use my phone to document my life. But when asked, my children are not interested in the photo albums. They see them as clunky and archaic. They’re not yet reviewing the past the way that I am. For them it is still too raw, too recent, too painful. They need to look forward. 

As do I. Which is why the remnants of my wedding album now sit atop a pile of several dozen albums that have been similarly shredded over the course of an obsessive few days. I am leaving this house soon, and I cannot take these relics of my former life where I am going. Not only because they weigh too much and take up too much space, but also because I am leaving to start a new life with a new person. A person who loves me for everything I am, and knows that I had a life before we met, but who doesn’t need that life sitting on our shared bookshelves. 

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My mother never showed us any childhood pictures when we were growing up. Her mother died when she was in her early teens, and we grew up with no family lore, no family pictures. Only secrets to unravel. Only the knowledge that our grandfather had been a photographer. We didn’t see the irony in the lack of a pictorial story from our mother’s childhood, nor did we understand the pain she lived with for the rest of her life, being orphaned at 13. She blocked it out by focusing on the photographic annals of my sister and me, documenting what came after. 

When my mother died, my cousin sent a spray of beautiful white flowers. We hadn’t been in touch since I was a child. We began to reconnect, slowly. Eventually I traveled to see her in Santa Barbara. She picked me up at the train station and we fell into each other’s arms, filled with love and delight. She drove me up the twisting roads into the mountains, where she and her husband live in a bungalow whose entryway is framed by riotous pink bougainvillea. As we stepped into the living room, whose windows open to mountains and ocean competing for the view, I gasped. My eyes were drawn immediately to the photo of Coney Island hanging on the wall. It looked smaller in this intimate space than it had during our childhoods, but there it was, marking the connection between my cousin’s life and mine. The hole in my life that had existed for decades—the hole my mother left in her wake, her physical and emotional absence, and the absence of her own family lore—felt filled by this one photograph, which was reaching across thousands of miles and generations to remind me of where I belonged. 

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My children will not have that empty hole needing to be filled. They have enough photographs for ten lifetimes. They have the stories. Someday, they will want to see our wedding pictures, and there they will be, available with a few clicks. They will want to see the joy in our faces on the days they were born, or on a family trip to Disneyland. At a school concert or a varsity baseball game. It will all be there, easily accessible from anywhere, a punctum to the memories that today are buried in pursuit of adulthood and other avenues. But it will call to them, and the gutting of the physical books that I undertook—hurting my back and hands as well as my heart in the process—will have been worth it. 

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Karen Paul is a writer in Takoma Park, MD, and the principal of Catalyzing Philanthropy, a fundraising and development consultancy. She is working on a memoir about her grief and trauma as a caretaker for a spouse with terminal brain cancer and her ensuing widowhood. She has had essays and short stories published in the New York Times/Modern Love, Washington Post, Lilith Magazine, Boston Globe, San Antonio Review, Pangyrus, Modern Loss, Motherwell, Red Wheelbarrow, Seltzer, Heartscapes and the two-volume pandemic collection, When We Turned Within. Karen graduated with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

My parents never acted like we were poor. They always made sure we had new school clothes in the fall (put on layaway in May and paid for in installments over the summer) and bikes and Hot Wheels and board games, puzzles and books. Of course, the toys that everyone wanted were the painted plastic action figures and detailed replicas of Star Wars TIE Fighters. But I never had any of those.

Two years younger than me, my little sister had several My Little Ponies, Strawberry Shortcake collections and a basic Barbie. We concocted our own games, practicing a Wonder Woman spin and lassoing one another to tell the truth, but I’d also braid the ponies’ manes (much better than Barbie’s unruly blonde locks). Care Bears were somehow the gender-neutral toy choice; we both received a few at Christmas, helping us to imagine an alternate universe where little bears with special powers saved the world again and again.

Everything changed when we went to visit Uncle Buck. We’d moved our mobile home from the Air Force base in Tampa, Florida to a trailer park in Wichita Falls, a small town in north Texas. This trailer park felt very different. Here, we’d sneak into abandoned trailers with our parents to scrounge around. As they’d look for spare parts, my sister and I fished green pennies from the heating grates or listened for kittens in the insulation below the hollow floors. The drunk next door tossed out empty bottles along with wooden whiskey boxes, which we collected for our colored pencils and crayons. We wandered through the mesquite trees and scrub, picking up rocks for my collection, until I got stung by a scorpion and became scared of the weird wildness that could suddenly become too real.

By this time, my fourth-grade friends were amassing shoeboxes full of G.I. Joes and keeping Mattel in profits by buying up Skeletor’s pals to battle He-Man’s crew, and Transformers had captured our imaginations. I told everyone I didn’t need the junk.

“It’s just marketing,” I said. I’m not sure how I figured this out, but I’d discerned the scheme behind the cartoons and commercials and decided I would be above it. “I’m not going to waste your money on that plastic stuff,” I told my parents, letting them off the hook before they even tried to provide me with the toys all the kids coveted.

Perhaps it was a way to be the mature one, sensing that cash was tight, to avoid any potential shame upon them. My parents had four kids by the time they were 30. Mom had applied for WIC, which paid for some of the groceries each month. We learned to like Kix cereal (the “healthy” choice the welfare coupons covered) instead of Trix, and I decided I’d even try to make my own money, so I began selling wrapping paper, cards, and other novelty items offered by a catalog that conscripted me into its army of sellers.

Buck wasn’t actually our uncle. He was my mother’s mother’s cousin, but we called him Uncle Buck. He and his wife Mickie, both avid collectors, lived about two hours away in a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth. As our only kin in the region, we began to visit this childless middle-aged couple, who enjoyed the new energy under their roof. They had a condo, which seemed extremely modern and cool, with its trash compactor instead of a garbage can, plus a fitness center with a steam room and jacuzzi.

Mickie’s mass of clowns dominated their two-bedroom condo. Clown memorabilia covered two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, organized and dusted and arranged in neat rows. There were sad clowns, happy clowns, hobo clowns, circus clowns and Italian harlequin court jesters. The expensive Lladro pastel porcelain pieces were on lower shelves at eye level. Lithographs of “Weary Willie” were hung with care. As the adults droned on about some current event, my sister and I would scour the shelves, careful not to touch or tumble, since we’d been warned time and again: “Don’t break the clowns!”

The first time Uncle Buck gave us toys, we didn’t know what had happened. It wasn’t our birthday. It wasn’t Christmas. But suddenly my sister had seven Peaches ‘n Cream Barbies and I had a handful of GoBots. The sentient robot toys were like Transformers but seemed slightly cheaper since their details weren’t as defined and their names were less complicated. They still took some skill in manipulating—which impressed the clumsy adults—so despite all my previous denials, I was thrilled to get these toys.

“Say thank you,” my mom instructed. We did, hugging Uncle Buck and Mickie, who beamed with wide grins of pride. More and more toys showed up—a Rainbow Brite doll and a bunch of plush Pound Puppies—but we never questioned our boon. We had moved out of the mobile home and into a two-story townhouse on the military base. Now, we were inviting friends over to play with our bounty of treasures.

When it was time for the next show-and-tell, I decided I’d take a few of my GoBots to school to brag. Mrs. Thompson, my fourth-grade teacher, was my favorite. She was new to the profession, a pretty blonde Texan eager to shape young minds. I spent hours doing extra credit, practicing my cursive on pages of notebook paper since Mrs. Thompson always rewarded our hard work. She handed out stickers for grades, oversized chocolate bars for perfect attendance and no misconduct. We got pencils, erasers, even crisp one-dollar bills for doing good. I loved the praise Mrs. Thompson heaped on me and, as a young overachiever who joined the morning crossing guard crew and recruited my pals to Young Astronauts, doing extra homework was a no-brainer.

Previously, I brought in prized polished stones or one of my mayonnaise jar bug habitats. But today I was proud to exhibit my gang of GoBots. “My Uncle Buck lives in Irving, a part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” I began, invoking the metropolitan moniker that was sure to impress everyone, since Wichita Falls didn’t have much claim to fame other than being in the path of the Terrible Tuesday tornadoes a decade before. “His wife has a humongous collection of clowns, and he got me these GoBots that he discovered at his job at the landfill.”

I’d been told about the landfill, and it seemed like a magical place. I imagined Buck, a big, grizzled man with a salt-and-pepper five o’clock shadow and wraparound shades, maneuvering his bulldozer through grassy mounds. He poked around with his machinery and uncovered buried treasure. As he explained it, lots of the department stores discarded tons of perfectly good toys and other things because their boxes were slightly damaged. They ended up at this landfill, and Buck was lucky enough to salvage them. It made perfect sense to me: My toys were even more special because they’d been rescued from destruction.

I don’t remember if the class reacted to my story; most likely they were bored and jealous and didn’t much care what I was saying. But after I finished, I saw the look of concern in Mrs. Thompson’s eyes.

“Jerry, do you understand what you said up there?” she asked. “Do you know what a landfill is?”

“Sure,” I replied. “It’s the place where all these toys are just sitting for someone to find.”

“Not quite,” she said.

I was confused, squirming in the uncomfortable position of having disappointed my teacher in some unfathomable way. I’d said something that was neither going to get me a sticker nor a chocolate bar. I was afraid to find out my error, felt ashamed that I’d somehow violated some unspoken rule.

When I informed Mom after school, she didn’t seem too concerned, but she also wasn’t happy with me either. “Don’t share things about the family with other people,” she instructed. “That’s our business. You don’t need to tell other people about anything that has to do with the family.” It was a lesson she’d tried to teach before, but I was all about sharing. Until I began to surmise that sharing the wrong information with the wrong people could somehow mean you would be judged—or worse—a lesson that would plague me for years to come.

The GoBots seemed tainted now. I couldn’t play with them without thinking that they’d come from some dirty place, gotten by ill means. I noticed that they were slightly chipped, not quite perfect. I felt betrayed by Uncle Buck and didn’t want to accept any more of his ill-gotten plunder, explaining that I’d outgrown such childish trinkets. My sister’s collection ballooned, and I wanted to warn her: “Beware of the Barbies!” They also had defects, but we’d managed to overlook them, not worrying that the makeup was smudged or a taffeta skirt ripped. Now, everything seemed sullied. It had all been transmuted into what it had always been—just junk.

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Jerry Portwood is a writer and editor living in West Harlem in New York City. He was recently the Digital Editorial Director at Rolling Stone, Executive Editor at Out magazine, and Editor in Chief of New York Press. He's a long time instructor at the New School's writing program.

Over the last three hectic years, we busy professionals—especially working parents like me—have been drubbed with the same phrase over and over from seemingly well-intentioned people: “Don't forget self-care!” Unfortunately, this admonition can have the opposite effect of what’s intended, transforming from kindly advice into another failed task on a growing heap of failed tasks. Self-care requires extra time and money, two things that are in short supply, which is kind of the point; if we had extra time and money for self-care, we wouldn't need as much self-care. To enjoy a hot bath after the workweek, I'd have to wake up before my kids get up and scrub the bath.

In early 2023, despite being three years out from the start of the COVID pandemic, things are not back to normal, although some folks pretend they are, urging workers back to the office. It’s not just that people are grieving loved ones or may still be sick themselves. It’s also that there are fewer resources to help busy parents. The babysitting room at my local gym, for instance, used to be a great way for Mom and Dad to sneak in a workout on the weekend without planning for a sitter. But the room, which my kids always loved playing in, closed a week into the pandemic and will never reopen, the gym owners decided. I used to sit on a bench in the locker room on Saturdays and make my “to do” list before running on the treadmill. It was a healthy way to recharge from the workweek.

However, over the last few hectic and unpredictable years, I discovered a self-care method that barely requires time or money.

I've discovered the Joy of Sox.

Every few months, I look forward to ordering a new "gourmet" pair.

The idea took root during a last-minute stock-up trip to the supermarket three years ago, as news of the coming pandemic grew dire. I knew I’d spend a lot of time inside. I was doing triple duty: advocating for an elderly relative in a nursing home, preparing to help my kids with remote learning, and working full-time at home writing local news. Self-care was not a priority.

But as I zigzagged through the supermarket with my cart, I threw a glance down the housewares aisle, the one full of items that always seem out of place at a supermarket (would you like light bulbs and panties to go with your Limburger cheese?)

I noticed an item I hadn't seen before: "Campfire socks,” the label said. They were thicker than any socks I’d seen, red wool with designs of reindeer and mountains. They were gaudy and severely unfashionable, with round rubber pads on the bottom to prevent slipping -- but they also looked comfortable and warm.

I love nature, and knew I wouldn’t be taking any trips to the mountains soon. I held the thick socks in my hands. They were cheerful and soothing. Wearing these "campfire socks" might be like toasting my feet by the fire. For a mere $5.99, I could imagine myself into the outdoors.

I have always preferred slow, simple pleasures to grand, superficial ones: a soft chair, colored pens, the promise of a page to fill on a quiet day.

So I brought the socks home to my 660-square-foot apartment in my small city outside New York. I had already carved out a cozy corner to decompress and read -- not a mom cave as much as a patch of what the Danish call hygge and the Norwegians call Koselig. It’s got a reclining chair, an industrial floor lamp to shed a warm glow, a wood cubby full of sketchbooks and colored pens, and an Ottoman for a weary parent (or child) to rest their feet. It could use one more amenity.

I rolled up the campfire socks and tucked them into the corner of the cubby. When I pulled them on during a winter afternoon, they reminded me of a weighted blanket, like hugs to my feet. It was the ultimate in relaxation.

I wondered what other sorts of heavy socks were out there, and I surveyed the footwear landscape.

Unsurprisingly, outerwear and camping-gear companies offer the widest selection of warm women's socks. For fancy folks, Ugg makes a red-and-white striped version with pom-poms for $50. But after sampling the wares, I found a true winner in terms of warmth and comfort: L.L. Bean adult Cresta Wool, desert rose (a warm red), midweight crew, for $19.95. When I washed them, the sides shrunk into an hourglass shape that perfectly conformed to the contours of my feet. They were snug, but didn’t require extra tugging to pull on. They felt just right.

I ordered two more pairs, because once you find something that fits, you don't want to lose it. 

When the holidays rolled around, I thought of a solitary friend of mine in her late forties who had left home in the Northeast to isolate herself Out West and try to write her first book. She had spent almost an entire year there. Before that, when she’d lived a few hours north of me, we would text each other excitedly whenever a snowstorm or nor’easter was bearing down. We’d celebrate the impeding time to write and read by texting the words: “Comfy sock alert!” A pair of bookish friends, we didn’t know if anyone else would understand our joy.

Now, I wondered if she was feeling lonely in her adopted town. I figured she could use a pick-me-up.

Without telling her, I ordered her a pair of my beloved red Cresta Wool socks, size M.

I wasn’t sure if she’d find the gift strange.

“Love them!!!” she texted me out of the blue a few days before Christmas, on Dec. 22. “As far as I’m concerned, that is the mark of a true friend: Someone who sends you cozy socks!”

People who say “Don't forget self-care!” may not realize how much work it takes to set up that self-care. But anticipation is a form of self-care too. If you know there’s a small joy coming down the pike, it can lighten your load. These days, I’m still navigating the “new normal,” still advocating for older relatives, and trying to keep everyone safe. But I look forward to carving out an hour or two each week to sink into my hygge hideaway. When I do, I feel grateful for the three things I want most: family, good health, and warm feet.

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Caren Lissner's nerdy first novel, Carrie Pilby, was adapted into a romantic comedy starring Nathan Lane that's currently streaming on Netflix. She's a journalist by day, covering social issues and New Jersey politics, and by night is finishing her (hopefully) hygge-inducing next novel, which takes place in New England in winter. Her personal essays and satire have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, McSweeney's, and LitHub. Read more of her writing at carenlissner.com and enjoy her photos of New Jersey and New England life at @carenlissner on Instagram.