It’s amazing what a gal can find when she throws on a wood Bow Tie o’ the Day to clean out a drawer of miscellany. Yup, this is my Senior Key necklace, and I present it here during Pandemic High School Graduation season. The “key” is now 40 years ancient, although it’s still in presentable shape. I didn’t consciously try to save it all this time. It just hasn’t gotten itself lost during my many moves. Here’s a brief history of where it has lived with me, in order: Delta, Ogden (3 different compartments), SLC (5 different apartments), Arlington, VA, Takoma Park, MD (1 apartment, 1 house), Delta again, Ogden again, Centerville. I know people who have moved plenty more miles than I have, but my moves still add up to a significant number of miles—across which this necklace has traveled in one piece. It has had only one owner. It has never been in a lost-and-found box.
If you’re anything like me, you have lots more stuff than you have room for, or need of. It would save time and space to not have to look after the props of our lives, yet we find it hard to let stuff go. Why do we keep things? They’re just things. They have no spirit in them. Are we afraid we’ll forget what’s happened in our lives if we get rid of them?
The memories in our brains are where the time lives. When we tell our stories, our experiences are alive again for ourselves and for whoever we’re sharing them with. We aren’t going to forget snippets of our lives if we don’t keep the props picked up along the way. But still, it so difficult to let material things go. And when we decide what stays and what goes, we each use a logic of our own—which would make no sense to someone who hasn’t lived your life, although it makes perfect sense to you. C’mon. You know you own some items whose significance you can’t begin to explain to people who don’t know you really, really, really well.
Some folks keep everything. They’re the ones who relate better to objects than to people. And sometimes we take better care of our trinkets than we do of the people we love. It shouldn’t be that way.