There Was a Life Here

I am forever picking things up.

A leaf on a walk. A scrap of paper from a café. A ticket stub. A particularly good postage stamp. A label from something I ate in France. A feather. A receipt.

Sometimes I know exactly why I want to keep something.
Often, I don't.

It just catches my attention, and before I've had time to make a reasonable decision about whether I need another tiny piece of paper in my life, I've slipped it into my pocket.

Later, it might end up tucked into a book or taped onto a journal page. It might sit in a little dish on my desk for six months. It might get moved from one pile to another until I've completely forgotten why I kept it in the first place.

And then, sometimes, I find it again.

And there I am.
Not just remembering a place or an event, but remembering something much smaller.
The table where I was sitting.
What I ordered.
The weather.
Who was with me.
The way the afternoon light came through the window.
A version of myself I had almost forgotten.

The smallest things have an astonishing ability to hold a life.

We are very good at keeping the milestones.
Birthdays. Weddings. Vacations. Graduations. The photograph in front of the monument. The beautiful dinner in the beautiful place.

We know these things are important while they're happening. We know to take the photograph. Save the invitation. Buy the postcard.

But an ordinary Tuesday?

We let Tuesday go.

And yet, increasingly, I'm convinced that Tuesday is where the good stuff is.

Not because every ordinary moment is secretly profound. I don't think it is.

Sometimes a grocery receipt is just a grocery receipt.

But sometimes you find one years later and there is your handwriting across the top. Or the name of the cereal someone in your house ate every morning for three years. Or the ridiculous price you paid for strawberries.

And suddenly you're standing in a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore.

That's the part that fascinates me.

How ordinary objects gather meaning with time.
How something completely insignificant can become a portal.
How a scrap of handwriting can contain a person.
How a photograph of the bowl that always sat on the kitchen counter can eventually matter more than the photograph you carefully posed everyone for at Christmas.

Maybe that's why I've always been a collector.
Not a collector of valuable things, particularly.
A collector of evidence.
Ticket stubs. Scraps of paper. Leaves. Labels. Postcards. Handwriting. Photographs of things no one else would think to photograph.

Little proof:
I was here.
I noticed this.
This was part of my life.

Lately I've been wondering what happens when we do this a little more deliberately.

Not with the solemn responsibility of documenting our lives. Good grief. That's too much pressure.

Just with curiosity.

What if, every once in a while, we paid attention to the evidence accumulating around us?

The things in our pockets.
The scraps on the kitchen counter.
The photograph we took for no particular reason.
The sentence scribbled on the back of an envelope.
The thing we almost threw away.
The tiny object we carried home because something in us said, keep this.

We don't need to save everything.

Please don't save everything. 😂

Maybe we tuck one scrap into a book.
Maybe we take a photograph.
Maybe we write six words in the margin of the calendar.
Maybe we put the strange little seedpod in our pocket and bring it home.
Maybe it ends up in a journal.
Maybe it doesn't.

Because perhaps the keeping isn't even the most important part.

Perhaps it's simply becoming someone who recognizes the evidence when she sees it.
Someone who understands that a life isn't made only from the things we'll put in the photo album.
It's also made from coffee rings and grocery lists.
The view from the kitchen window.
The book beside the bed.
The handwriting of someone we love.
The bowl that always held the keys.
The song we played over and over that September.
A Tuesday.

All these small, peculiar, completely ordinary things that would mean almost nothing to anyone else.

And everything to us.