Artifacts

I like walking through old houses, the kind that are open for the public to wander through for a fee.  If I am with a group, I hang back so that I can really look at each room and what is in it.  I try to imagine the lives of the people  who lived there based on what they left behind:  a dressing table filled with atomizers and potion bottles, a silver backed brush and comb; shelves filled with glass jars instead of books, a mortar and pestle on a table;  a scrubbed wooden work table in a kitchen, a cradle in the corner near a window with a rag doll resting inside, an apron on a peg.

What does my house say about me?.  It is not beautiful.  There are three bedrooms and seven people.  None of the rooms would ever be featured in a home decorating magazine. Most of the furniture is old and scarred. The sofa fabric was chosen with two things in mind: dirt and durability. It is a heavy brown tweed, not pretty, but clean, comfortable, and sturdy. I tend to decorate with things from nature:  plants, lots of plants; a cage full of birds; flowers or fruit on the table; a row of shells on a window sill; paper snowflakes and stars hung on the winter windows, a group of smooth stones on a bookshelf. There is a castle, a pirate ship, and the Bat Cave lined up neatly on a low play shelf.  There are books from the library, piles of them on end tables and on the hall chair seat. There is a basket overflowing with knitting tucked under a table. My ancient desk, with its drawers filled with writing paper, stamps, and wax seals, a cat sleeping on its chair. What does this say about me?

One day when my husband was cleaning out his closet I saw that he had kept every card I had ever given him. They were in a stack on our bed:  the Valentine I painted when I was nineteen; the syrupy poems I wrote to him;  the love letters; the birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas cards.  "I didn't know you kept all these," I said.  He just smiled, and told me to stay out of his stuff.

I keep things, too. I have an odd collection of bits that people have given me,  and which my heart has declared treasure:  a tiny carved hedgehog from an old pen pal, a miniature English cottage that a friend in England hand-painted, a blue and white cat-shaped milk pitcher from Holland that was my grandmother's,...and, every letter that I have ever received--hundreds of them--, boxes and binders full of sheets of paper and postcards and small scraps with other people's words upon them; their messages to me.

A police officer I know once told me that you can learn a lot about a person from going through his trash.  But, I think you can learn even more from the things that people hold onto.

What are the things that you keep?