Uncurated Keepsakes

Many of us have trouble parting with old clothes, toys, or games from childhood, papers from college, single gloves that have long since lost their mates, and empty perfume bottles still heady with scent. We keep them because they still transmit an aura of pleasure, or importance. Our eyes love to look at them. They haven’t faded into generic oblivion. We refuse to part with them because they keep us whole. They are our history, kept close at hand, available to open up and touch once more.

I keep such objects in a drawer with no name, a drawer filled with oddities, like some old Victorian cabinet of curiosities. The long ago and far away, in time and in space, are all inside that drawer. Some items linger by pure accident, others by sheer tenacity. The drawer exudes an undeniable power even though its contents are not organized. It’s a private place. I go there to reach in and touch the familiar shapes. So reassuring. They’re still there. And so am I.

My drawer of uncurated keepsakes contains two much-used, but now out-of-date passports. Some French francs from the time before the euro. A handkerchief with a map of Wiesbaden, Germany, printed on its crisp, perpetually folded cotton square; my eyes immediately catch the name of the street where we lived. A silver filigree pin from Portugal that belonged to my sister.

A little jewel case nestles in one corner, containing a few rhinestone barrettes from when I had long hair and one large aquamarine bead from a necklace (long gone) that belonged to my great-grandmother. A tube of lipstick that no longer opens. A teal silk scarf Jack bought me in Florence. A sachet filled with lavender made by a girlfriend as a birthday present. Two or three unidentifiable rocks considered important enough to keep. A twisted, velvety wisteria pod from either last year or last decade. A silk rose that belonged to my aunt, which she wore pinned to a favorite sweater—I like to pick it up to feel its soft faded texture. There’s a thin, elaborately tooled leather wallet my father bought in Morocco when I was a kid. No one has ever used it, but it’s finely made so why get rid of it? And there’s a plastic bracelet that used to glow in the dark. Now it doesn’t. A pair of 3D movie glasses. Tickets from trips to Europe, the theater, and the opera. A tiny manicure case made of beautiful red leather that doesn’t open. And a single cotton glove without a mate.

There’s also a box of nine squares of rock salt, each a slightly different color due to the differing amounts of minerals in them, from a childhood tour of the salt mines under Salzburg, Austria. My mother, father, sister, and I had to put on industrial overalls and slide down a long chute into the mine, where we visited a dozen chambers dug into the glittering crystalline rock. There is no file cabinet with a drawer for cubes of forty-year-old salt memorabilia, so it sits in the unnamed, all-purpose, uncurated keepsakes drawer.

Do I really need to keep old theater tickets? Old recital programs? Brochures from a remote museum I will never visit again? A ribbon trim from something I absolutely cannot identify or remember? Why not? Even if they’ve become dislodged from their own stories, from their original owners or ancestry, they have gained a new life as residents of this drawer. They have taken on a different narrative as objects somehow, and probably for no particular reason, they are important to me. I treasure them enough not to toss them away. When I open that drawer and see them there, I am situated reliably in a place I can recognize as home. If they’re all still here, so am I.