What We Keep

There are things I own that would make absolutely no sense to anybody else.

A note in somebody’s handwriting.

A recipe card with a stain on the corner.

A photograph that is not particularly well taken.

A piece of jewelry that is not especially valuable.

A song I cannot hear without immediately being somewhere else.

None of those things would impress an appraiser.

But I would know exactly what they are worth.

That is the strange thing about what we keep.

The object is rarely the important part.

What matters is what got attached to it.

A smell.

A voice.

A person.

A version of ourselves.

A day we did not know would become important while we were living it.

We keep things because human beings seem to have this instinctive need to give memory somewhere physical to live.

Maybe that is why people save concert tickets.

Or the hospital bracelet from the day their child was born.

Or the dried flower from a funeral.

Or a voicemail they cannot bring themselves to delete.

Or the old shirt that should have been thrown away twelve years ago but somehow continues surviving every closet cleanout.

We know perfectly well it is just a shirt.

Until it isn’t.

There is probably a whole category of objects in every house that nobody else is allowed to throw away because the owner will suddenly materialize from three rooms away shouting, “WAIT! I NEED THAT!”

Do you?

Absolutely not.

But that is beside the point.

We are not always keeping the thing.

Sometimes we are keeping the person who touched it.

Sometimes we are keeping the life we had when it mattered.

Sometimes we are keeping proof that something happened at all.

I think about handwriting.

There is something about seeing the handwriting of someone you love that feels almost impossibly personal after they are gone.

Not the words.

The handwriting.

The way they made an R.

The strange little loop in their Y.

The way the letters leaned.

Something their hand did automatically thousands of times while they were alive suddenly becomes precious because that hand will never write another word.

That transformation fascinates me.

One day it is a grocery list.

Years later, you would frame it.

Milk.

Bread.

Eggs.

Love.

Human beings are remarkable that way.

We can turn the most ordinary evidence of someone’s existence into treasure.

Recipes do that too.

Families pass down recipes as though they are instructions for food, but they rarely are just that.

A recipe can contain an entire kitchen.

You can almost hear cabinets closing.

Smell something simmering.

See the apron.

Remember who always stole a bite before dinner.

One bite of something made exactly the way somebody used to make it and suddenly thirty years disappear.

You are not tasting dinner anymore.

You are eight years old.

That is what memory does.

It hides inside things.

Music may be the greatest hiding place of all.

There are songs that have no idea what they are carrying.

A songwriter sat somewhere and wrote something about their own life, released it into the world, and then millions of strangers attached completely different lives to it.

Now that song belongs to weddings.

Road trips.

First dances.

Funerals.

Breakups.

Summer nights.

Long drives home.

Someone’s mother singing in the kitchen.

Someone’s father turning the radio up.

Someone sitting beside a hospital bed.

Someone falling in love.

Someone realizing they have fallen out of it.

Three minutes of music can become a filing cabinet for an entire decade.

You hear the first few notes and the drawer opens.

There you are.

Music has always done that to me.

Maybe more than anything else.

I have spent so much of my life around music that songs do not merely remind me of periods of my life. Sometimes they seem to contain them.

I can hear something and remember what the room looked like.

Who was there.

What I believed then.

What I did not know yet.

That last part gets me sometimes.

The things we did not know yet.

Old photographs carry that too.

You look at yourself smiling in some picture from twenty years ago and think, Oh, honey. You have no idea what is coming.

Sometimes that thought is funny.

Sometimes it is heartbreaking.

Sometimes you want to reach through the photograph and hug the person you used to be.

Sometimes you want to shake her.

Occasionally both.

But we keep the picture.

Because even if we are no longer that person, she belongs to us.

That version mattered.

She made choices.

Made mistakes.

Loved people.

Trusted the wrong ones.

Trusted the right ones.

Survived things.

Created things.

Eventually became us.

We keep pieces of our former selves too.

That may be one of the most overlooked kinds of keeping.

A person does not disappear simply because we changed.

Every age we have ever been is still somewhere inside us.

The child.

The teenager.

The young adult who thought she understood the world.

Bless her heart.

The person we were before a particular loss.

The person we were before someone walked into our life.

The person we were before the phone call.

Before the diagnosis.

Before the opportunity.

Before we knew better.

Before we became responsible for things we never imagined carrying.

We bring all of them with us.

Not equally.

Not consciously.

But they are there.

And then there are the people we keep.

Not literally, of course.

Life has a terrible habit of eventually making that impossible.

But people leave pieces of themselves everywhere.

A phrase you start saying because they always said it.

A recipe you make their way.

A song you love because they introduced you to it.

A habit you picked up without realizing it.

A joke you still tell.

A way of folding towels.

A certain expression that suddenly comes out of your mouth and makes everybody in the room say, “Oh my God, you sounded exactly like your mother.”

There it is.

Inheritance nobody writes into a will.

We become little museums of the people we have known.

Some exhibits are obvious.

Others are tucked into corners.

There are people whose influence we carry without thinking about them every day.

A teacher who made us believe we were good at something.

A grandparent who taught us how to make biscuits.

A friend who taught us what loyalty feels like.

Someone who hurt us and therefore taught us what we would never again accept.

Not every inheritance is pleasant.

Some lessons arrive beautifully.

Others break the door down.

We keep those too.

We carry boundaries built from old wounds.

Wisdom paid for with embarrassment.

Instincts sharpened by mistakes.

Compassion created because we know what it feels like to need some.

Even pain can leave us something useful if we refuse to let pain be the only thing it leaves.

That does not mean everything happens for a reason.

I do not believe we need to hand tragedy a job description before we are allowed to survive it.

Some things are simply awful.

Some losses do not become beautiful later.

Some wounds do not reveal themselves as secret gifts wrapped in character development.

Sometimes something terrible happened, and that is the truth.

But even then, we decide what comes with us.

That part interests me.

Because keeping is not the same as refusing to let go.

Those things get confused.

You can let go of a person and keep what they taught you.

You can leave a place and carry home with you.

You can close a chapter and keep the sentence that changed you.

You can forgive someone without forgetting what the experience taught you.

You can release the pain without surrendering the wisdom.

You can move forward without pretending the past did not happen.

There are things we are supposed to put down.

Resentment.

Shame that does not belong to us.

Other people’s definitions of who we are.

Old versions of ourselves that became cages.

Guilt over choices we made before we knew what we know now.

We do not need to keep everything simply because it happened.

Memory is not an obligation.

But there are some things worth carrying.

The sound of somebody’s laugh.

The way your father answered the phone.

The smell of your grandmother’s house.

The advice you rolled your eyes at when you were sixteen and now hear coming out of your own mouth.

The friend who knew the old version of you and somehow loves the current one too.

The person who believed in you.

The person who made you brave.

The person who taught you to laugh at yourself before life had to do it for you.

We keep moments too.

Tiny ones.

The giant moments announce themselves.

Weddings.

Births.

Graduations.

Deaths.

Those come with witnesses and photographs and dates we remember forever.

But some of the things that stay with us longest are ridiculously small.

A conversation in a car.

Someone putting their hand on your shoulder.

A look across a room.

Sitting on the porch.

A joke that got out of control.

A completely ordinary dinner when everybody happened to be there.

You did not know to take a picture.

Why would you?

Nothing was happening.

Except now you would give almost anything to sit at that table one more time.

That realization changes the way I think about ordinary life.

We are constantly living moments we will someday miss without knowing which ones they are.

That is humbling.

It makes me want to pay better attention.

Not obsessively.

I do not want to turn every Tuesday into a spiritual assignment.

Sometimes Tuesday is just Tuesday.

The dishwasher needs unloading.

Somebody cannot find the remote.

The dog has apparently chosen violence.

Life is life.

But tucked inside all that ordinary noise are things we are keeping without knowing it yet.

A voice from another room.

A certain season of somebody’s life.

The way the house sounds while everyone is still in it.

We will remember more than we realize.

And we will forget more than we want to.

That is part of why stories matter so much to me.

Stories help us keep what memory cannot hold perfectly.

That is what photographs do.

What recipes do.

What songs do.

What journals do.

What family stories told for the hundredth time do.

They say:

This happened.

This person was here.

This mattered to me.

Do not let it disappear completely.

Maybe that is part of what I am doing every time I write one of these chapters.

Keeping something.

A thought.

A person.

A moment.

A version of my life.

Something I noticed that I do not want to lose.

And maybe when someone else reads it, something in their own life comes back to them too.

Their person.

Their kitchen.

Their song.

Their ridiculous family story.

Their old photograph.

Their Tuesday.

I love that.

Because maybe what we keep is not meant to stay locked inside us.

Maybe some of it is meant to be passed along.

A recipe goes to another generation.

A story gets told to a grandchild.

A lesson becomes advice.

A song becomes somebody else’s memory.

Kindness received becomes kindness offered.

Love changes hands.

That may be one of the most beautiful ways people remain in this world.

We continue things.

We repeat things.

We pass things down.

We carry pieces of people forward into rooms they never entered.

There are people influencing decisions today who have been gone for years.

There are grandparents showing up in kitchens they never saw.

Teachers speaking through former students.

Parents appearing in the way their grown children comfort their own children.

Friends surviving in jokes.

Musicians surviving in songs.

Writers surviving in sentences.

Love is remarkably difficult to contain to one lifetime.

It leaks into everything.

And perhaps that is why what we keep matters so much.

Not because we are afraid of moving forward.

Because moving forward does not require arriving empty-handed.

We are allowed to bring things with us.

The good advice.

The terrible jokes.

The recipes.

The music.

The photographs.

The lessons.

The strength somebody lent us.

The kindness somebody showed us.

The way someone loved us.

The person we used to be.

We gather these things throughout a lifetime, most of the time without realizing we are collecting anything at all.

And somewhere along the way, they become us.

Maybe that is what a life is.

Not only what happened to us.

Not only what we accomplished.

Not only what we owned.

But what we chose to carry forward.

And what, because we carried it, gets to remain.

~ Michelle Mullins ~
Founder & Creative Director
Amplified Imagination Studios

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Every Story Becomes a Song, and Every Song Becomes a World.