In ripping the house apart, I always come across the 'keepsakes'.
I am a woman of many mementos.
I have filled boxes with the small things; a stack of fortunes from fortune cookies, movie tickets, thank you cards, birthday wishes, dried flowers, printed emails ... engagement rings.
All things that mean more than their material value, yet worth their weight in gold - I hold tight.
In my jewelry box, a keepsake gift from a lost love (Japanese inscription and custom music of Beethoven's Fur Elise), I have two letters my mother wrote to her grandmother. One is from when she was a child, the other is from when she first met my father. Aside from Nino's baby hair and wrist band from the hospital, they are the most precious items I own. I think it's what started the hoarder in me ... in fact I am sure of it.
After she died, I felt I had a small piece of her, her very own words ... a window for me to peer through. They were so important to me, that I began hoarding my own words, memories, items of great import. I began to think "If I leave this world, I want my son to have this to remember."
I have no doubt there will be things Nino will look at with a question mark in his heart ... but I think this is the magic of keep sakes ... the wondering. The opportunity to imagine something about the person that kept it, why was it important to them, what does it say about that person?
A mother's heart is a deep ocean of secrets.
No one person can ever truly acquaint themselves with every depth. The water of her emotion fill cracks that are not visible to the eye... only to the heart. There are parts of her so silent ... that they are but a whisper in the center of her iris. Her eye lids - are a mussel that muffles the tsunami of her em-ocean.
I'm hopin' ... one day my mementos will tell my son the story that never had words ... and finally the keep sakes will be heard.
