A few weeks ago, my husband decided to clear out the basement for the third time since we moved into our home nearly four years ago. As we began The Great Sort Out of 2017, boxes and bins I’d shoved and forgotten behind old picture frames and stacks of throw pillows made an appearance. We found our wedding album stashed away with the few photos left over from my childhood. On the highest shelf, we re-discovered three small, nearly empty bins I’d set aside for each of our kids’ keepsakes. I found most of their keepsakes–tiny pre-school t-shirts, stacks of drawings, and pottery pieces shaped like fairies or snakes–sitting in forlorn piles next to half-empty paint cans.
For days, I snatched moments here and there to flip through an album or rifle through old school papers with German vocabulary words from the kids’ school in Switzerland. There is nothing more bittersweet then realizing the keepsakes of motherhood are no longer of the fingerprint and ceramic variety, but rather memories you file away and watch unfold again and again from behind closed eyes.
As we shuffled things from one spot to another, I discovered a box filled with photographs I’d torn from my favorite home and interior design magazines. I began the collection fifteen years ago, long before Pinterest made its debut. We lived in London, and I was the mother of a toddler and had another little one on the way. I remember the quiet days of life with one child and an increasingly round belly, with the soft British lilt of cartoons on the tv keeping me company, while the rain tracked patterns down the windows. I sat with a cup of tea and a few biscuits, and every week, I carefully tore out sheet after sheet. Photos of baked bread, English gardens, and toile wallpaper rose up to greet me. With each page I saved, I’d planned for a life I didn’t yet live, creating a home I could only see in my mind’s eye. A home filled with children, home cooked meals, whitewashed french furniture, candlelight, and vintage china.
One afternoon recently, I gave myself the gift of a few hours with my younger, fanciful self, and I sat down to look through all of the paper and ink dreams I collected over the course of fifteen years. The memories hit me with a wave of longing for the girl I used to be, and with each turn of the page, I felt my affection for her grow. How rare and sweet to discover I love her and her dreams, however unrealistic. I never did bake that bread, and my version of an English garden exists only in my imagination. But, I see the current, middle-aged me sitting there beside her, in waiting. How unexpected to realize that she birthed forty-year-old me into being.
All of the worn pages my younger self tore out, all of the days spent dreaming of the future, all of the long walks to the antique shops to search for bargains, all of the recipes collected, the books read to squirming children, the tea cups filled to brimming– they created more than a few memories boxed in the basement. They created the life I wake up to every morning. Much to my surprise, my imagined-future became a living, breathing reality. The location is different than I expected, as are the ruts and detours we’ve encountered along the way, but the essence captured by my collection is alive in our home and our hearts today.
