After twenty years of collecting miscellaneous memories in disparate spots and stringing them together into a vibrant tapestry of youth, the parental house will be sold, cardboard boxes abound around everywhere, to be filled with a restructured story of the past, like layers of sediment, packing different ages closely together. I ask myself, should that stay, or should it go? And what about all the other souvenirs I’ve hidden in each their own nook and cranny?

Things to keep. 

The old clear glass bottle topped by a chopped piece of broken of cork, filled with hundreds of bright yellow balls, the pellets from an airsoft gun, which I meticulously gathered as a little boy in the streets of some senescent community in Burgundy, unaware of their origin, and instead imagining them to be the traces of another story, the scattered remains of another little boys playtime, which, so that it would never be forgotten, I gathered and kept on the chestnut shelf of my bedroom.

The never worn but timeworn Venetian mask, handcrafted overlooking the canals to resemble a threatening dragon with slit slithering tongue that stills shows specks of white where the carmine red paint flaked of years ago, when it fell from its brass hook to the floor at the dead night with a deadening bang, jolting me awake with such fright and confusion that I wouldn’t sleep again until sunrise.

The ensemble of four Japanese samurai in richly painted kimono, heavy as lead, joined by a quartet of Gods most at home in the Indian heat, one with extra arms, another resembling an elephant, next to a pair of purple and pink capirotes of Andalusian baked clay, in turn flanked by a medieval duo, nickel shiny as silver, the first a horned helmet viking, the second a violent knight bereft of his horse, above a slew of pastel pigmented wisemen, Chinese in make, betrayed by carefully glazed ceramic robes.

Things left behind.

The blackbirds in the trees across our quiet street, singing each spring to announce the sun’s arrival, and familiar with our ways they sit peering through the glass, perched upon the windowsill, there to request a dried bread crust or cheese rind for the chicks in their nests. 

The generous and fertile earth that bore me plentiful harvests at the end of summer, from strings of hefty pumpkins and honeydews fit to burst, to potent peppers perfect to prank a friend, and potatoes of which you would always fail to find all, sprouting anew the next season, called for or not.

The windowpanes that would rumble every New Years celebration, when Dad would push his otherwise so respectable amplifier and loudspeakers to unheard volumes, blasting deep bass sound waves through the glass and launching friends and family alike dancing into the air.