Week 2 Prompt, 1 of 3

6. The stuff I've collected over the years in my little box/bureau drawer/keepsake chest marks every step of my way.

I used to collect all kinds of things.  I had a little memo pad full of stickers that I would randomly flip through and enjoy.  As a child I wanted to be an ornithologist, so I collected feathers.  Some were just regular ones - a blue jay here, a mallard's mottled neck feather there.  But then there were the thick, shining green ones that an ornithologist-turned-nurse had given me.  Or the difficult to find brightly colored yellow feather of an evening grosbeak.  I liked to collect other things from nature as well.  Fossils, sea shells, rocks.  I inherited some strange items from my great-grandmother Beulah, such as a dried out puffer fish and an abalone shell.  She died when I was 5, so I never did have the opportunity to find out where such random items had come from.  I also had quite the pen, pencil, and stationary collection.  One would think that because I collected those items I was constantly writing.  But I was actually mostly just fascinated with them visually.  The pen with blue liquid in it and a whale, damned to eternally move backwards or forwards a couple of inches.  The thick, massive pencil with dollar bill designs, too ridiculously big to actually be used for anything.  The stationary with the floral print and parrots.

All of that is gone now.  After my parents got divorced, in my college years, many things got shuffled here or there.  Children of still married parents don't realize how lucky they have it.  They can always leave their childhood memories in their old rooms, year after year while they find their place in the adult world, until parents finally get fed up and make them go through stuff.  I suddenly found myself faced with needing to find a home for a lifetime's worth of items, and nowhere to put them.  I was moving a lot, having trouble finding a job, fresh out of college.  After a year of unemployment, then another year miserable at a job, I got my assistant teaching job in Japan.  And I didn't return home to Maine for 5 years after that.  3 years in Japan, one in Massachusetts, one in New Zealand.  Except for brief visits, I never really came back for a long stay.

Most of what I owned got lost over those years and that first year of divorce.  My dad found my sea shell and nature items collection in his shed, and threw the whole thing out  (let's just say that not completely clean crab shells you find on the beach as a child don't store necessarily well).  But some of the feathers, rocks, and other items I would have wanted were gone now too.  I felt a sense of loss when he told me.  More items were sold, lost, broken, or thrown away.  I no longer had a collection of anything from when I was growing up.  The anchor to my childhood has been severed.

These days I own a lot less than I used to.  No furniture, no household items to brighten an apartment.  It's hard to say that I have a "collection" of anything.  But I've finally come back to my beloved state to stay, and I intend to hang on to those things that are precious to me.  There is my growing collection of cooking utensils.  In Japan I became a vegetarian, and since then have become much more of a cooking enthusiast than I ever was.  When I pull out my kitchen drawers, I find the random items of a budding foodie.  A pastry mat, with diameters marked for different sized pies.  Various cookie cutters - butterflies, stars, hearts, even the shape of Maine.  I doubt anyone but a Mainer would recognize the latter though.  Gifts from family members, like my immersion blender, show their acknowledgment of my new-found hobby.  A row of vegetarian cookbooks, many of them presents as well, sit along the counter.  One of the few t.v. shows I enjoy is Master Chef.  My dream is becoming a cooking master some day.  I turn from these things, warm with thoughts of becoming the ultimate foodie.

Another collection, in my closet in a small storage container, bears witness to my world travels.  Gifts from beloved colleagues and friends in Japan.  Some of these are decorations, but I somehow can't bring myself to decorate my small studio apartment with them.  I keep saying "when I own a home".  That seems so far away though.  I waste this random beauty, but can't really explain why.  Perhaps it is the tug at my heart, every time I am reminded of the people and places I left behind.  To close your eyes and see the streets of another place so clearly, but to know that it would take thousands of dollars and miles and miles to see them once again.  That has always been the pain of traveling, for me.  To love a place so thoroughly, but know that you cannot return easily to it.  Or in some cases, never to return again.  I try not to guess which places those might be.

A lovely green fan with cherry blossoms, a wire frame decorated with blue pukeko (a native bird of New Zealand), a map of Australia.  I went on vacation for a couple of weeks to Thailand, while I was living in Japan.  But there aren't any mementos in this box.  I cringe to remember that trip.  Being forgotten on a small, uninhabited island by a tour guide.  Having a man demand that I give him money while traveling in a jungle in the middle of nowhere on another tour.  No, I don't need mementos from there unfortunately.

Then there are the mementos that I keep stored in a separate container, that I can only bear to look at on occasion.  A homemade photo album from one of my sweetest, kindest students.  Photos of me standing with my adult English students at the community center in Goshogawara.  A homemade note from a student saying how much they would miss me.  I wish my personality wasn't such that I feel the bittersweetness of it all when I see such things, but at least for now it seems to be so.  Maybe some day I will be able to look at these pictures without that sad, tugging feeling in my heart.

Enough of these things though.  The only other collection that I could say I have is my books.  These days I try to use the library exclusively, to save my money and apartment space rather than collect books.  But this collection is perhaps the only one that survived the divorce, the one real reminder of my childhood.  Some books were lost along the way, but I still keep a hefty amount with me.  There are the countless fantasy novels I read while growing up.  The occasional elementary school level book that for one reason or another always stayed with me.  Looking at these books is like watching a timeline of who I was becoming over the years.  It's my personality on display.  Books have been and always will be near and dear to me; for now they are stored tightly in a box, but one day they will again be proudly displayed.

I think that collections don't just reveal our hobbies or interests, they reveal something of that inner spark that resides within all of us.  I wonder what kinds of things I will collect in the future?  I hope that someday I will have all these cherished memories proudly on display.