What is it about the little things? For as long as I can remember, the mundane items that make up an individual life have enthralled me. One of my earliest memories features my aunt’s purse. Dumping it out to review the contents inside, I was utterly captivated by every item, from hair tie to lip balm. Each I regarded with total respect for their utility purpose and the purpose they held in her life.

How was her purse different from my mom’s? What would be in mine? What would be significant enough to carry around as if it were an extension of me?

My affinity for items and their quiet contribution to a novel lifetime has been further solidified by the countless estate sales I have walked through every other weekend for the better of twenty-three years.

Each house is a museum of self- unabashed examples of what gets left behind. These fascinating, well-curated exhibits feature rooms filled with the clothes these people wore on display in the closet, their toiletries in the bathroom, and the project they never got to finish in the garage.

Most fascinating of all, people walk out of these exhibits with all sorts of the very items on display. Out the door goes cutlery- the buyer headed home to wash and, later, eat every meal with what might have been the previous owner’s favorite fork. Off goes the ugly vase gifted by an unpopular relative-it’s riddance, a secret relief even to the dead. Then, the hammer that helped build the gazebo in the backyard where their daughter got married. Everything of significance, minor to major.

How easily what was once someone else’s can become what is now our own. We, the culmination of everything that ever was and ever will be. Our future, the past.

The fork, the vase, the hammer.