Found Objects

I'm a bit of a magpie - it runs in the family. When great-aunt Geraldine died, it was a mission to clean out her apartment. She'd been collecting Stuff her entire life - much of it "well, don't throw that away, we might need it someday" Stuff.

Granted, with a move in sight we've been doing some chucking out of hoarded possessions - old letters from high school, an entire box of class notes from my Food Tech studies, fabric scraps that a rat made a home in at the back of the garage.

Yet there are things I simply don't want to get rid of.

There's the piece of mica shaped like a key. We were visiting friends who mined semi-precious stones somewhere between Harare and Mutare - they'd come up with amazing pink marble, huge crystals of tourmaline, waist-high quartz crystals, amythests, garnets, carnelians, tigerseye and a couple of emeralds. Their road was covered, not in gravel, but in mica, shining and beautiful. Unbroken slabs of mica were stacked to one side, big enough for double beds. We peered down their mine-shaft, but didn't venture in.

There are halved and carved seed pods from north Zimbabwe, the thin outer brown covering chiselled away to reveal patterns and portraits in creamy white.

There is the unfinished carving found discarded near people selling soapstone images - a slip of the tool and damage done beyond repair, but made unique as a result.

A bottle of tiny shells from Jeffrey's Bay - surfer's paradise! The entire beach was made up of minute shells, requiring an on-the-stomach examination to distinguish them.

There's the smooth stone found on our latest walk through the field, now painted with delicate designs to be used as a paper-holder-downer when reading outside in the breeze.

There are other pastel-striped sandstones from a beach around the coast - I took photos of them nestled among other rocks, and brought them home to place in a frame with the photo. Still haven't done that, but will one day.

There's the piece of chalk from my Grade 11 class that I carved intricately into a face and wrapped in tissue paper.

A couple of empty bullet shells found in the Zimbabwe bush post-war. One not-empty one.

A tiny bottle of heavy mercury, rescued from the floor of the science class where it had scattered from a broken thermometer.

If I were to pass on to better worlds today and leave the task of sorting through my stuff to someone else, all these things would be thrown out as junk. Perhaps, in a sense, they are.

Yet at the same time they are a part of my history, they call up memories of times and places, smells and light, they're like journals without words. Chucking them away would be like getting rid of a part of who I am. Even if they're just pieces of nothing.