Inspired by a writing theme around “your most valuable possessions”

Without considering this for longer than a few moments, here is what I grabbed on to:

1. My photos.  Most are in “the cloud” backed up by Apple and Google and Meta (and likely others).  But if that cloud went down, losing them would bring me immense grief.  I love scrolling through my “Favourites” Album or my Facebook feed, re-living and re-igniting the feelings that these snapshots of life can surface.  Holding them softly, my collection of memories, validated and grounded in those magical slices, captured through images.  The realization that I have very limited physical artifacts of these photos, causes me to think I should remedy that.  But they are one possession (albeit primarily virtual) that I hold most dear.
2. My Levi’s denim jacket.  It took me many years and many previous attempts to find the perfect jean jacket.  Soft, perfect loose-fitting style, classic lines and stitching and colour.  Since it’s not overly structured, it rolls up and packs easily, but can flex with most any outfit or season or style.
3. My box of recipes.  For my wedding, nearly 19 years ago, I received a very thoughtful recipe box from a colleague and friend.  She had inserted some of her own favourites to get me started, and through the years, I’ve added our family favourites.  With the transition to online recipes, I don’t pull it out as often, but there are core recipes, for important annual traditions, that only live in that box:
   • The chili recipe, printed out from an email my mom sent me in Fall, 2002.  My first Fall living on my own in the San Francisco Bay, far away from “home” in Wisconsin.  I had offered to bring chili to a soup-themed potluck at my new job and my mom emailed me the recipe.  I still pull it out each Fall (more for nostalgia than reference, as it’s well committed to memory).
   • Gigi’s Apple Cake.  Which was really my grandpa’s mother’s recipe, from what I understand.  A handwritten note from Gigi wraps around the scanned and printed recipe.  She had sent me a letter in the mail with this recipe, likely at my request, shortly before my wedding in 2004.  Perhaps the early signs of her future Alzheimer’s diagnosis evident in the confession that “soon you’ll be Mrs. Tim… I can’t seem to remember his last name”
   • The Christmas Cookie recipes.  Written on lined index cards and laminated with clear packing tape, these are official artifacts of our family traditions.  I also have a set of the Electric Company cookbooks where many originated, but the handwritten versions in the recipe box are my go-to each holiday baking season.
4. My journals.  A record of my discovery of Ikigai, my Brene’ Brown values exercise.  Notes from numerous podcasts.  Lists: of books to read, people to research, ideas to pursue…  Many of the poems that I drafted during a 21-day poetry writing challenge in Fall, 2022.  Note: I am still waiting for the physical book of said poems, but the digital PDF would also be among my most-prized possessions. My gratitude journals, started during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a reminder of all that I have to be thankful for and a visual nudge to continue practicing gratitude, to stay alert.
5. All The World.  My favourite children’s book.  Worn and missing the protective cover sleeve.  Reen and Phil purchased this book for us from a local, family-owned, book shop in downtown Wausau, Wisconsin, when our first baby, Emaline, was very small.  It has beautiful words, font and especially illustrations.  A representation of daily life, the connection to earth and ancestors, the realization that we are all more similar than we are different, all told through a rhyming narrative that ends with, “hope and peace and love and trust, all the world is all of us.”