We humans are like the magpie that hoards shiny objects for its nest; we accumulate things. We are collectors, hunters and gatherers, keepers of stuff. And for us writers, within every object around our house, in our pockets or bags, in our attics and basements and storage units, and in every collectibles shop and antique store is the genesis of a story.
Several years ago I had a moving sale. Out in the yard and along the driveway, I lined up stacks and piles and furniture and treasures and what apparently some people thought was trash… all that stuff we collect when we live in one place for a while.
As people asked me about things at the sale, I found myself telling story after story.
How I came to have the poster of “42nd Street,” a musical I saw in Paris with my daughter one Christmas season a decade ago and what a time it was for us in cold, gray beautiful Paris. How I had come upon the blue glass bowl when we were dissecting my mother’s house, and that it came from my grandmother’s house before that and how I remembered the smell of ripening peaches in that blue bowl, and how my mother canned peaches and made peach cobbler and how delicious her cobbler was and that once I tried to make a cobbler and the crust was so hard my friend Pinetree Bill nearly choked on a piece he couldn’t quite get down.
