I am a collector. Of what, I’m not exactly certain. I have a stack of embroidered handkerchiefs on my desk that I haggled for at a flea market in Paris. I have a tall jar of colorful buttons from a bankrupt button factory arranged in a gradient on top of my dresser. I have no less than three typewriters scattered throughout my house. I have gathered a dozen glass bottles in the surf of a bay, and now proudly display them on the shelf next to my bedroom window where the light hits them best.
I suppose, if I had to put a name to it, I would be a collector of memories and atypical mementos. In my own words, I am a mudlarking magpie. I am fascinated by the slightly peculiar, and I revel in the quirks of found objects. I preserve my important moments with tiny trinkets, like autumn leaves between pages of library books, in hopes that they are someday found by a complete stranger.
My memories are preserved it objects of no great worth. Five fond years of summer camp have boiled down to a finger sized piece of barnacle encrusted driftwood. Four years of varsity running has only supplied a handful of dull pyramidal spike pins that I wore in my very first race. These tiny collections, although they are not glamorous by any means, are things that have defined my experiences and created a complex three dimensional scrapbook of my life. I hope that someday, should some handsome archeologist discover these tiny knickknacks, he or she will realize that they have all been much loved.
