preserve.

I can’t say for sure where it started, or even the driving force behind it. Maybe it was something sparkling I wanted to keep forever, maybe a memory I was afraid to forget one day, but when I was very young I started collecting. Small trinkets. Pebbles and gems. Plastic baubles to hang from lanyards, necklaces, eventually-- when I was old enough to drive-- my rearview mirror. Fortunes from cookies that offered vague ideas of hope or a windfall of good luck. Notebooks to write everything down. And, before too long, photographs.

I almost always have some combination of the following: paper and a pen. Something to cut with, something to hold found items, something to capture an image. I know I’m not alone in this. Creators, no matter what we make, all carry tools, ready to grab, hold, and keep. We have rituals, the ways we turn experiences, memories, ideas, and materials into something else entirely.

I remember in high school, littering my bedroom wall with scraps of paper- ripped, torn, cut with the tiny pair of scissors that I kept in my desk drawer- photos, quotes, small paper napkins with doodles in black sharpie, blue bic pen, sparkling glitter ink. These strips and cuts, frays and curls, they meant memory. They were markers of moments I wanted to hold close, remember always, relive.

My mom has a box of photos documenting her life starting in her childhood and weaving through mine. Maybe this is where I learned it. A picture of my grandmother with a tinfoil hat, my dad in a tinsel wig; these memories feel lived by us, even though we were too young to hold the moment ourselves. My sister and I have pulled that box out so many times, laughed at facial expressions, faded fashions that are coming back around. We have asked for stories, and explanations for faces (or whole shapes) that were scissored from memory. Even now, on a randon afternoon we’ll dig through the stacks, find ourselves as babies, little girls, and compare those chubby hands and round faces to the features of our own daughters, wonder who they will be.

My sister and I have spent a lot of time exploring abandoned places, old buildings, houses and, last summer-- a church that was starting to crumble. We couldn’t help it, we were desperate to see inside before it toppled. We stepped inside and were stunned. It was like a time capsule. Brown carpet, so many old things. There were framed religious images, piles of magazines and church bulletins, mail. We walked through the rooms, silent, not wanting to disrupt the stillness. We paused in the small holding room between the office and sanctuary. The walls there were covered in clippings from papers, and small hand jotted notes in faded ink, all cut with perfect intention. We read an article about a musical group, an announcement about a baptism. I couldn’t help but imagine the hands that had hung these clippings, the scissors they used to cut them.

A few weeks later, after a bad summer storm, the whole front of the building had collapsed. It’s strange, thinking of all those things-- books, records, photographs, art-- that are lost forever, except for the photos we took that I would later print and cut and hang on my wall. I think about abandoned places, rooms full of memories, standing still and silent as the world goes on outside.

My fiance lost his dad when he was eleven. When we first started dating, he shared with me how much it has meant to him that his mom always took so many pictures, how it has kept his dad alive for him as he’s grown into adulthood. For him, it’s not about living in the past. It’s about carrying his dad with him, bringing his legacy into the right now. I know this feeling, think of my mom’s box of photos, my grandmother’s crocheted afghan, the baby box I have started for my daughter. I understand the way preserved memories can spark to life, weave into the present. How, if we’re intentional, we can keep something alive even after it’s gone.

I can’t remember a time when documenting life was unimportant to me. Honestly, it might be the most important thing that I do. Because it’s more than taking a photo, making a collage, writing a poem, making a meal from an old family recipe- it’s collecting. It’s cultivating a life well documented. Or, maybe, it’s more like this: Trying to pin something down, create permanence in a world where how long something will last is unsure.

On more than one occasion I have been honored to capture someone’s most important day. From weddings, to the birth of a child, graduations to homecomings, I’ve lived those moments alongside the people that are building those experiences into foundations and futures. I’ve stacked these images in boxes, wrapped them in ribbon, said cut these into shapes and cover your walls, your life, with them. Relive them over and over.

I keep my own collection now. It arcs decades, highlights victories, holds grief and what comes after. It still rainbows my walls, catches dust in boxes, lives cut and puzzled together on scrapbook pages. Memory keeping each bright adventure, it traces the lines of legacy into my past and stretches the possible future wide for my daughter. There’s a purpose to this: to hold on to moments, make them into memories- cut from the earth, or photographs, or cloth, or paper- and turn them into something that stays.