Hi! I'm so glad you're here. This week's collection is about losing track of time, losing stories, and what might happen to the things we've lost.

1. A letter my maternal grandmother wrote me after/for my 21st birthday. In it, she talks about spring cleaning and losing track of time. I was thinking about her this week as I was cleaning out my house - and as each of my family members started sending me photos of things they'd unearthed in the process of cleaning out their living spaces. Somehow, totally uncoordinated, we had all started sorting. I think, too, about her mentioning losing track of time - when she wrote this letter she was experiencing the first few years of dementia, which defined her last decade of living. Dementia showed up in many ways, one of which was losing track of time. As I frequently lose track of time this summer, I've been thinking about her. As the years went on she became less and less connected to the social norms around her, but she always had eyes for trees and flowers. "This is...nice," she'd sigh, looking at a birch tree. I learned a lot about how to be present and quiet together from those moments. And I wonder, who taught you about losing track of time? Who couldn't do, can't do social norms but will absolutely look at a flower, a cloud, a tree with you? Who teaches you how to be present?

2. This blue glazed clay fish whistle I've had since I was a baby. It's missing a fin but the whistle still works. I'm so curious about how it was made, and who made it, and who gave it to me. All these stories are somewhere out of sight (I'm hesitant to say lost). And yet, here is the whistle, its single tone bringing me back to my childhood bedroom, the wood floors, the soft shadows of the closet, the way the wind moved the leaves of the elm tree in the yard. What objects hold your memories? Have you held them in your hands lately?

3. This butterfly wing made out of feathers that someone lost and I found on the street in DC two springs ago. I remember finding it on the street and thinking "oh no!" and then picking it up and looking carefully at it. It took me several seconds to really confirm it wasn't an actual butterfly wing. I've been seeing a lot of things out of the corner of my eye by the river recently, thinking a bird is a butterfly, a butterfly is a leaf, a stick is a snake, a log is a turtle. When I turn and look at them more directly, there's a moment where the two images clash and for a second I can't tell which is there. It feels like they've just shifted back into their regular forms, and that they'll change again into something miraculous once I turn my back. I wonder what I'm learning from these mistaken recognitions.

Sending you love from the river,

Kali

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