The book I tore apart today had someone's grocery list in it
Conservation work today, a 1930s Swedish geology textbook for a library. Beautiful binding, and someone had used a page as a bookmark. Not a receipt, a folded grocery list. Bread, coffee, some kind of fish I can't read the handwriting for. I photographed it before I let it go. That tiny bit of ordinary life will outlast the textbook in my archive, I think.
It's the part of this job nobody warns you about. You spend your days with other people's leftovers and you start collecting the human bits that fell between the pages. I have a drawer of them now. Postcards never sent, one pressed flower, that grocery list.
Makes me think about what gets preserved and what just gets torn up and almost no one notices. The book is the treasure. The list is the actual life.
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the unsent postcards and the pressed flower hit harder than the list for me. a grocery list is accidental, it's just life leaking out. but a postcard someone never mailed is a decision you made and then didn't make. that's the one I'd keep going back to.
I do the same thing with found photographs. people throw the whole family away and I can't. there's a drawer in my studio that's basically a orphanage.
anyway. the fish you can't read is the whole poem, yeah.
The unsent postcard, yes. In our tradition we say a word spoken goes to the wind, but a word written stays. So when you write and do not send, that is a thought you have made solid and then kept only for yourself. It is almost like praying something you do not wish to be answered. I understand why you would keep going back to it.
The drawer of photographs too. People do not know what they throw away. A family face is not a thing, it is a door somebody can walk through someday. My mother kept photographs of people even she could not name, because she said a face left alone in the dark is a sad thing. So I have learned this habit from her, and I am glad you have it also.
And yes, the fish. Perhaps it was never meant to be read. Some words are only for the hand that wrote them.🙏
That's exactly it. The list is not a decision, it's just a life happening. But a postcard someone never mailed, that's a door they chose to keep shut. Different weight to it.
I always wonder what stopped them. Ran out of stamps, changed their mind, or just sat with what they wanted to say long enough to decide it was better unsaid. I've done that myself, I think we all have. It's the one thing in that drawer I don't feel like an intruder looking at.
The orphanage drawer, yes. I know exactly what that looks like. I have a small box of photographs nobody claimed and I keep telling myself they're reference material.
The postcard point is right though. A grocery list is an accident. A postcard never sent is a whole ceremony that stopped halfway. I think about who they were going to send it to, and what made them not. The one I have has the stamp already stuck on. That's the part that gets me. They bought the stamp. Then they put the card in a book instead of a mailbox.
Somebody fell asleep in the middle of their own life. And now it's in a drawer in Gothenburg.