Last Saturday when I headed out for my morning walk, I noticed there was a jingling in my pocket.
Of course I reached into the pocket, and there, accompanying the house key, I found two acorns. Two very tiny, bitty little acorns, collected I don’t know when by my daughter, collected because they were of interest to her, collected because they were so small.
She is a collector, Emma is, though not of what I might call typical things. She doesn’t collect dolls or snow globes, purses or stuffed animals. No. She collects Natural Things.
Exhibit A: the acorns in my pocket last weekend.
The week before last, when the evening weather suddenly turned cooler, I found myself rummaging in her backback in search of a long-lost sweater. I didn’t find the sweater, but I did find Several Sticks with flaking bark that were sort of wedged into the base of the bag.
Several weeks ago, again in pursuit of a sweater, I lifted her backpack to search its dark interior. It was heavy– unusually heavy for a backpack belonging to a child in the first grade who carries with her only a lunch box and a slender homework folder. Yes, her backpack was heavy, so I plunged my hand in and found three apples of various size and shape, each with irregular patches of scaly brown skin, all with at least one worm-hole. She had found them in the backyard of a friend, underneath the apple trees. I arranged them in order of size on the kitchen window sill, where they persisted in Not looking very pretty.
When, in early September, she came home from her field trip to Jordan Lake, I found a twisted knot of napkin in her backpack, and inside it was a collection of broken nutshells: thick, curved, triangular bits of rind. These she carried to the bathtub to see how they might float, which they did with varying success. At the conclusion of her bath I voted they be disposed of, but she was not in favor, and so they lived for about a month inside a toy submarine that lives on the edge of the tub. Last weekend, when she wasn’t at home, I finally threw them out.
I don’t know when she began this, but I do know that, at any given time, she is gathering things and pocketing them away. Even when she was Very Small she liked to crouch in the sandy corners of parking lots and gather the sand with her fingertips. Even as I exhorted her to Please Come Along, she would scrape it together as best she could and then try to take it with her. On more than one occasion–even very recently–I have shaken her jeans before putting them in the laundry and received, for my efforts, small showers of sand. And if she herself cannot carry the treasure, she is asking me to hold something for her: a leaf, or leaves, a rock or two, acorns, pinecones, the petals of a flower.
The other day I withdrew my sunglasses from my purse and found them Badly Scratched, and this because of the Several flattish grey stones she had handed to me when I found her on the playground after school. For over a week we had a yellow plastic bag sitting outside our front door. It was decidedly deflated, most certainly trod upon, and unequivocally ugly, but in it Emma had stashed her collection of cattails taken from the creek at school, and she had wanted So Badly to bring them home.
Of course she forgot them Immediately– both the stones and the cattails–as soon as we got to the house, moving on, as she always does, to Other Things; and leaving me wondering how precious is the treasure this time, and whether I should keep it, and where, and if it might possibly, again this time, do damage to my sunglasses.
It is Something to keep after all this, to know when it’s time to sort through the things, to know how to admire them appropriately, to (gently) suggest that, maybe, it’s time to throw something away. I know that some mothers have Places for these kinds of collections: shelves or labeled boxes, a pretty basket or some suitable tupperware. But I haven’t made this commitment yet, surprised every time (I always am) by the latest fascination.
One afternoon this week she met me on the playground with a plastic tennis ball canister. Inside it another collection, indiscriminate and earthy. Around the edges of the label, clear plastic gave on to views of the interior: fine, tan sand; pine straw; yellowing leaves; the spiky balls dropped by gum trees; stones. She was all excited to show it to me, then forgot it immediately upon entering the car. Yet it is there still, this tennis ball can, occasionally rolling in its awkward, oblong way across the van floor. I know I could throw it away at any time. I’m fairly certain that she’s forgotten it completely. And I forget too, I guess, to carry it out with me and actually put it in the trash.
Or maybe it has simply entered a second, obligatory stage, the stage when it becomes, for a time, My collection. It’s a temporary collection, to be sure: I can’t savor these things– these objects, these natural baubles that, for the span of an afternoon, were the treasures of my little daughter’s eye. I can’t keep them forver. But I hold on to these treasures for a little while, just in case Emma takes an interest in them again. Just in case she remembers. Just in case she wants them.
They were, after all, spotted by her own bright eye, and collected by her hand.
