Souvenir

The wind chimes were softly blowing against the ocean wind. It was a southern wind that day as it often was. The heat baked everything into a crust of salt and sand.  She lay on the porch wanting to become a part of it. For the sun to outline her body on the rotting wood. It was familiar and it was good. Jane Fonda’s voice softly came from the TV inside. The smell of dinner cooking on the grill. Her brothers laugh down at the pier as they catch fish in their net. As Jesus did, they said. She rolls over and sees her sketchbook and favorite Agatha Christie novel. The pages flap back and forth. The sketchbook reveals and conceals with each gust of wind. A green colored pencil sits perfectly in the gap between the panels of wood. She’ll need to start packing soon, but for now, she just wanted to be still. She could hear the frogs croaking to one another as the sun was setting. It wasn’t a spectacular sunset as it normally is, but it was an okay sunset. The ones that are often forgotten. Not quite good enough to take a picture of. Those were her favorites.

I am nowhere for very long.

I have moved 22 times. 

17 schools. 

2 countries. 

6 states. 

I never know how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” Home for me then becomes moments rather than specific buildings. When looking back at my memories, I think of icons. Sandspurs that stay in my shoes way too long, the water tower across the lagoon, Carolina Lilies growing on the side of the road, the smell of pine on a winter morning, and the bike path near my grandmother’s house. The fragmented moments come together collectively as the home that I have built for myself. 

I have always picked up souvenirs. I have shelves full of my trinkets and a goblin-like hoard. I have jars full of rocks from Colorado, I have a jar with a single strand of seaweed from Maine. A bear skull nestled between my houseplants. I have sticks and branches from Mexico City and Utah and Maryland and North Carolina and Pennsylvania and Wyoming and Arkansas and Alabama and New York and France and Acapulco and the list goes on. Within this series, I am thinking about the ways I document the things that I can’t fit on my shelves: the sketchbook. It remains a constant when going from place to place. As an artist, it is a tool for quick gestural depictions of our surroundings. It then becomes a keepsake and memento. A time capsule for where we were at that moment. The sketchbook becomes a house for the emotional souvenirs that can’t be bought in a tacky roadside store. Taxidermied icons hanging from two screws in the wall. Blink once and it could be gone, but it’s not. Still there. The paintings become mementos and keepsakes that can be looked upon whenever feeling lonely. Like the need to enter a church when wanting prayer. An altar for our mementos.