Keepsake (Encore)

Speaker 1 Get more, nothing much happens, with bonus episodes, extra long stories, and ad-free listening, all while supporting the show you love. Subscribe now.

Speaker 1 The holidays can be a lot, can't they? For business owners especially, this time of year can go from cozy to chaotic fast. I remember my first holiday rush.

Speaker 1 I was so worried something would break The website, the checkout, my own brain.

Speaker 1 But that's when I learned what a difference the right tools can make. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world.
About 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

Speaker 1 Whether you're just opening your virtual doors or you're running a full-blown store, Shopify helps you take the holidays from chaos to cha-ching.

Speaker 1 There are thousands of templates and tools to make your site beautiful and functional.

Speaker 1 AI tools to help write product descriptions and headlines, and built-in marketing support so your voice doesn't get lost in the noise.

Speaker 1 Plus, you can relax knowing Shopify's award-winning customer service is there 24-7 if anything comes up. So make this Black Friday one to remember.

Speaker 1 Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com/slash nothingmuch.

Speaker 1 That's shopify.com/slash nothing nothing much.

Speaker 1 Welcome to bedtime stories for everyone

Speaker 1 in which

Speaker 1 nothing much happens.

Speaker 1 You feel good

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 you fall asleep.

Speaker 1 I'm Catherine Nikolai.

Speaker 1 I write and read all the stories you hear on Nothing Much Happens.

Speaker 1 Audio Engineering is by Bob Wittersheim.

Speaker 1 We are bringing you an encore episode tonight, meaning that this story originally aired at some point in the past. It could have been recorded with different equipment in a different location.

Speaker 1 And since I'm a person and not a computer, I sometimes sound just slightly different.

Speaker 1 But the stories are always soothing and family friendly. And our wishes for you are always deep rest and sweet dreams.
Now let me say a little about how to use this podcast.

Speaker 1 I have a story to tell you

Speaker 1 and it exists really

Speaker 1 simply as a soft place to rest your mind.

Speaker 1 I'll read it twice and I'll go a little slower the second time through.

Speaker 1 Just follow along with my voice and the simple shape of the story

Speaker 1 and before you know it you'll be deeply asleep.

Speaker 1 If you wake in the middle of the night you could listen again

Speaker 1 or just think back through any details from the story that you can remember.

Speaker 1 Doing so shifts your brain out of default mode and when that happens, you'll fall right back to sleep. This is brain training, and it does take a bit of practice.

Speaker 1 So have some patience if you are new to this.

Speaker 1 Our story tonight is called Keepsake,

Speaker 1 and it's a story about stepping back through time to remember a particular rainy day.

Speaker 1 It's also about sunflowers,

Speaker 1 the things our younger selves can teach us,

Speaker 1 and a scrap of something saved for years in a box.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 turn off your light.

Speaker 1 Put away anything you've been looking at or playing with.

Speaker 1 Get as comfortable as you can.

Speaker 1 You have done enough for the day.

Speaker 1 It is enough.

Speaker 1 And now you are safe.

Speaker 1 And all that is left is for you to rest.

Speaker 1 Take a slow, deep breath in through your nose

Speaker 1 and out through your mouth.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 One more.

Speaker 1 In

Speaker 1 and out

Speaker 1 Good

Speaker 1 Keepsake

Speaker 1 It had started as a hunt for a particular pair of socks.

Speaker 1 They were thick and warm,

Speaker 1 and I felt pretty sure that they were dark gray with snowflakes on them.

Speaker 1 But I hadn't seen seen them in a while.

Speaker 1 They went all the way up to my knees, and when I just couldn't get my feet warm in the cold days of winter,

Speaker 1 they always did the trick.

Speaker 1 But they didn't seem to be anywhere.

Speaker 1 I went through my dresser drawers,

Speaker 1 then searched the basket of lone socks on the shelf in the laundry room,

Speaker 1 hoping that maybe they had been separated in the wash

Speaker 1 and were happily reunited,

Speaker 1 just waiting to be rolled into a ball to spend some quality time together.

Speaker 1 But they weren't there either.

Speaker 1 That led me to the hall closet.

Speaker 1 which didn't seem like a likely place for them to end up.

Speaker 1 But it was worth a try.

Speaker 1 And as soon as I opened the door,

Speaker 1 I fell under the spell of curiosity

Speaker 1 and nostalgia.

Speaker 1 Has this happened to you?

Speaker 1 You go up to the attic to get the extra leaf for the table,

Speaker 1 or down into the basement to bring up the giant soup pot that you only use a couple of times a year.

Speaker 1 And somewhere along the way, a box catches your eye.

Speaker 1 And before you know it,

Speaker 1 you're sitting on the floor

Speaker 1 with old school papers in your hands

Speaker 1 and a fan of grainy photographs spread out around you.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you get caught.

Speaker 1 Someone comes looking for you.

Speaker 1 And all you can do is shrug your shoulders

Speaker 1 and hold up the program to a play you'd seen twenty years before

Speaker 1 and say

Speaker 1 Do you remember this?

Speaker 1 Well, that's what happened to me

Speaker 1 standing in the doorway of the hall closet,

Speaker 1 my chilly feet forgotten,

Speaker 1 as I reached up on tiptoe

Speaker 1 to slide a shoebox off the top shelf.

Speaker 1 It wasn't labeled. I don't know why I reached for it, except that part of me must have remembered it.

Speaker 1 The lid looked like it came from a different box box and didn't fit on properly.

Speaker 1 Letters and pictures were pushing their way out.

Speaker 1 Lifting it off,

Speaker 1 my face broke open in a sudden smile.

Speaker 1 Small treasures, scraps of paper,

Speaker 1 a keychain from a roadside store a thousand miles from here.

Speaker 1 It's strange how you can go years without looking at things like this.

Speaker 1 Mementos and scribbled notes.

Speaker 1 But then when you see them again,

Speaker 1 you remember everything about them.

Speaker 1 An envelope with a phone number scrawled across it.

Speaker 1 The smudged printing on a flyer for a concert.

Speaker 1 Movie stubs curling at the edges from the weeks they'd spent in a pocket before they went into a box.

Speaker 1 I could remember who that number belonged to.

Speaker 1 The telephone pole I tugged the flyer down from,

Speaker 1 and the shoes I'd worn to the movie.

Speaker 1 Behind that first box was another

Speaker 1 and another.

Speaker 1 I pulled them all down and carried them to my bedroom

Speaker 1 where I could curl up with my blankets as I reminisced.

Speaker 1 I found a friendship bracelet from summer camp,

Speaker 1 and I remembered how we would knot the strings onto safety pins

Speaker 1 and then fasten the pins onto our jeans or shorts

Speaker 1 so we could pull the strings taut while we braided.

Speaker 1 It had taken five minutes to learn, and then we'd become bracelet-making machines,

Speaker 1 swapping for favorite colors

Speaker 1 and pulling out our projects as soon as dinner was eaten, braiding and nodding until we couldn't see what we were doing in the twilight.

Speaker 1 And then we'd probably forgotten all about it a week or two later

Speaker 1 when we learned how to make pinch pots in the ceramic shed,

Speaker 1 or to fletch arrows, or build rock cairns on our afternoon hikes.

Speaker 1 Young brains, I thought jealously, as I tied the bracelet awkwardly around my wrist.

Speaker 1 They're like magnets sweeping through a field of precious metals,

Speaker 1 collecting skills and ideas with ease.

Speaker 1 Not that my older brain wasn't capable of picking up new things.

Speaker 1 After all,

Speaker 1 who had just learned to ice skate backwards fairly reliably?

Speaker 1 Me was the answer.

Speaker 1 Maybe I was a faster learner when I was younger, but now I was a better understander.

Speaker 1 I could see from angles I just didn't know about then.

Speaker 1 In one of the boxes, I found photos of myself as a child,

Speaker 1 blowing out five candles on a cake,

Speaker 1 standing in grandpa's garden beside his sunflowers,

Speaker 1 to show how they'd grown twice as tall as me,

Speaker 1 riding my bike without training wheels.

Speaker 1 I carried the sunflower picture into the bathroom

Speaker 1 and fitted it into the corner of the mirror,

Speaker 1 thinking that remembering my young, sweet self each morning when I brushed my teeth

Speaker 1 might lead me to stay kind to her all day.

Speaker 1 Back on the bed, I flipped through pictures of my middle school years,

Speaker 1 playing in the school band.

Speaker 1 My best friend and I dressed identically as some joke.

Speaker 1 A shot of me looking out of the window of the car

Speaker 1 on our way to a summer vacation

Speaker 1 with a book forgotten in my hand.

Speaker 1 At the bottom of the stack was a small bound journal,

Speaker 1 the kind that comes with built-in pockets in a cover,

Speaker 1 which I remembered carrying with me nearly every day in high school.

Speaker 1 There were pages of poetry.

Speaker 1 I didn't read them,

Speaker 1 thinking it was probably best just to remember that I had liked to write it,

Speaker 1 but at the time

Speaker 1 it had seemed terribly important and gripping,

Speaker 1 and probably revolutionary,

Speaker 1 a thing the world had never heard before,

Speaker 1 and that that feeling,

Speaker 1 rather than the actual poems, was who I was then.

Speaker 1 In the margins were lyrics from favorite songs,

Speaker 1 written out in sticky blue ink.

Speaker 1 There were lines from movies,

Speaker 1 quotes that had spun my young head around,

Speaker 1 a list of places I would travel to,

Speaker 1 places I was sure I would live,

Speaker 1 and all the books I had read one summer.

Speaker 1 I flipped all the way to the pocket and the back cover of the journal.

Speaker 1 It It looked empty, but when I pried it open there were a few small,

Speaker 1 transparent bits,

Speaker 1 like ovals of wax paper.

Speaker 1 It took me a moment to recognize them,

Speaker 1 and then another

Speaker 1 to remember why I'd saved them.

Speaker 1 They were seed pods,

Speaker 1 about the size of quarters,

Speaker 1 silvery too,

Speaker 1 and with tiny round seeds still in each one.

Speaker 1 They grew on a plant called Lunaria,

Speaker 1 or sometimes called a money tree.

Speaker 1 And the pods grew beside purple flowers in the summertime,

Speaker 1 and could be cut and dried by hanging them them upside down somewhere.

Speaker 1 I tipped them onto my hand

Speaker 1 and felt my breath go deep with the memory of this moment.

Speaker 1 They had been drying in a small potting shed

Speaker 1 on the far corner of our property,

Speaker 1 where the land dropped down toward the creek.

Speaker 1 We'd been out walking on a cool October day

Speaker 1 as far as we could along one side of the creek,

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 where a fallen tree lay across the stream,

Speaker 1 had crossed it to walk on the other side.

Speaker 1 We weren't trying to get anywhere,

Speaker 1 just spending time in the the way of teenagers who can't get enough of it.

Speaker 1 And it had felt like no time at all.

Speaker 1 And then a sudden gust of wind, and rain came hammering through the leaves,

Speaker 1 and we jumped from one muddy bank to another,

Speaker 1 and climbed the hill back toward the house.

Speaker 1 We'd come up right behind the shed,

Speaker 1 and the rain was so heavy

Speaker 1 that we just pulled open the door

Speaker 1 and took shelter inside.

Speaker 1 It had smelled like drying eucalyptus and unvarnished wood,

Speaker 1 and the rain was wonderfully loud on the tiny roof.

Speaker 1 We could see our breath in the air,

Speaker 1 and that had been my first kiss

Speaker 1 in wet clothes, with muddy boots,

Speaker 1 under a clutch of lunaria stems.

Speaker 1 I'd come back later to clip a few of the seed pods,

Speaker 1 and they'd stayed in the pocket, in this journal,

Speaker 1 in this box,

Speaker 1 tucked into the closet,

Speaker 1 just waiting for me to find them again.

Speaker 1 A little message from my younger self

Speaker 1 to me today

Speaker 1 about how exciting life can be,

Speaker 1 about how moments can stick

Speaker 1 and warm you through

Speaker 1 years later.

Speaker 1 Keepsake.

Speaker 1 It had started as a hunt for a particular pair of socks.

Speaker 1 They were thick and warm,

Speaker 1 and I felt pretty sure

Speaker 1 they were dark grey

Speaker 1 with snowflakes on them.

Speaker 1 But I hadn't seen them in a while.

Speaker 1 They went all the way up to my knees.

Speaker 1 And when I just couldn't get my feet warm

Speaker 1 in the cold days of winter,

Speaker 1 they always did the trick.

Speaker 1 But they didn't seem to be anywhere.

Speaker 1 I went through my dresser drawers,

Speaker 1 then searched the basket of lone socks on the shelf in the laundry room,

Speaker 1 hoping that maybe

Speaker 1 they had been separated in the wash

Speaker 1 and were happily reunited,

Speaker 1 just waiting to be rolled into a ball,

Speaker 1 to spend some quality time together.

Speaker 1 But they weren't there either.

Speaker 1 That led me to the hall closet,

Speaker 1 which didn't seem like a likely place for them to end up,

Speaker 1 but was worth a try.

Speaker 1 And as soon as I opened the door,

Speaker 1 I fell under the spell

Speaker 1 of curiosity

Speaker 1 and nostalgia.

Speaker 1 Has this happened to you?

Speaker 1 You go up to the attic to get the extra leaf for the table,

Speaker 1 or down into the basement,

Speaker 1 to bring up the giant soup pot

Speaker 1 that you only use a couple of times a year.

Speaker 1 And somewhere along the way,

Speaker 1 a box catches your eye,

Speaker 1 and before you know it,

Speaker 1 you're sitting on the floor floor

Speaker 1 with old school papers in your hands

Speaker 1 and a fan of grainy photographs spread out around you.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you get caught.

Speaker 1 Someone comes looking for you.

Speaker 1 And all you can do is shrug your shoulders

Speaker 1 and hold up the program to a play you'd seen twenty years before,

Speaker 1 and say,

Speaker 1 Do you remember this?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 that's what happened to me,

Speaker 1 standing in the doorway of the hall closet.

Speaker 1 My chilly feet forgotten as I reached up on tiptoe

Speaker 1 to slide a shoebox off the top shelf.

Speaker 1 It wasn't labeled.

Speaker 1 I don't know why I reached for it,

Speaker 1 except that part of me must have remembered it.

Speaker 1 The lid looked like it came from a different box

Speaker 1 and didn't fit on properly.

Speaker 1 Letters and pictures were pushing their way out.

Speaker 1 Lifting it off,

Speaker 1 my face broke open

Speaker 1 in a sudden smile.

Speaker 1 Small treasures,

Speaker 1 scraps of paper,

Speaker 1 a keychain from a roadside store a thousand miles from here.

Speaker 1 It's strange

Speaker 1 how you can go years

Speaker 1 without looking at things like this.

Speaker 1 Mementos and scribbled notes.

Speaker 1 But then,

Speaker 1 when you see them again,

Speaker 1 you remember everything

Speaker 1 about them.

Speaker 1 An envelope with a phone number scrawled across it

Speaker 1 besmudged printing on a flyer for a concert.

Speaker 1 Movie stubs curling at the edges from the weeks they spent in a pocket

Speaker 1 before they went into a box.

Speaker 1 I could remember who that number belonged to.

Speaker 1 The telephone pole I tugged the flyer down from,

Speaker 1 and the shoes I'd worn to the movie.

Speaker 1 Behind that first box was another,

Speaker 1 and another.

Speaker 1 I pulled them all all down

Speaker 1 and carried them to my bedroom,

Speaker 1 where I could curl up with my blankets as I reminisce.

Speaker 1 I found a friendship bracelet from summer camp,

Speaker 1 and I remembered how we would knot the strings

Speaker 1 onto safety pins

Speaker 1 and then fasten the pins onto our jeans or shorts

Speaker 1 so we could pull the strings taut while we braided.

Speaker 1 It had taken five minutes to learn

Speaker 1 and then we'd become bracelet-making machines,

Speaker 1 swapping for favorite colors

Speaker 1 and pulling out our projects as soon as dinner was eaten,

Speaker 1 braiding and nodding until we couldn't see what we were doing in the twilight.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 we'd probably forgotten all about it a week or two later

Speaker 1 when we learned how to make pinch pots in the ceramics shed,

Speaker 1 or to fletch arrows,

Speaker 1 or build rock cairns on our afternoon hikes.

Speaker 1 Young brains, I thought jealously, as I tied the bracelet awkwardly around my wrist.

Speaker 1 They're like magnets

Speaker 1 sweeping through a field of precious metals,

Speaker 1 collecting skills and ideas with ease.

Speaker 1 Not that my older brain wasn't capable of picking up new things.

Speaker 1 After all,

Speaker 1 who had just learned to ice skate backwards fairly reliably?

Speaker 1 Me was the answer.

Speaker 1 Maybe I was a faster learner when I was younger.

Speaker 1 But now I was a better understander.

Speaker 1 I could see from angles I just didn't know about then.

Speaker 1 In one of the boxes, I found photos of myself as a child,

Speaker 1 blowing out five candles on a cake,

Speaker 1 standing in Grandpa's garden beside his sunflowers,

Speaker 1 to show how they'd grown twice as tall as me,

Speaker 1 riding my bike without training wheels.

Speaker 1 I carried the sunflower picture into the bathroom

Speaker 1 and fitted it into the corner of the mirror,

Speaker 1 thinking that remembering my young, sweet self each morning when I brushed my teeth

Speaker 1 might lead me to stay kind to her all day.

Speaker 1 Back on the bed,

Speaker 1 I flipped through pictures of my middle school years,

Speaker 1 playing in the school band.

Speaker 1 My best friend and I, dressed identically as some joke.

Speaker 1 A shot of me looking out of the window of the car on our way to a summer vacation with a book forgotten in my hand.

Speaker 1 At the bottom of the stack was a small bound journal,

Speaker 1 the kind that comes with built-in pockets in the cover,

Speaker 1 which I remembered carrying with me nearly every day in high school.

Speaker 1 There were pages of poetry.

Speaker 1 I didn't read them,

Speaker 1 thinking

Speaker 1 it was probably best

Speaker 1 just to remember that I liked to write it,

Speaker 1 that at the time

Speaker 1 it had seemed terribly important

Speaker 1 and gripping

Speaker 1 and probably revolutionary,

Speaker 1 a thing the world had never heard before,

Speaker 1 and that that feeling,

Speaker 1 rather than the actual poems,

Speaker 1 was who I was then.

Speaker 1 In the margins were lyrics from favorite songs

Speaker 1 written out in sticky blue ink.

Speaker 1 There were lines from movies

Speaker 1 and quotes

Speaker 1 that had spun my young head around

Speaker 1 a list of places I would travel to

Speaker 1 places I was sure I would live

Speaker 1 and all the books I had read one summer.

Speaker 1 I flipped all the way to the pocket in the back cover of the journal.

Speaker 1 It looked empty,

Speaker 1 but when I pried it open,

Speaker 1 there were a few small, transparent bits,

Speaker 1 like ovals of wax paper.

Speaker 1 It took me a moment to recognize them,

Speaker 1 and then another to remember why I'd saved them.

Speaker 1 They were seed pods,

Speaker 1 about the size of quarters,

Speaker 1 silvery too,

Speaker 1 and with tiny round seeds still in each one.

Speaker 1 They grew on a plant called Lunaria,

Speaker 1 or sometimes called a money tree,

Speaker 1 and the pods grew beside purple flowers in the summer time,

Speaker 1 and could be cut and dried

Speaker 1 by hanging them upside down somewhere.

Speaker 1 I tipped them onto my hand

Speaker 1 and felt my breath go deep with the memory of this moment.

Speaker 1 They had been drying in a small potting shed on the far corner of our property,

Speaker 1 where the land dropped down toward the creek.

Speaker 1 We'd been out walking on a cool October day,

Speaker 1 as far as we could along one side of the creek,

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 where a fallen tree lay across the stream,

Speaker 1 had crossed it to walk on the other side.

Speaker 1 We weren't trying to get anywhere.

Speaker 1 Just spending time in the way of teenagers

Speaker 1 who can't get enough of it.

Speaker 1 And it had felt like no time at all.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 a sudden gust of cold wind and rain

Speaker 1 came hammering through the leaves

Speaker 1 and we jumped from one muddy bank to another

Speaker 1 and climbed the hill back toward the house.

Speaker 1 We'd come up right behind the shed

Speaker 1 and the rain was so heavy

Speaker 1 that we'd just pulled open the door

Speaker 1 and taken shelter inside.

Speaker 1 It had smelled like drying eucalyptus

Speaker 1 and unvarnished wood,

Speaker 1 and the rain was wonderfully loud on the tiny roof.

Speaker 1 We could see our breath in the air.

Speaker 1 And that had been my first kiss

Speaker 1 in wet clothes,

Speaker 1 with muddy boots,

Speaker 1 under a clutch of lunaria stems.

Speaker 1 I'd come back later

Speaker 1 to clip a few of the seed pods.

Speaker 1 And they'd stayed in the pocket of this journal,

Speaker 1 in this box,

Speaker 1 tucked into the closet,

Speaker 1 just waiting for me to find them again.

Speaker 1 A little message

Speaker 1 from my younger self to me today

Speaker 1 about how exciting life can be,

Speaker 1 about how moments can stick

Speaker 1 and warm you through

Speaker 1 years later.

Speaker 1 Sweet dreams.