The Things in My Home I Would Never Replace
I think about this sometimes when I’m moving things around — rearranging a shelf, clearing a surface, deciding what stays and what goes.
Most things in our home are replaceable. The sofa could be a different sofa. The rug could be a different rug. The lamps, the cushions, the vases, the decorative objects I’ve collected over ten years of writing about home — all of it could go and I would find something else and the house would still be a house.
But there are a few things I would not replace. Could not replace. Things that have nothing to do with how they look and everything to do with what they carry.
This is about those things.
The Blanket
It is not in good condition.
I want to be honest about this because if you saw it you would not immediately understand why it’s on this list. It is old. It is worn in places where the yarn has thinned almost to nothing. One corner has a small repair that my grandmother made herself at some point — you can see where the stitches change, where her hands fixed what was coming apart.
She crocheted it. I don’t know exactly when — before I was born, I think, or when I was very small. I don’t remember watching her make it the way some people remember those things. What I remember is that it existed, that it was always there, that it had a particular weight and texture that I associated with her house and her presence before I was old enough to put that into words.
She is gone now. And the things that remain from a person, really remain — the objects that hold something of them — are fewer than you expect. You think there will be more. There isn’t.
The blanket is one of the very few things I have from her beyond memories. It sits on the armchair in our bedroom. I don’t use it every day — it’s too fragile for that now — but I see it every day. And seeing it is enough. It is, in the most literal sense, irreplaceable: there is no version of this blanket I could buy or make or find that would be this blanket. The value is entirely in the fact of it existing and being here.
Tasos has never once suggested getting rid of it. I mention this because Tasos is not sentimental about objects in the way I am, and his silence on the subject of the blanket is its own kind of tenderness.
The Drawings
There is a drawer — I have mentioned it before in other articles and I will keep mentioning it because it deserves to be mentioned — that I don’t let anyone else open.
It contains years of cards and drawings and handmade things from Maria and Marina. From school, from home, from their preschool classroom where they made things with paint and paper and glue and brought them home with the particular pride of someone who has made something real.
A drawing of our family where the proportions are gloriously wrong. A card that says YOU ARE THE BEST MOM in letters that start large and run out of space. A paper flower from Marina that has lost two of its petals and which I have never thrown away. Things made for my nameday, for Mother’s Day, for no occasion at all — just because they wanted to make something and give it to me.
None of these things are beautiful in the conventional sense. Some of them are barely recognisable as the things they’re meant to be. A sun that might be a face. A house that might be a table. A figure that is definitely me, apparently, with very long arms.
I would not get rid of a single one of them.
People ask sometimes — kindly, reasonably — whether you really need to keep all of it. Whether you couldn’t photograp