Scavenger

I was born a scavenger.

Not in the way the word is often meant… something low, something surviving off what has already been discarded… ok, yes that but not just that… but in the way of one who notices everything that glimmers, even in the chaos. From my earliest days, since I was merely 8… when hunger pressed itself against my ribs and the cupboards sat nearly empty, I learned to make meals out of scraps, to transform what looked like nothing into something that sustained. Sure my main courses consisted of bologne and mustard, and I hated the taste of tap water so much I stuck to small amounts of water and whatever soda there was, usually apple, I hate it to this day because of that…

… I scavenged food as a poor child … and then again as a poor adult, piecing together nourishment from fragments the world would have overlooked. And now not only for myself but for a husband and kids who I  would like to add, are intensely picky… But what I was gathering was always more than food… it was dignity, creativity, survival embedded into small masterpieces on chipped plates. It was an art of endurance… the alchemy of making do, of turning scarcity into something resembling beauty. The art of love. I made not for myself but for the beauty of it and the way it fills my heart enough to give to others.

This instinct did not remain confined to kitchens or tables. It became my way of being. I scavenged people, too… the rare souls who felt like home, who carried some quiet recognition of me inside them. From the first moment of contact, I could feel when a thread had been pulled between us, something invisible and unbreakable. I have always reached for those threads, gathering them into my hands, tying knots of memory and devotion, holding fast to anyone who felt like part of my unfinished story. In a not so permanent life and world that discards people as easily as objects, I could not help but cling to the few who illuminated my path, no matter how fleeting their presence.

I scavenged in thrift stores and secondhand shops, running my fingers across fabrics already worn, shelves already touched, books with other people’s handwriting in the margins. These places were sacred to me. I could feel the lives embedded in what others had abandoned…

the almost worn down sweater that had once kept someone warm on a bitter night, the framed picture that once hung above a stranger’s dining table, the doll that had once been pressed against a child’s chest during moments of tears or laughter. These things were not just objects… they were evidence that someone existed, that someone loved or wept or dreamed, and that even after they were gone, something of them remained. I scavenged their echoes and carried them with me.

Even re-gifting, recycling, re-using… these were not chores but rituals. Every act of keeping something alive a little longer became an act of resistance against forgetting. I learned to see treasures where the world saw trash, because I knew intimately what it felt like to be overlooked, nearly thrown away. To be born into poverty, shuffled through homes, discarded and reclaimed, to grow up with nothing but a fierce desire to prove I was something worth keeping… it shaped me into one who clings.

But what I clutch to my chest most tightly has never been objects. It has always been time, memory, the fragile evidence of life passing by.

hoard laughter the way others hoard riches. I grip handmade meals and their aromas especially if I didn’t make them… just the simple act of someone setting food in front of me with love. I hoard songs like they are relics, each melody carrying me back to the place where I first heard it, the person I first sang it with. I hoard dreams… the ones that never came true, the ones that still might, the ones that bloom in the night and vanish by morning but leave their fragrance behind.

I live with an ache to remember, an ache that feels like hunger. I dig my nails into experience, desperate not to let it slip through me. For so much of my life, I have feared being forgotten, feared being extinguished without ever being seen. To live is to flicker here for a while, glowing like a fragile candle flame… and then to be gone. But I have never been able to accept the brevity. I want to carve my existence into the bones of the world, into the memory of others, into something that cannot be snuffed out by the first gust of wind. At least not so quickly.

I am not afraid of death itself so much as erasure. I know what it feels like to vanish from sight, to be misplaced, overlooked, left behind. I know what it feels like to be passed over, as if my worth were negotiable, as if my voice were not needed. So I scavenge with urgency, piling up evidence that I was here… the meals I made, the photographs I took, the words I wrote, the bonds I nurtured or at least attempted to, the fragments of love I stitched together into something resembling permanence.

If life is an ocean then I am the scavenger who drifts upon it gathering whatever floats my way.

Some of it is driftwood, rough and unyielding, but it can keep me from drowning. Some of it is glass, broken and sharp, but even that can catch the light. Some of it is treasure, unexpected and breathtaking, and I clutch it to me as if my survival depends on it… because in many ways it does.

A scavenger lost at sea, always searching, always salvaging. I am not waiting to be found, not exactly… but I am leaving a trail of what I have gathered, in hopes that someone might stumble upon it one day and know I was here. And not only that… but cherish it, embrace it, acknowledge it and pay attention with their heart… I do not want to be a flame that flickers once and disappears without smoke. I want to be the warmth that lingers on someone’s skin long after the fire has burned out.

I was born a scavenger. And if that is what I remain until the end, then let it be said of me… I took what was broken and made it whole or at the very least, I attempted to. I took what was forgotten and remembered it. I took what was small and made it shimmer. I was never rich in gold or power, but I was rich in the treasures that most people overlook.

And perhaps that is enough.