Yesterday I offered bits of me to the valley. Baby teeth, taken from the small pouch my mother recently gave to me. She had kept them all these years in her jewelry box, tiny relics of my becoming. Each one a memory of a wish from my child self.
I buried my little tooth, a small token from my body years past, an offering and prayer for new beginnings on this equinox.
I thanked the valley that has held me through many seasons, a reliable respite and reset for all the times I’ve needed it. I thanked my mother, whose body, along with mine, still holds the archive of my childhood. And I thanked my grandmother, who turns 102 today. A life that has held more seasons than I can fathom in her 60 years ahead of me. Her body another archive of births and losses, recipes and rituals with hands that have made, kept, and carried.
I come from people who hold on. Nostalgia runs thick in our blood, stored not just in our bodies and stories, but in our kept things. Objects as talismans, proof peppered through homes and dispersed through the family that we were, and are, here.
My great-grandmother’s wedding corset, blue and embroidered. My great-grandfather’s barber tools, tarnished and rubbed smooth. A colander, five generations old, countless pots of pasta water poured through its holes. Reminding us of tradition, labor, gathering.
We keep everything. Madonna, Italians know how to hold on. Recipes that stay the same, history passed down through palates and stained notecards. We have needed these constants, pieces of us that remain in a world of rapid, advancing change, knowing that memory needs matter beyond data to survive.
And. It feels so damn good to offer memories to the land, to release what is precious to me through devotion and pray for the new, the fresh, the unknown.
I think of my wisdom teeth given to waters and land in Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Tahiti, remembering my delight in giving pieces of my body, wishing I had more to offer, and feeling free in the release. I had them pulled late, like so many other thresholds into adulthood, reluctant to surrender the “wisdom” of youth, resistant until a time of urgency, needing the pressure to catalyze courage. Afraid, too, of the violence of bone leaving body.
I almost forgot to ask for them back, lost in the after-haze of pain and swelling. Cried in the car when I realized. It felt too big to return, to claim them. Marcus went back in for me, because sometimes we all need a little help claiming pieces of ourselves.
I’ve needed to make letting go a practice, because I love my Taurean stubbornness. It provides me staying power. I do not give up easily, especially on the humans I love. But I know that devotion is not the same as holding on. So I tend to what I love by placing it on the earth and trusting the unseen work.
The valley does not keep what I bury. It takes it, breaks it down, threads it into root and soil and unseen things. Nothing is lost. But nothing is kept the way we’ve known it.
My grandmother’s memory is finally fading after 102 years. She knows who we are, but not that it’s her birthday. She remembers my grandfather, but not where he is. She wants pasta and cake for her birthday.
We’ll give her flowers and leis, and the dogs will sit at her feet, keeping her company, making her smile, in a body still holding on, even as it seems her soul has been ready to go. And it’s beautiful, hard, and thank god, sometimes hilarious.
And we all have to breathe out, to let her be as she is now, to let it all belong to something larger than our keeping.
