The Things We Keep

I remember my Auntie Mary saying the same thing over and over.  Buy cheap, buy twice.  As a child, I thought she meant money. It took me years to realise she meant something bigger. She believed some things were worth investing in — not because they were expensive, but because they were made to last. She never filled cupboards or wardrobes with more than she needed. She bought thoughtfully, looked after what she owned, and when she found something she loved, she kept it.

For years she wore the same pair of boots — beautifully eccentric things, covered in dolphins leaping through waves, the kind only she could have pulled off, and yet somehow they suited her completely. I loved those boots. I used to joke that she should leave them to me one day. We weren't the same shoe size, but that feels beside the point now. It was never really the boots I wanted. It was what they stood for.

Auntie Mary quietly shaped how I see the world without ever seeming to try. She introduced me to Desiderata by Max Ehrmann, a poem that's travelled with me through most of my adult life — one line about being a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, found its way onto my skin as a tattoo.

She was fiercely independent. A feminist before it was fashionable to say the word out loud. She shopped locally when she could, believed small businesses mattered, and supported charities quietly, without ever making a fuss about it. As children, she'd buy us memberships to the Young Ornithologists' Club and encourage us to actually notice the birds around us, convinced that looking after the world wasn't somebody else's job.

Looking back, I realise she was teaching us values, not lessons. A lesson is something you're told. A value is something you absorb from watching someone live.

Mary didn't chase more. She chose better, and then she kept it.

Auntie Mary never got to see who I've become since. I often wish she had. I'd have loved to know what she made of it — whether she'd have recognised, in it, the same instinct she had with her dolphin boots.

I have a feeling she would have.