Baggage, Baskets and (good)Byes

During my Peace Corps service I have come to terms with some potential baggage that implicates my future and makes sense of my past.

I, Marie Davis, am a low-risk hoarder.

I’ve always thought of my savings behavior as sensible. I have great ability to recycle old belongings, allowing old clothes to live to see another trend-cycles and make a reappearance. Jackets have turned to vest, pants to shorts, shorts to shorter shorts. What’s thriftier than jeans from a decade ago, especially when they’re your own jeans?

My hoarding kryptonite of choice is trinkets. Little reminders of happy moments hide in my shelves, and at the bottom of my purse, in this random cardboard box that lives under my couch and shoved into coat pockets.

I’ve tried to harness this hoarding through different collectables throughout my life – rocks, bottle caps, snowglobes and postcards. Books, pictures, pens and magnets. Yet, I still feel it’s essential to hold onto a ticket stub or a brochure, and when I inevitably stumble upon said stub or brochure I am reminded of this special day and able to relish in the glow of a latent memory …and then promptly proceed to shove the stub/brochure/photo/oystershell right back into whatever crevice I re-discovered it in.

This behavior has continued in Botswana. Flipchart papers from my first little project in Ghanzi, cryptic notes slipped to me from students, cards from the beginning of a friendship, and letters from home litter every corner of my home. A receipt from Kirstenbosch, an oystershell from Namibia, a strip of gifted fabric, a Christmas card from a Sky Girls and a book from a new friend are just a few of the things that decorate my shelves in a chaotic system for which only I have the code.

Each momentum represents a glimmer of Botswana; they are little pieces of beautiful days that have shaped me. These trinkets have helped me realize who I am and who I want to be, and provide a map on how to reduce the distance between these two selves.

I desperately do not want to forget these memories – these people and places and words and sounds. I desperately do not want to forget everything I learned here. These trinkets serves as little reminders of each of these elusively definable, evanescently defining days.

But for some reason, I’ve started throwing things away.

I didn’t read that stupid declutter book that is often mentioned to me in a straining-to-be-polite, but seriously how do you live like this, way. I didn’t honor my memories and gingerly place them in the garbage can to be mixed with last night’s dinner or whatever that crap is. I just realized their purpose was null.

One of the main crafts in Botswana are traditional baskets. Reeds from the delta are dried and colored, and intricately woven together in delicate patterns to create a festive bowl or basket.

No matter how hard you tried, it would be impossible to unweave the reeds and return them to their original state. Each reed remains an independent entity, but has been bent in such a way that it could not be completely un-bent. They have become one, and together, they have become something more beautiful than what they were alone.

I now know that beginnings and endings aren’t finite, like the patterns of the baskets and the incessant Kalahari sand. Leaving Botswana, and finally burning my tattered exemption form, isn’t final, there is no unweaving Botswana from who we all are, and who we all will be. A ticket-stub-reminder is no longer necessary.

(Plus, I think it will be impossible to remove this sand from the bottom of all my bags, shoes, pockets and sheets, and the sand will serve as the truly infinite reminder. Eish.)