One of her things was a wintergreen Altoids tin that held unspectacular shells, dead flowers and sea glass that she just liked to have. If you asked her where the skeletal aftermath of foxglove or milkweed had come from, she would say I don’t know, curiously, without searching. Objects that reflected a future memory appeared to her in the parking lots of trampoline parks, bogs and in the winter grass of Best Gas! At twenty-two she was still a forager of shiny things, both natural and what was made to be trash. She was the tale of a magpie in her collecting of hues. A fortune from a cookie that wasn’t hers and salt sweating kelp shared residence in her tin. The exact origins of her acquired belongings weren’t so important. She plucked a pinecone out of sooted snow at Holiday Bargain Outlet, her kelp – something rejected. The tide pools, clay and riverbanks her rocks and shells came from were already familiar to her. Sophie collected to have shards of her geological body with her always. What is a beach if not many small shards of the past?

As we drove to Range Pond, her prius bumped over the bridge of the Androscoggin. I learned of her Altoids tin of things when it fell, open lid, from the front pocket of her backpack. Her objects weren’t uncomfortable in their individuality; they didn’t need to be in company of others of their kind. She said ohhhhh those are just my things when I asked for reasons. Range Pond was frequently tested for bacteria, like much of the fresh water that we accidentally swallowed while swimming – never learning that it shouldn’t be a talking activity. As we began to air dry in a month like July our skin became sticky with what was and was not living. What was living was red bacteria of a 2022 algal bloom and blue runoff of Kool-Aid filled toddlers. We watched one toddler with sweat-matted, straight-across bangs and a Peppa Pig bathing suit dig up the sediment of the beach like a hound through her legs, sending the coarse sand of Range into her brother’s hair behind her. We watched and lied in the sun, clogging our pores with the brother’s tank top which read “Sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of my freedom,” six days after Dobbs V. Jackson. Sophie didn’t keep anything for her tin that day.

Range was southwest of the river city we lived in. During a less sticky month, she picked up a heart rock when the frost of the pond seemed to reify the stench of the summer months. Sometimes she hummed as she looked down at gently lapping fresh water, and many times when she smoothed over a pebble with her thumb she tossed it right back. She confused me, abandoning a glossy and green spiral shell while treasuring a dense, colourless rock. I had always assumed she was looking for something “beautiful.” At some point I said sooo, now why this one? And she would say she liked a rock porous. Closing one eye and looking at the negative space in a seashell, she would say, see, it looks like a beaver tooth!

In Sophie’s tin was a pale slice of pink sea glass, from her home beach I thought. I’ve only ever been cold on Hummrock beach. Even with freezing fingers I would follow her in walking methodically, in searching. I’ve seen photos of her from summer between the years of high school, her and her friends in ripped shorts and heart shaped glasses. When we walked along the slanted sediment, our feet left such deep craters of where we had been, the sand invited us to remain in the past. But Sophie didn’t speak of her slowest walks, with her mom, a year prior, in chemo. She might have gone down to the shoreline and soaked her ankles in the will of a winter’s westward ocean, asking to be released from the strength she held in the soles of her feet. I’m sure her mother watched her in a maroon knit hat that was removed from Sophie’s round with a darning needle, green, which was kept in her tin of things. She may or may not have a rock from that winter which could be stored somewhere I’ve never seen, kept safer than her travelling things. 

Sophie liked to run on the rural roads Maine called highways. By the springtime she had done too much of it. In April, on Popham beach, she taught me a new stretch for the aches in her hips. What she showed me looked like imaginary hula-hooping and what came from our laughs traveled far into the fog and mist. Through the low clouds we didn’t believe that what we saw off in the distance were horses. With blurry eyes Sophie told me they looked like her childhood dream horse, Clementine, whom she had pasted on her bedroom door after she found her on google images. I asked her the colour of Clementine; she said grey and paused, remembering her dad only ever bought black and white ink. Bent over in a small hysteria, I picked up a snail’s shell. She slipped the spiral home into her frayed jeans pocket. As the spring mist turned our hair into weeds and the dampness in our sweatshirts released the smell of cigarettes, we walked back towards Sophie’s car, speaking of things we had already discussed but in a new way. She kept Advil in the tin still lined with the wax paper that shouted Uncle! and traded a Liqui-gel in aid of her hip for a snail’s shell from a hungover day. 

Sophie’s Altoids tin wasn’t her only mausoleum of things once more alive. The foot of her bed cradled drying round fruits and acorns; when she laid down at night the apples and oranges rolled towards where her hips sank. Her red Prius was a museum of unwashed clothes, cans of beans and Mayor Carl’s business cards. Playing WBUR since 1998, her rural Maine chariot died in 2023. On the way home to Massachusetts for her uncle’s funeral, she said something to the sky in memoriam for a being with no suspension. Mourning on her way to mourning. 

As she swept out crumbs of peanut butter pretzels and pits from cherries, she left her Wintergreen Altoids tin of things in the cupholder. Her car dying marked a close to her two weeks of late August series of unfortunate events, which had begun with a rabies shot. She kept what she could in two tote bags and a cardboard box. She sat in the spindly harsh grass of I-93 and began a new scarf with yarn just found under the seat of her Prius’ passenger side. She waited for an older man named Ralph. 

The Prius died just in time for us to move away from each other. We began taking commuter trains to meet in small in-between towns with little significance. As we finished a small hike in Wachusett, Massachusetts, I asked her if she had brought her tin of things. In her eyes I saw something similar to the recognition of never knowing the colour of Clementine. She hadn’t seen that Altoids tin since she had parted with her Prius. My thingggssss, she giggled a bit in sadness and said, of course, accepting that someday her things would become new things.