Mementos

Maïa has this terrible habit of picking up things she finds on the ground. Our driveway/parking area is an especially interesting foraging ground for her; it's gravel, so you never know what kind of treasure you might find just by kicking up a pebble or two. She has so far found cigarette butts (care of our downstairs neighbour), rusted washers (look! it's a ring!), bits of red brick, a piece of glass, an oily bit of a car engine, a spring, various and sundry pieces of garbage, and, of course, gravel.

Beyond just picking them up, Maïa holds onto her treasures as though they were, well, treasures. She is reluctant to let them go or put them down, never mind not picking them up in the first place. Yesterday, when I went to fetch her from daycare, her teacher gave her something. I asked Maïa to show it to me: it was a little red plastic "pitoune" that looked like a piece from the game Battle Ship (remember that??). She told me that she had found it on their walk earlier in the day. After much coaxing, I got her to give it to me. Mostly I was worried that Solanne would get her hands on it on the ride home in the stroller and put it in her mouth.

So I explained to Maïa, for the fourty-third time this week, that we don't pick things up from the ground. They're dirty. They're dangerous. They're simply yucky. She seemed to understand. She said, "okay." And that was that. Until we got to the park, and I took her out of the stroller. The first thing she did was to pick up a bit of broken toy that was on the ground. I swear, she had walked about three steps before doing it! I asked her to put it down, and she did, quite nicely without a fuss, but still...

This whole compulsion of hers to pick things up seemed incomprehensible to me. But today, on my walk with Solanne, I got to thinking about it. And it doesn't seem so strange after all. When Maïa picks something up, she's not particularly curious about the object; she just holds onto it or puts it in her pocket. It seems more like a need to collect things. But not just for the sake of collecting them; rather, for the sake of feeling them, of having them. It's like those random items that she picks up along the way affirm to her that she is in the world, that there are things around her, that she was there. It's a way of remembering where she was (even if it was just moments ago), of connecting her to that place. For our memories and our experiences are so ethereal. We can make things up if we forget. But a thing, an object, ties us to reality, it reminds us of the feel of the ground at that place, of the smell of the air, of the shadow we cast upon the place where we once stood. It reminds us that we ourselves are real.

Maïa lives only in her body right now: that's the reality of a preschooler. Yet her body seems somewhat detached from her, out of her control at times, just as her moods are just beyond her reach most times. She is still discovering its solidity, its firmness. The world beyond her own body must seem ever more confusing and apart and wonderous. To pick up bits of it, even the tiniest and inconsequential bits of it, must be so affirming: yes, I'm here. Yes, this whole wide world is here, too. Wow. Lucky for me! Maybe I'll just carry around this neat little ring for a while to remind me.