“Every object, after all, is a kind of doorway.” Margaret Atwood
Some days there is never enough.
The sorting pen in the stockroom sits near empty, as if it has dried out from trying to keep up. Other days there is too much, the kind of volume where bags land one after another and you start worrying about someone twisting their back. I tell people not to hurt themselves, and then, half joking, that I do not want to be doing paperwork today.
But it is never the amount that unsettles me.
Not the used underwear.
Not the child car seats you hope never turn up but sometimes accept without thinking.
It is the things that feel too personal.
The ones that carry a bit of a life inside them.
The items that make you pause in the middle of a busy morning and wonder what happened next.
One of those arrived on a day when the shop was already a bit chaotic. Eight boxes dropped off together, a mix of toys, clothes, puzzles, the usual spillage from a hurried clear out. My volunteer, a retired chef with more energy than most people half his age, was working through them with his usual precision. He has a way of turning ordinary tasks into small performances. It keeps the place lighter than it has any right to be.
He knocked on the office door and asked if I knew who donated the boxes.
I told him they had not left any details.
Inside one of them was a faded slip-in photo album. A mother and child. Little captions written quickly but with care. Messages meant for the child when they were older. Familiar local backgrounds. A park I have walked through countless times. A corner of the high street that looks different every year. First crawl. First days out. Moments that were meant to go further.
I still have it. It sits on the high shelf in the back office. Sometimes I check it, just to be sure. The plastic pockets lift slightly as they separate, the way old albums do. I keep thinking one day I might recognise the mother. I cannot bring myself to process it yet, and I do not want it ending up in the wrong hands or being sold by mistake. It is waiting for someone who may never come back.
So it stays here for now. Quarantined for safekeeping, holding its place until the day someone claims it or until I finally resign myself to the confidential waste.
Not every donation carries that kind of weight. Some are simply confusing.
We once had a self help book come in, and a previous reader had annotated one of the chapters. The chapter was about influence the usual idea that being close to smokers makes you more likely to smoke. Underneath that example, in pencil, they had written:
Fat people make you fat.
No explanation.
No context.
Just their own logic, left there for the next person to find.
I remember closing the book and wondering what sort of moment someone must have been in to write it. People leave fragments of themselves behind without realising anyone might see them.
Other items unsettle me more quietly.
We get Bibles sometimes.
Old ones with soft pages that carry the faint texture of every hand that ever held them. Margins filled with notes. Verses underlined. Dates of loss or hope written in small handwriting. Private thoughts never meant to travel beyond a bedside drawer.
And they end up with me, standing in a stockroom that always smells of old cotton, cardboard, and something faintly sweet from the donation bin. I stand there trying to decide what to do with someone’s private faith. We cannot sell them. We cannot give them out. So they go into the recycling. It never feels quite right, and I cannot fully explain why.
Some things arrive with a different kind of weight.
The house clearance boxes.
The ones meant to empty a room rather than preserve a life.
We had medals once. Proper military service medals with a name engraved along the edge. They were wrapped in thin tissue paper that smelled of a drawer that had not been opened in years. I remember the cold weight of them in my hand, heavier than the metal should have been.
I always wonder who they belonged to. Whether they came home. Whether anyone is still alive who remembers what they did to earn them. It is a strange thing, opening a box and realising you are holding something that once meant a great deal to someone. Something that should have been kept safe, handed down, spoken about. Instead it ends up with me, deciding whether history belongs in a cabinet or a crate.
We once had a library book donated by accident. Fairly new, with that clean library smell that is half glue and half nothing at all. My volunteer spotted the stamp straight away and said we should return it. He even rang the number inside the cover before I had finished the box. It was from a town miles away. Not far on paper. Far enough in practice. About a two and a half hour round trip once you include trains, waiting, and walking.
He kept saying it is the right thing to do
and I kept saying yes, but it is miles away.
In the end he posted it back. He could not stand the idea of it being lost. I admired that about him, even if I was not going to lose half a day returning a paperback that had already lived a full life.
Old books appear sometimes. The kind from the 1950s with gift messages inside the cover.
For Elsie
Christmas 1954
From Ron
Little declarations from people who must have imagined a future together.
I always wonder what happened after the ink dried. Whether they stayed together. Whether they had children. Grandchildren. Whether anyone alive still knows their names. Or whether the book is the last thing left carrying them.
The ink softens over time.
The handwriting loses its sharpness.
It feels like reading a story with the middle and ending missing.
I think about people more than I admit.
Old volunteers.
Old friends.
The ones who drift away quietly.
Every person has their season, I tell myself.
It sounds reasonable enough.
But some people stay in your thoughts long after their season has passed.
The stories you were never meant to know.
The names no one says anymore.
And the objects that outlived their owners, still sitting in whatever box they travelled in.
You end up carrying more than you realise.
Quietly, piece by piece, until the next box turns up.
“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their stories for them.” Siegfried Sassoon
What objects in your life would still speak for you if you could not?
Notes
Header Photo by Arun Prakash on Unsplash