The Keeper of Found Things

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My great-aunt was the first person who ever truly unnerved me—not in a frightening way, but in that rare way when a child meets someone so original, so unbound, that the world suddenly feels larger and less predictable. She lived at the edge of the forest, and the forest loved her back.

As a child, I would follow her narrow shadow among the cedars and watch as she lifted skulls from under moss, each one held with the quiet reverence of a priest raising a relic. Deer, raccoon, owl—she knew them all by the curve of bone, the language of sutures. She kept them on a long table hidden deep in the woods, a place that felt like a strange altar where only she and the wind were allowed to pray.

Loneliness hung around her like a shawl, but it did not make her bitter. It made her attentive. She saw details others missed—the way bark healed around a broken branch, the way a stream braided itself after winter storms. She wandered the woods because she belonged there more than she belonged among people.

In her nineties, she formed an unlikely friendship with a woman down the road. They bonded over skulls the way some women bond over recipes. They traded their finest specimens like children swapping cards—“Here, take this fox, its sutures are exquisite”—and they pored over bone-ordering catalogs as if they were planning future lives. “Maybe a peccary next,” she’d muse, tapping the picture with a trembling finger.

But her greatest obsession wasn’t skulls—it was wood. Myrtlewood, specifically. She collected it from the Oregon coast in monumental quantities—fifty bushels, maybe more. She would burnish the pieces gently with an antler, of all things, creating a natural polish. The result was a smoothness so deep it felt like touching time itself. The wood was hard, dense, almost musical.

Once, we talked about the best kind of found object. She told me that true treasures were the gnarled roots and knots left behind when a tree rotted away. What remained was a strange sculpture—half-ghost, half-memory. Driftwood, she said, was too washed, too worn. The sand and water stripped away all the interesting secrets.

“The best things,” she said, holding up a twisted knot she’d saved from the surf, “are the ones the world tried to erase but couldn’t.”

I think of her often now. Of her skulls, her Myrtlewood, her quiet life in the trees. She was a collector of what nature almost forgot—but somehow, miraculously, left behind for her alone.