ةOn a seemingly average afternoon, when the dust in the closet was already floating toward my nose before I could even open the door, I lifted an old wooden chest off the shelf.
It wasn’t large. But it was unexpectedly heavy—the kind of weight that makes you pause for a moment and wonder: what did she keep there without ever telling a soul?
The lid creaked softly, and inside, I was greeted by nothing “valuable” in the classic sense. Instead, I found more than 30 small pieces, each one different and carefully arranged. Some appeared to be metallic, others were made of wood or ceramic, featuring strange shapes that weren’t immediately recognizable. And that was exactly the problem: the more I looked at them, the more “intentional” they seemed.
Every single piece was individually wrapped in a scrap of cloth. You don’t just throw things like that into a box. If it’s just junk, you don’t wrap it so carefully. And my grandmother wasn’t the type to hoard trash; she was orderly, practical, and attentive to detail. This discovery didn’t fit the image I had of her—and that was precisely why it bothered me.
The Box That Couldn’t Be Random
I picked up a few pieces one by one. Some showed faint signs of wear, as if they had been held in someone’s hand many times. Others looked almost new, preserved more as symbols than as tools. Not one of them came with an explanation, a label, or even a tiny hint. There was only that thick silence people leave behind over things they don’t want to talk about.
The questions I never thought to ask during her life began to race through my mind: Where did she get them? Why were there so many? What was the connection between them? The way the box was hidden made it feel more like a drawer from a parallel life rather than a simple box of memories.
As I turned them over in my hands, I realized I wasn’t necessarily looking for what they were, but why they were there. These objects didn’t seem like random souvenirs. They seemed like witnesses—and witnesses usually know more than they tell.
Small Signs, Deep Feelings
In the box, I also found a yellowed slip of paper with delicate, barely legible handwriting. At first, I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could grasp quickly. It was the sort of paper that, even before reading, tells you it was preserved for a specific purpose.
I closed the box a few times, then opened it again. I tried to convince myself I was overreacting. But if it wasn’t important, why was everything wrapped, separated, and protected? Why would my grandmother put such diverse objects in one place, as if they belonged to a single story?
In that moment, for the first time, I felt that the woman I knew as “calm and predictable” possessed a mysterious, quiet territory where no one else had ever stepped. And this box was the door.
When I finally managed to decipher a few fragments of the note, only these words repeated clearly:
“Memories,” “Protection,” and “Luck”
—and the more than 30 objects began to seem less “strange” and more like part of a personal ritual that my grandmother had hidden from everyone’s eyes.
