One of the benefits of moving is the need to go through all those boxes and bins you never unpacked the last time you moved. The other day I reached the box containing things from when I was a little girl and found a few family “heirlooms” – just odds and ends – a few of my grandfather’s boyhood books, now musty and crumbling a bit (Dare Boys in the Revolutionary War! Bobby of the Labrador!…) and my grandmother’s little leather purse with her initials, from when she was a girl.

I had a lovely moment remembering when she gave it to me, telling me how one day she’d been walking on the beach in Maine and found this tiny mother of pearl heart in the shells and gravel, which probably would have been around 1910….this is one item I’m definitely keeping!