Another point

Funny how once you get onto a theme you start to see it everywhere. This morning I came across an article on the Globe and Mail website entitled, "A house becomes a museum of missed hopes" by Ian Brown. While this is just an excerpt of his book, in it Brown describes the challenges of being a parent of a child with a rare genetic disorder. He writes about keeping every object that he and his wife were given for their son, including toys, clothes and therapy tools. I thought his description of why they saved everything was very telling: he calls the collection "the archaeological history of our futile belief that this or that plaything would pull him out of his closed-off world, into our own more public space."

We collect and save for very different reasons, some more frivolous than others. But I think Brown's article is another example of how we use objects to sustain hope for what's ahead; they aren't just relics but items that potentially make it easier to cope with the daunting and uncertain future.

See Brown's article here.