Heart

20 Years Strong

Added 2024-09-04 22:29:17 +0000 UTC

20 years ago from right now I was 22 and I was in France on my honeymoon. We didn’t have much money, we were practically still children. We took overnight buses to save money on hotel rooms. It was my first time being across the ocean. We grabbed lunch at a cafe one day and the single serve yogurt was in this terracotta cup (above). It had a foil top just like the ones at home from the grocery store.

I’ve always been a Captain Planet under-consumption kinda girlie. No way I was going to throw away a perfectly good vessel. I washed it out, threw it in my backpack, and put it in my bathroom to hold my lip pencils when I got home. It’s still doing its job 20 years later, I’m glad I saved it from a landfill. One tiny gesture, but one that reminded me of our travels and our beginnings every day when I peeked behind our bathroom mirror.

My new at-the-time husband thought it was a silly thing to do, he wouldn’t have said it out loud, but it was Poor People Behaviour. That’s not how his family would do things.

Fair. It’s true. My grandparents left everything they knew after the war and built a new life out of nothing. They found all kinds of things and shined them up until they were pretty. They appreciated getting use out of things others might just throw away. These things are in your bones, of course. Genetic memory and hard lessons. But 20 years later and this terracotta piece of garbage is still holding strong, and I can’t say the same for my fucking marriage. So maybe there’s something to be said about trash and treasure being in the eye of the beholder.

This summer I was in France again and brought home only one souvenir; the cup from my yogurt.

I’ll find a good use for it.