My wheelchair *ba dum tss*. Honestly, it is a close race between the quilt my grandmother made me:

Or my journal. It sounds cheesy, but I can get through a lot with that journal and a nice pen. It has been there with me for every agonizing step in the journey of life, and is filled with stories of triumph, love, happiness, and failure. There are broken hearts, healing souls, and introspective exploration melded between the soft black-and-white, swirled covers.

I am not a sentimental person, and that makes forming attachments to objects and belongings difficult. It has only been in the last few years that I have truly begun to understand what it means to be sentimental. Most of the items that I have come to know as sentimental items, are those that cannot be recreated. Items such as the quilts my grandmother has made, the words written on the pages of a journal, a pair of shoes, a hoodie, a soft blanket, a favorite coffee mug, and so much more.

The most interesting thing about sentimentality is that the items you think would hold sentimental value don’t, and it is often random items that remind you of a person, place or event. Quilts remind me of my grandma and aunt. They remind me of the months that my grandma spent learning to sew in order to produce hundreds of masks during the pandemic. It is listening to the embroidery machines machine-gunning in the background making every repeat every word louder in conversation. It isn’t the item, but the memories sewn into the item.

I am not a hunter nor gun enthusiast, but I will be adopting my grandmother’s muzzleloader and crossbow. She loves hunting and the muzzleloader sat above our fireplace most of my life. To me, it is as much a part of their house as the rafters in the framing. It has become as much a part of me as the bones in my body.

We all have silly possessions that invoke sentimentality. For me, that would have to be a laminated black whisker. In 2021 I adopted my cat, Gingko le Stinko. He has been paramount in helping me through anxiety and panic attacks. He lays with me when I am sick, sleeps with me, goes for walks outside on a leash with me in tow, and generally maintains a great demeanor for dispelling the hauntings of the mind. Thus, being the werido that I am, I laminated the first whisker that he ever shed. It is in that trusty journal I was speaking of earlier.