Why Do We Leave Mementos?

My high-school-age son had an old Casio keyboard. It was handed down to him by his grandmother when he was small. He composed some of his first tunes on it. He played sing-along songs for his little sister. He sang to me, accompanied by that little electronic piano. When our family home was foreclosed, my son took his keyboard deep into our woods, propped it against a tree, and left it there. It was the day all of us became briefly homeless. No other place else could be called home by any of us, for a long time after that.

Over the years, we had left other things in the idyllic ten acres of woods that fanned from the back of our country home like a superhero's cape. Each annual Christmas tree was dragged through the forest to the edge of the little stream and left to be a home to birds and bunnies. Carved pumpkins were set in the woods in November, to frighten and hopefully ward off coyotes. We stood on the edge of the tree line pitching rotting produce into the woods to feed the animals. If there were mixed nuts in their shells left over at Christmas, we took them to an area of the woods that my children had named The Thicket and scattered them on the ground for the squirrels.

It was different when my son left his keyboard there. It wasn't something organic to be consumed by the living breathing woods. It was a representation of the young man himself.

Much like the way people leave teddy bears, pictures, and toys at the graves of children—or flowers and letters at war memorials—my son's keyboard was a reminder of love lost. It was a symbol of the way things were, left at a place that had become a memory. Even now... years later, it brings tears to my eyes to think of it.

Long before the foreclosure, when we were having some work done in the basement, a contractor told me he always wrote on the inside of a new wall before he closed it up for good. He said he wrote his name, the date, and a description of the weather conditions that day. I was charmed by this. I had seen something similar once before when I moved into a home in rural Michigan. We bought the place from the family that had built it. There were two young daughters who were heartbroken about moving from their home. One of the girls had written on the inside of her closet... small letters in pencil. She wrote her name, and the words: this was my room.

I wrote a little something in a house once too, in a place no one will ever find. Why do we do these things?

People leave mementos as a representation of themselves. When we are in a place and it is time to move on, sometimes we are compelled to memorialize the experience of being there by leaving a piece of ourselves behind.

There is an old song called "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". Many times, when we move on from one place to another, we experience years of wistful memories attached to the thought of the place. This can leave us feeling as if we have left our very heart there... as if we will never recover, and a piece of us will always be missing.

Leaving behind mementos gives us a sense of ownership. Though we don't own it in any real sense, we have claimed it, like leaving a flag on the moon.

In the 2017 film, A Ghost Story, a memento left behind in a house ties together everything that has ever been in existence on the piece of land where the house stands. It illustrates the real and powerful soul connection people feel with places, especially places we call home.