I’m not the most faithless person I’ve ever met, but I’m not the most faithful either. This is one of the thoughts that came to me as I tidied the house in anticipation of my mother-in-law’s visit. Connected to this thought was the memory of a recent conversation with a friend about a popular house-cleaning book that advises readers to dispense with everything in their home they do not love.

Said my friend: “The author gave away her hammer because it was no longer bringing her joy.” I recall thinking that seemed a little shortsighted.

What gave rise to these thoughts of faith and faithlessness was cleaning out the drawers of the dining room hutch. I doubted my mother-in-law would be peeking into them, but somehow the exercise seemed vitally important. Midway through, I came across a rock. While I’d like to say the discovery of the rock caused me to swoon in memory of some long-ago, soul-inspiring trip to a foreign land, the truth is, while it was an attractive rock, there was nothing distinctive about it, and I have no idea where it came from or why I picked it up.

“This is no longer bringing me joy, so I’ll just throw it outside,” I thought.

But I didn’t. Here’s why: Obviously, the rock meant something to me at the time I picked it up. Maybe it was from a many decades-old wintery trip down to the floor of Cloudland Canyon, a souvenir of my first real hike with my husband.

Or maybe it was from our hike with another couple through Torre Pines State Park in La Jolla, Calif., five years ago, and I scooped up the rock in celebration of friendship. Or it could have come from our hike on the Pacific Crest Trail last year, a physical reminder of hardship and accomplishment.

The rock could have been from any of a number of wilderness stops my husband and I made across the country when we were in our late twenties, bunking in the back of a pickup truck and collecting mementos of a trip I told myself I would always remember (but barely do).

 

While I have no clue as to the rock’s origins or raison d’etre, one thing I do know: Wherever the rock is from, whatever it was meant to signify, it was important, and you don’t just throw a thing like that away.

As a result, it’s sitting on my dining room table, annoying the hell out of me. What’s obvious to me now — now that the hutch drawers are cleaned out, my mother-in-law is gone, and I’ve had time to think about this — is that the rock is no longer a rock but a philosophical conundrum.

Since I don’t remember where the rock came from, why it was important to own it or what it signified, I have to wonder: Does it still have meaning? Is it possible for what is now an anonymous rock — with no more backstory than any of the millions of random rocks currently lounging around my yard — to still be imbued with the gravity of significance or to in any way enrich my life? (For the record, the rock, even when it still had backstory, was not exactly blowing my mind every few days.)

Which brings me to my other question: If I truly believed this rock were still imbued with the gravity of significance, despite my inability to remember how or why I came to possess it, what exactly should my expectations be of it?

As an artifact of an earlier self who gazed upon it and deemed it necessary to own, I’m thinking maybe it should afford me some sort of magical connection to my younger self, though I’m not sure how that would manifest. The fact is, while I’ve owned it for some time now, I do not feel magically connected to my younger self. I suppose I could be overlooking the signs of connection. Either that or it’s possible the rock is “broken.”

Then again, maybe the rock is simply a stand-in for activities gone by, an icon of sorts, a reminder that, at some point in my near or distant past, I went outside and did something that, for some reason long forgotten, I believed merited a memento. And maybe that is reason enough for a rock to take up space in a life.

So back into the drawer it will go, along with its silent story, beneath the ping-pong paddles and the playing cards, to do whatever mementos do when not in service to fragile memory. In a few years’ time I expect I will find and puzzle over it yet again, recalling all it might represent before making the same decision. I’m not sure this qualifies as joy, but I’m also not sure it doesn’t.