On Keeping Things
There is a drawer in my kitchen that I have not fully opened since 2019. Not because it is stuck — it opens perhaps fifteen centimetres before something inside prevents further movement. I have chosen not to investigate. Whatever is in there has earned its privacy.
I mention this because my neighbour Giuseppina came by last week and suggested, not for the first time, that I should declutter the villa. She used the word “declutter” with the confidence of someone who has recently read a book about it, and I’m quite sure that she has. I offered her coffee. She accepted, which she took as a sign that the conversation was over.
It was not over, for me yes, not for her.
According to Giuseppina, I own too many things. This is probably true. It is also, I suspect, not entirely her business. The villa contains: books I have read, books I intend to read, books I keep to remember who gave them to me, and books I keep because getting rid of them feels like a small cruelty. There are expired train tickets in a bowl by the door. Three notebooks with identical covers that I can no longer tell apart. A biscuit tin that belonged to my grandmother, full of buttons that have outlived their coats, their shirts, their original purpose. And a fountain pen with a cracked nib that has not written a legible sentence in several years.
Giuseppina pointed at the pen. “That hasn’t worked for years,” she said.
I told her I was aware of this.
“So why keep it?” Good question I refuse to answer.
Anyhow I considered the question seriously for a moment, which I think surprised her. The pen worked when I wrote my first published essay. It worked, and then it didn’t, and somehow that transition seems important to record. Not everything that stops working should disappear. We do not, after all, throw away photographs of people who have died.
Giuseppina looked at the pen for a moment. Then she drank her coffee in silence.
The button tin is more complicated to explain.
My grandmother kept it on the second shelf in her kitchen, next to the olive oil and a small ceramic saint whose name nobody could remember. The tin had my name on it, which I never understood and never asked about, and now it is too late to ask. When I was small I would sit on her floor and sort the buttons by colour, then by size, then by some private system of my own that made complete sense at the time and that I can no longer reconstruct.
She never threw a button away. “You never know,” she’d say, which is what people say in Marisòla when they mean: this came from somewhere and that somewhere still matters. Maybe a neighbour will come by and ask for a specific button, which I hardly believed.
The tin is here now, on my desk. It rattles when I move it, like a small, contained ocean. I have no use for buttons. I keep it anyway, which I think would have pleased her, and which Giuseppina would consider a problem.
There is a difference between hoarding and remembering. The hoarder keeps everything because letting go feels dangerous. The rememberer keeps certain things because they hold a shape that nothing new can replicate. My broken pen holds the particular weight of ten years of writing. The button tin holds my grandmother’s voice saying you never know in a kitchen that no longer exists.
Giuseppina keeps a spotless house. Everything in it is functional, recent, and replaceable. When I visited last Christmas it felt like a waiting room for a train that runs on time. Very clean. Nothing rattling. I don’t feel at home at her place, and always fear that I will break something by accident.
I walked home and opened the biscuit tin for no reason, and the buttons made their small ocean sound, and the cats came to investigate, and the dog put his head on my knee, and I thought: yes. This is the right amount of clutter.
Some things stay broken on purpose.
Osalio Verbino Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 01: The Lighthouse Works When It Wants
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026