LAUREN ARDIS

The Receptacle

In her film of 2000, The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda travels across France, documenting communities and individuals known as gleaners—those who partake in the historical practice of gathering the remaining crops after a season’s harvest. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Varda delights in the discovery of a mound of heart-shaped potatoes, filling her bag to the brim with her bounty. The unadulterated joy in her discovery immediately reminds me of my mother and her ongoing collection of heart-shaped rocks, “gleaned” by my brother and me as Children. The rarefied treasures, equally satisfying to find as to give, of little to no monetary value.

One of my earliest recallable pleasures is the semi-regular visit to the fabric store where I was permitted to collect silk flowers from the floor (never pick!). With the cashier’s permission, I carried them home in my lap, eager to add them to my curio container once alone in my bedroom. The square purple box held other items of adoration—letters in secret script from my BFF, an impressive sticker collection, colorful remnants of paper, miniature poodle-shaped erasers. My brother, an early and life-long devotee to tidiness and purging, concluded his collecting with he rocks, unable to understand my commitment to procuring useless sentiment.

These vignettes now live in a larger secret box, buried in the back of my childhood garage. I frequently visit them, reminding myself over and over again of the tiny talismans that comprised my deep affinity for sacred objects. As I’ve aged and moved a dozen times over the past decade, I’ve become more keenly attuned to the amount of sentiment I keep with me. I’ve traded fake fallen flora for heirlooms and what my friend recently referred to as the ephemera of relationships. Tokens of affection from a lover carry much of the same weight as the childhood

tchotchke, containing no value to anyone other than the recipient and the giver. Where expensive presents come with responsibilities, a gift from a lover often bears no burden—a gas station keychain, a plucked flower, a book. Gifts given in the earliest days of a relationship hold a specific type of significance, one that’s hard to describe and can only be felt. With them comes a familiar sense of hope, a sign of what may come. Someone is thinking of you a gift-shop mug’s worth. Someone could love you enough to fill a kitschy tote bag.

In many ways, my phone has become a safe haven for this version of hoarding, filled with screenshots of sweet texts and voicemails that I’ll never delete. While looking through my phone recently I found a note, which reads: The receptacle of the object is what makes it charged (no additional text). A google search provided no author to attribute, only scientific articles about electricity, ads for Home Depot, and a brief definition: an object or space used to contain something. In botany, the receptacle refers to the part of a flower stalk where the beautiful parts attach, the underbelly of tissues that encompass the flower’s reproductive organs. Thinking more about the idea of the receptacle, I go back to the box in my room, now living within another. And then to the boxes in my storage unit containing more boxes of what I’ve deemed most sacred.

All of the receptacles containing the make-up of my life and the things I’ve chosen to love from people I’ve chosen to love. The objects inside the receptacle being what charges them—the opposite of science—but undoubtedly where the beautiful parts take shape. The satchels of heart-shaped potatoes that matter only to us, and the receptacle’s final and most enduring form, memory.