Love doesn’t always announce itself with dewy-eyed words or expensive gifts. Sometimes it shows up in ordinary things, like an old voice mail, a bus ticket or a key that doesn’t open any doors in your home. On their own, these items might seem insignificant. But they hold deep meaning to the people who have kept them as a memento of love.
With Valentine’s Day approaching, we asked readers to submit stories and photos of the objects they kept as reminders of love, whether romantic, familial or platonic. The responses were poignant, funny, uplifting and often sad, sometimes all at once.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the quiet keepsakes started with an investment of just a few dollars, and some didn’t cost a penny. Money can’t buy you love. But sometimes an old sock or an empty tube of metal polish does.
These answers have been lightly edited.
Pearl Harbor Business Cards
My father, Kai Fong Wong, was an engineer for 45 years at Pearl Harbor and worked after the attack on Dec. 7, 1941, to help. Dad was smart and provided very well for our family. He grew up poor and would get a hard-boiled egg for his birthday, but he sent me to Stanford. I found a box of his business cards in 2017, when my 97-year-old mom died and I had to move Dad into a care home. I love seeing his name in Chinese characters. The character on the left is Wong: “Dai Tou” Big Stomach, because the square on the bottom looks like a stomach. He loved to eat! Especially Chinese food. He died at age 99 in 2019.
Kathleen Sau Kum Wong Bishop
Pacifica, Calif.
Miniature Wire Chair
My love item is from one of the first dates with my husband of now 20 years. It is a chair he fashioned from the wire cage, metal wrapping and label affixed to the top of a champagne bottle. I used to have the cork, too, but after 21 years together, and having lived in three countries, it has disappeared.
The significance of the chair is manifold: I was a recently divorced mother of an 8-year-old boy and had plunged headlong into being the best mother I could be. Because of the weight of guilt I felt over my divorce, I had basically erased the part of myself that did not serve my ideal of “perfect mother.” I keep this little chair on my vanity. It reminds me of when I first saw myself as an object of desire, as if, possibly, I might even be beautiful — at least to this one person, which, as it turns out, is enough for me.
Maria Garcia Teutsch
Berlin
From a Spicy Situationship
During the pandemic, I was in a salty long-distance situationship with someone I met briefly during a work trip. When he told me he decided to make a career change and start a cinnamon business with a partner in Sri Lanka, I started calling him Spice Man. I mentioned in a text that I had coincidentally just run out of cinnamon, so he sweetly sent me a bag from his new endeavor, describing it as the best-tasting cinnamon I’d ever have. I decanted it into the jar I use for cinnamon and taped on the label. Spice Man’s spice business soon soured, and eventually so did we.
But I’ve always refilled the jar before the cinnamon runs out, so there are remnants of his in there. It reminds me that traces of old loves linger in all of us, subtly altering the flavor of our lives.
Tabitha Mallory
Seattle
The Lucky Dime
I met a girl at a friend’s party, but I didn’t get her phone number. A few days later, I asked a friend to try and get her number from his girlfriend. The next day, he came into my office and gave me a note with her number. He also handed me a dime he found outside, on the sidewalk. “Maybe it will give you good luck,” he said. I still have that dime and always carry it in my wallet. That girl is now my wife — we’ve been married 40 years.
Robert Pescinski
Hillsborough, N.J.
Ugly Winter Gloves
On my 22nd birthday, Dec. 10, 1968, my future husband filled a box with an odd assortment of things that had been on top of or in his bureau: a hockey puck, ticket stubs, baseball cards, a pair of ugly purple and turquoise winter gloves. In the ring finger of the right glove, I found a diamond engagement ring. I kept the gloves because they were so ugly that they made me laugh. My husband died in 2018. When times get tough, I take out the gloves and remember the young man who opened his heart and his dresser drawer to show me he loved me.
Karen Owens Linehan
Boston
Size 14 Shoes
I decided to keep my dearly departed husband’s comfortable house shoes. They are size 14 bright red-orange slip-on Allbirds, his favorite shoe brand. I lost him to a malignant brain tumor last June. I keep them where he did, near the front entry to our home. He loved these shoes. He was a busy person, and the shoes represent the time we were able to be together at home, enjoying each other’s company. No one else will ever fill his shoes.
Wendy McGuffin-Cawley
Shaker Heights, Ohio
I.O.U. for $1
I keep a note from my brother. It says, “STEFF, I.O.U. $1.00 ONE BUCK.” My brother passed away unexpectedly in 2001, at age 40. He left me the note when we were teenagers, over 50 years ago. Looking at it takes me back to when we were all here.
Stephanie Fedoroff
Philadelphia
A Tube of Metal Polish
One winter, my husband decided to bring his motorcycle into the family room. He took it apart and set all the pieces on the floor, then used a tube of Simichrome to polish all the chrome parts before putting it back together. We had young kids at the time, so it was memorable. He died nine years ago. Now I keep the tube on the windowsill over my kitchen sink. I think of him every time I look at it.
Cynthia Mirbach
Wilton, Conn.
An Empty Perfume Bottle
When I was 15, a friend of my then-boyfriend and I became close friends. We went Christmas shopping together one snowy December afternoon. He was looking for a gift for a girl he was dating, and I mentioned Shalimar perfume as the ultimate desirable. I used to steal spritzes of it from my mother’s dressing table. On Christmas Eve, my friend came to our house and presented me with a small, gift-wrapped package. When I saw it was Shalimar, I gasped and burst into tears. No one, including my then-boyfriend, had ever done anything so thoughtful for me.
We kept in touch for several years. I always knew there was something there that was more than friendship, but we never acted on it. The bottle remains at the bottom of my dresser in its purple velvet box. It has been with me since Christmas of 1974. We lost contact, but maybe it’s better to hold onto the dream, which has stayed lovely.
Celia Bredenbeck
Cleveland
Purple Yarn Talisman
In 2021, the 14-year-old daughter of a close friend double-looped a strand of vibrant purple yarn around my right wrist. It was for her mother, Pauline, who had just died of A.L.S. Purple is the color sometimes used in Canada to represent A.L.S awareness. I had no idea then that my mother would also live with A.L.S.; that diagnosis came a year later. The piece of yarn became a talisman, keeping A.L.S. from claiming Mom’s life.
In the summer of 2024, I was in Nova Scotia helping to care for her when my string caught on a hook and snapped, sending me into a crying panic. My husband tied it back on, and Mom lived a few months longer. First, the string was a connection to a close friend. Then it meant endurance and strength for Mom. Now the string is love. I don’t know how I’ll react when it finally breaks.
Lea Storry
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Ralph Lauren Shirt
Every time I see my brother’s blue and white button-down Ralph Lauren shirt, I’m reminded that he encouraged me to be myself, to be bold, to be silly and to help others. He was always scoring vintage shirts like this one from Goodwill and buying other designer things secondhand to gift to anyone in need; sometimes when he picked me up from school I’d find five pairs of soccer cleats in the car for kids he had yet to meet. It wasn’t uncommon for him to say, “What size are you? I think I have something in my car.”
When my brother died in 2020, I grabbed a few items that reminded me of his presence and spirit. Now, when I feel I need a little extra courage or belief in myself, I throw it on. At first I was afraid to wear it. I’m notorious for spilling food on myself. But when I have a day when I really need to feel his friendship and support, it feels like armor.
Carrieanne Reichardt Quinn
Manhattan
Hand-Embroidered Table Runner
Lily was a friend of my grandmother’s who died before I was born. The women worked together as secretaries at Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, a New York City bank. Lily was from Cuba and had no family here, so my grandmother added her to our family. After my grandmother died, I found some of Lily’s things in the attic, including a table runner with an “L” embroidered at its center.
I must have found it in my early 20s, and I’m 50 now. I use it every year at Christmastime, though the fabric is disintegrating and has wine and candle wax stains. It has special resonance for me as a gay person: a symbol of chosen family.
Michael Quinn
Brooklyn
Takeout Box Flap
On our first date, in 2019, my husband and I shared a meal from a restaurant we both independently considered our favorite. I ordered my usual, the #33 without mushrooms. A few dates later, we ordered takeout from the same restaurant. My order came labeled with the message “33 No Mush.” We laughed about how we probably deserved gentle chiding about the unbridled mush(-iness) we displayed in each other’s company.
Despite the best intentions of a couple of cautious and independent divorcés, we were decidedly, inescapably in love, and everyone around us knew it. When we moved in together in 2020, the cardboard flap, food stains and all, found a permanent home in a frame above our bedroom windows.
Emily Hamilton
Florence, Mass.
Tassels From Dress Shoes
My father was my long-distance best friend and confidante through all my dating fiascos. One time, as a shortcut for describing my incompatibility with my most recent date, a man who turned out to be very conservative, I said: “I should have known, Dad — he had tassels on his shoes! How could I think it would last, with someone like that?”
A week later, a mystery box arrived in the mail. I opened it and found four small leather tassels cut from dress shoes, and a note: “To the most precious person in my life. I cannot wear these ever again. Your loving father.” He sent them partly as a joke but also as a proclamation of his love. Now that he’s gone, every time I look at them or even think about them, I cry. They represent both his love and his spirit.
Monika Khushf
San Francisco
The post The Objects We Keep for Love appeared first on New York Times.
