When I was in the fourth grade, my parents gave me a first baseman glove for my birthday. We lived in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. One of Chicagoland’s forest preserves, Yankee Woods, stretched out along the edge of the village, and that’s where my parents threw a party for me. My friends and I played baseball. When it came time for us to go home, we couldn’t find my new glove anywhere. I never saw it again. I still wonder what happened to it.

Objects that exist only in our memories can provide subject matter for our writing whether in prose or poetry. So, asking for your forgiveness for the brevity of this post, I invite you to recall an object you treasured that vanished. What was it about that object that you loved? What did your love for it say about your identity, or your life during a certain period? I was fairly new to Oak Forest, having moved there from our farm in southeastern Illinois. What a culture shock. I was eager to gather whatever I could about this new place that would make me fit in. What better metaphor than the large pocket of that glove, made for scooping up the bad hops of errant throws, making it easier for nothing to get by me. It represented, in a sense, a place of safety and confidence at a time when I needed to feel connected to my new home.

The details of our lives, if we look at them closely enough, often tell the stories of our lives. A baseball glove can be much more than that. Use your own lost object to start an essay, a story, or a poem. Think about what the object represented to you. Think about why you can’t forget it even years after it disappeared.