Recognize Yourself Again.
I found the jeans I wore in every photo from 1996 in a vacuum sealed bag at the back of my husband's hunting closet last Saturday morning, and I sat on the edge of our bed holding them in my lap for a long time. I want to tell you the whole story. My husband Tom is a hunter. He has a separate closet in our guest room where he keeps his gear — camouflage, boots, his old hunting vests, things he never wears anywhere else. Once or twice a year I'll go in there to dust or to look for something that has migrated in. I had been in there on Saturday looking for a sweater of his he claimed was missing. The sweater was not there. What was there, behind his hunting jacket on a low shelf, was a translucent vacuum sealed bag with the words "Diane 1996" written on the front in my own handwriting from twenty-eight years ago. I had no memory of putting that bag there. I am 59 years old. I live in a town outside Cincinnati called Loveland. I worked as a dental hygienist for 32 years before I retired in 2022. Tom and I have been married for 36 years. We have two grown sons, both with families of their own, both living within an hour. I am a careful person. I keep notes. I write down what is in storage. The fact that I had no memory of a vacuum sealed bag with my own name on it was strange enough by itself to make me sit down. I sat on the edge of our bed and I opened it. Inside were three things. A folded sweater I had loved in my late 20s, oatmeal colored, slightly pilled. A pair of leather sandals I had worn every summer of the 1990s. And a pair of jeans. The jeans were the jeans. I want to explain what I mean by the jeans. There is a photograph in our family album from a Fourth of July party at my sister's house in 1996. I am 31 years old in the photograph. I am holding our older son Adam, who was 4 at the time, on my hip. I am laughing at something Tom said. I have on a white sleeveless top and these specific jeans, and the entire family — when anyone
