There was a period of time when the purse lived inside a paper bag.

Not a preservation box. Not tissue paper. Not behind glass.

A crumpled, brown, oilpaper bag, tucked inside a steamer trunk discovered in my Nana’s old chicken coop after she died.

Also inside the trunk was a velvet dress with small sections chewed through by mice. I have a photograph of my Nana wearing it sometime around 1920. Most of the family photographs from that era are filled with unsmiling people in tailored suits and carefully tended dresses, posed as though being remembered was serious work.

But in the photograph with the velvet dress, my Nana is smiling.

Even in black and white, you can tell it was a sunny day.

The purse was beside the dress in the trunk — beaded, tarnished, its silver clasp dimmed almost black with time. A short chain handle curled against itself from decades of being stored away.

I kept it for years without doing much with it.

That feels important now.

Some objects survive not because they are valuable, but because they carry stories yearning to be told.

The purse moved from house to house inside that same paper bag. Occasionally I would unwrap it, run my thumb across the beadwork, look at the tarnished clasp, then roll it back up again. I never polished the silver. Never tried to make it more presentable than it was.

When we moved to this house in 2022 and I began putting my office together, I finally framed it and hung it in a letterbox display beside photographs of my parents, my Nana, and her relatives stretching backward through generations.

For a long time, I thought I kept the purse because it belonged to my Nana.

Now I suspect I kept it because she was smiling in the photograph.

The strange thing is that the purse survived more carefully than the moment did.

The photograph captured the sunlight. The paper bag carried the rest.