—that’s beautiful, @jmah— I have some old embroidered cloths and brooches that my grandmother gave me when I started my first witchcraft altar – they were so important to me and when my father (in one of his alcoholic rages) threw my altar into the garbage, I cried the hardest for the things my grandmother gave me..I was able to retrieve some of the stuff and have it in a shoebox that is now within a much bigger witchcraft trunk in my closet. I have a cross fashioned out of metal that my brother made for himself and gave to me before my SATs so that I can do well and get into NYU – a couple of months later, he died…I wore that cross often, together with my pentagrams (one of my pentagrams I put into his coffin because he always wanted to do magik with me but I never agreed). Now, the cross rests in a jewelry box next to some pentagrams that I got the second time around I was practicing witchcraft. I also have some of his old college notebooks and drawings and the clothes he wore in the months before his death. I will never throw these things out. I’m trying to remember what I kept of my grandfather’s or my father’s but am drawing a blank. I do know that when my father passed away, I held onto one of those pieces of shawl (some are expected to put on their heads) for the duration of the funeral and then put it into his coffin. He was a photographer, my father, I have photographs that he’s taken or worked on to remember him by.