What Survives

"Livvy," my mom said, "when you have a minute I have something to show you."

Last month my brother and his best friend flew to California to see friends from the family camp we'd attended every summer for the first sixteen years of my life. Growing up, it was the best place I knew, warm and safe and familiar; a constancy that allowed me to root myself. Camp was where I learned how to swim, where I made some of the deepest friendships of my life, where my brother (and then I) worked on staff and my mom taught pottery classes as an artist in residence. Almost exactly one year ago, it burned down.

"Adrian gave this to me," my brother told my mom when he got home, "but I want you to have it." Into her palm he pressed a round, jagged-edged object. It was blue at the edges, deepening to brown and black--and bubbling--at the center. It looked like it could have been a piece of sea glass so battered by grinding waves and sand that it had nearly turned to stone.

My mom led me into the kitchen where she'd leaned it up against the windowsill above the sink. "Pick it up," she said. It was heavy, its rough weight familiar to the daughter of a potter. "Flip it over."

I stared at my mom's signature, unblinking. Something sharp caught in my throat and I swallowed it down, all at once understanding and not understanding, knowing that this meant something but ashamed that I didn't know exactly what. Tears stung the corners of my eyes. We were silent for what felt like minutes but couldn't have been more than a few seconds, until my dad set aside his crossword and lay his pen on top of it. "Adrian found that," he said. "At camp."

Of all that was lost in those scorching, smoky hours last August--the circle of green chairs next to the dining hall, the bridge connecting main camp to Sun City across the river, the cabins and the rec hall and the camp store--what I held in my hand had survived.

I have lived my whole life knowing that no man-made object is permanent. I've accepted, albeit reluctantly, that believing our creations immune to natural or malevolent forces is naive, and that everything will, sooner or later, turn to dust. But here was something that didn't. Here was a three-inch pottery shard--the bottom of a coffee mug--that had merely bubbled when everything around it disintegrated. My mother's creation, the tangible product of our sixteen-year presence in the Sierra Nevadas, was stronger than fire. My mother was stronger than fire.