There is a particular kind of drawer that most women carry through their lives, even if it changes shape and location a dozen times. It might be a small wooden box, a zipped pouch tucked into a suitcase lining, or simply the corner of a dressing table. Inside it: a chipped earring whose pair was lost decades ago, a train ticket from a city visited once, a glass bottle with the last centimetre of a discontinued perfume, a pebble from somewhere significant enough to be carried home. None of it is valuable in any way a stranger would recognise. And yet, for the woman who keeps it, these objects do something quietly extraordinary — they say, this is still me, even here, even now.
We rarely speak of this as a ritual, because it looks so unremarkable. There is no candle lit, no formal moment of pause. But ritual, at its heart, is simply a repeated act that carries meaning beyond its function. Touching a familiar bottle before leaving the house, opening a drawer to glance at an old photograph, dabbing on a scent worn since university — these are rituals of continuity, small private ceremonies that stitch together a self that might otherwise feel scattered across years, homes and versions of a life.
Why a Scent Can Undo Us in an Instant
There is a reason a particular fragrance can return you, in a single breath, to a kitchen you have not stood in for twenty years, or to the collar of someone no longer here. Unlike sound or sight, scent travels a shorter, more direct route through the brain. It reaches the limbic system, the seat of emotion and memory, before it is even fully registered as a smell. This is why an old perfume, a specific soap, or the particular mustiness of a childhood home can produce a wave of feeling long before the mind has caught up and explained why.
This is not sentimentality getting the better of us; it is simply how the nervous system is built. Evolutionarily, smell needed to warn or reassure quickly, long before language existed to process it. What this means, practically, is that scent is one of the most efficient tools we have for grounding ourselves during uncertain seasons. A woman navigating a new city, a new diagnosis, a new stage of life, can use a familiar fragrance almost like an anchor line — something the body recognises even when everything around it feels unfamiliar.
It is worth noticing which scents already do this for you. Perhaps it is your mother's hand cream, the particular incense from a grandmother's home, or simply the fabric softener your family always used. These associations were not chosen consciously, yet they hold real psychological weight, and there is nothing indulgent about leaning on them deliberately during periods of change.
Objects That Travel When We Do
South Africa is, in many ways, a country built from movement — families arriving from India, China, Malaysia and beyond, generations settling, resettling, and settling again, often carrying very little in the way of physical inheritance but a great deal in the way of memory. For many women here, the object kept from a grandmother's kitchen, a mother's sewing box, or a father's watch is not decoration. It is a form of proof: proof that a lineage existed, that a life happened before this one, that identity did not begin the day the passport was stamped.
Even without the drama of migration across oceans, most women relocate many times within a single lifetime — a childhood home, a first flat, a shared home, perhaps several more after that. Each move asks something of us. Boxes are packed and unpacked, walls change colour, the view outside the window is suddenly unfamiliar. In the middle of all this flux, a small object placed on a new windowsill in exactly the way it once sat on an old one becomes a quiet act of self-recognition. It says: whatever else has changed, this has not.
There is a temptation, in the name of minimalism or fresh starts, to release everything from a previous chapter of life. Sometimes that release is genuinely healing. But it is worth distinguishing between clutter kept out of fear, and a handful of chosen objects kept out of love. The former weighs a space down; the latter can do the opposite, offering a sense of steadiness precisely because it takes up so little room.
What We Keep When Someone Is Gone
Grief has its own relationship with objects, one that is rarely straightforward. A scarf still holding a trace of someone's cologne. A handwriting sample on the back of a recipe card. A worn hairbrush no one can quite bring themselves to clean. These items become, for a time, almost unbearably important, not because they replace the person, but because they offer the senses a way of staying briefly connected to someone the mind knows, rationally, is gone.
There is no correct way to hold this. Some women keep such objects for the rest of their lives, moving them gently from home to home, decade to decade. Others find that after some years, the object no longer holds the same charge, and letting it go feels less like loss and more like completion. Neither response is wrong. Grief does not follow a manual, and neither should the objects that accompany it.
What matters more than the object itself is the permission to keep it without needing to explain it to anyone. A drawer does not need to justify itself. A perfume bottle, long since dried up, does not need to make logical sense to still sit on a shelf. These things are allowed to simply be there, holding their small, private weight.
Reinvention Needs Its Own Anchors
It is not only loss and relocation that call for these quiet rituals. Every significant reinvention — a career change in your thirties, the arrival of motherhood, the recalibration that often comes with menopause, the freedom or disorientation of retirement — asks a woman to become someone slightly new, while still remaining recognisably herself. This can feel disorienting in ways that are hard to articulate, precisely because nothing dramatic has happened; life has simply shifted underfoot.
In these seasons, small kept things can serve almost as a bridge between versions of self. The ring worn since your twenties, still on your hand as you navigate your fifties. The specific tea you have always made in the same chipped cup, even as your household, your body and your responsibilities transform around you. These continuities are not resistance to change; they are simply reminders that change does not require erasing everything that came before it.
The Quiet Practice of Curating, Not Collecting
There is a meaningful difference between a home filled with sentiment and a home burdened by it. Curating the objects we keep — asking honestly which ones still carry meaning, and which are simply present out of habit or guilt — is itself a form of self-care rarely discussed. It asks a woman to check in with herself, gently, and notice what she is actually still carrying, rather than what she has simply never gotten around to putting down.
This does not need to be a dramatic decluttering exercise. It might be as simple as choosing, once a year, to hold each treasured item for a moment and ask whether it still feels alive with meaning. Some will. Others, quietly, will not — and that is useful information too. The goal is never to keep everything, nor to keep nothing, but to keep what is true.
A Gentle Reminder
You do not need to explain the small things you keep, nor apologise for the ones you have let go. Whether it is a scent that returns you to yourself on a difficult morning, or a trinket that has quietly followed you through every home you have ever lived in, these objects are simply doing their gentle work — reminding you that you are the same woman you have always been, even as everything around you continues, softly, to change.
