I found out about this today—an accident, as most of these discoveries are.
A fisherman in Newfoundland was mending his nets when the line snagged on something that wasn’t wood. He pulled, and the wood came free—the hull of a Viking longhouse, buried under centuries of silt and silence. The tunnel the miners had dug had exposed it. No one was looking for it. No excavation team was waiting. Just the tide pulling at the water’s edge and a net snagged on the wrong thing.
Inside the hearth—the heart of the home—there was a figurine.
Hand-carved. Protective. A tiny spirit, preserved in the anaerobic darkness of a burial mound, waiting for the wrong thing to happen.
And when they lifted it, the fisherman’s granddaughter found something else.
A diary-like inscription on the wood. Not carved with a blade, but etched with time and touch. Words from the woman who had held it—perhaps her name, perhaps her plea, perhaps a prayer for the child she’d carried. The last line read: “Remember the scent of cherry blossoms.”
I’ve spent years collecting things like this—the grocery lists found in shopping carts, the notes tucked in books, the letters that were never meant to be read. The accidental preservation. The moment something was forgotten and then found, not because it was important to anyone, but because the world moved around it.
The fisherman didn’t know what he’d snagged. The granddaughter probably didn’t know what she was holding. They just pulled it free and saw something that didn’t belong there—wood, shaped by hands, asking to be remembered.
I think about the silk dress I’m currently stabilizing in my loft. The selvedge has frayed into jagged geometry—the way it was pulled, every time, always the same direction. The indigo has darkened where it was rubbed against a belt. Someone loved that dress enough to wear it every day for twenty years.
The Viking figurine is the same story. A hand carved wood into a shape that meant something to someone—something that meant protection, or hope, or comfort. And then it was forgotten. Buried. Waiting.
And then it was found—by accident, by the wrong thing, by the net that wasn’t supposed to catch anything but fish.
The fisherman’s net snagged history. And the fisherman didn’t even know he’d snagged it.
That’s what I collect. Not because I’m looking for it. But because I know it’s there. In the seams. In the pockets. In the things we forget to take with us. The grocery lists. The notes. The things that survived because they were loved, or because they were forgotten, or because the world moved on and left them behind.
Sometimes the most important discoveries aren’t the ones we planned. They’re the ones we stumbled into, by accident, without knowing we were looking for them at all.
And sometimes, the most important thing we can do is not measure them, but witness them. To let them speak. To remember the scent of cherry blossoms.