If you were to look at your belongings, which might you choose to represent you after your death? What’s worth passing down to the next generation? These are the questions that Marci Wilding mulls in this keenly observed essay for Oxford American, after she and her colleague are tasked with sifting through the possessions of a judge who had served the state of Mississippi for 48 years. What Wilding chooses to preserve will surely surprise you.

The details we had about the judge were general: A man had spent a lifetime in service for the Mississippi judiciary, forty-eight years, eventually reaching its highest bench. His opinions moved quietly through the lives of strangers and friends, altering custody, land, and inheritance, shaping the fragile scaffolding of other people’s futures. Those who worked with him spoke of him in retirement as measured, fair, and courteous, and as a man who loved and remembered his people, a modern-day Atticus Finch.

There is something magnetic about decay. It repels and attracts in the same breath. I think it unsettles because it reminds us of what we are made of: flesh that can soften, skin that can host growth, breath that can carry contamination. The strange intimacy in the way the surface gives way and something underneath begins to show makes it difficult to turn away, not because it is unfamiliar, but because it isn’t. We recognize ourselves in what is rotting.

Beryl Gilothwest’s grandmother, Sandy “Moose” West, passed away at age 108 in 2021. For The Bitter Southerner, Gilothwest profiles a diminutive woman whose love for Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, was larger than life. In a world striving for “progress,” West was a staunch advocate for thoughtful preservation; she was a fierce conservationist and environmentalist who embraced the unknown and took pleasure in learning from it.

“Sandy believed that embracing what we cannot understand is the pathway to enlightenment. In her mind, spending time in the uncharted wilds of Ossabaw is the best way to learn that lesson. Separated from the mainland by a 30-minute boat ride, the island is deeply remote. Cell service is scant, and there is no wi-fi. You have to fend for yourself out there in a way that is uncommon in contemporary culture, where we always seem to have an escape hatch. Sandy knew that welcoming people into that kind of environment, where they have to relinquish control to the island, would force them to reckon with the unknown.”