Hector’s room was an Aladdin’s cave of magical machinery. It was a place he shut himself away in for hours to peer down microscopes, write stories, take pictures, or make placemats and table runners on a loom the size of a house. Sometimes I hid under the loom, camouflaged in its mechanical guts, waiting for the shuttles to dance, and the heddles to open up the threads like a giant mouth, ready to swallow me whole.

The loom was sold when Hector died, years before I was old enough to have a say in its fate, and I was devastated for both losses. But nostalgia is a long, thick string tying us to the past, and not so long ago it reappeared in my life, albeit in a slightly altered version. Someone left a loom leaning up against my front doorstep, a Harris table-topper, very large and cumbersome but instantly comforting.

Reflecting on why the loom had found its way to me, I realized that the same had also happened with grandpa’s writing desk, Chinese screen, butterfly collection and wooden trunk – all these things have come back into my life, unbidden, found on street corners or donated by strangers. The doorstep gift is the third version of the loom I’ve been given. It’s slighty unsettling. Before I cast these things back out into the wide world to see how long it takes before they surface again, a quick photo, a short story, and fingers crossed I’ve thrown them far enough they don’t.