Trashmagic
If I haven’t bloomed yet, what have I been doing this whole time?
My kids give me trash for Christmas. Actually, other people’s trash, which I guess would make these items my treasures. They find these treasures at their school’s Holiday Market, a festival of regifting where students browse donated items at bargain-basement prices. As with any regift, the items are usually a little off—they’re broken, itchy, an incomplete set, originally acquired via Temu. But after they’ve been carefully selected, purchased with quarters carried to school in a sandwich bag, and wrapped in a jumble of paper and a mile of tape, some alchemy imbues them with magic. Of all the trash in our house, this is the trash I treasure most.
After her first Holiday Market a few years ago, then-5-year-old Paige presented me with a child-size, hot pink, sparkly plastic purse “for fancy nights.” I haven’t worked up the courage to wear it out in public. For now, it sits at the front of my closet shelf, dusting my other purses with glitter as I take them out and put them away.
She gave her then-3-year-old sister June a Polly Pocket set, an uncanny valley one where Polly was two inches tall instead of her usual two centimeters. Polly came with a house and a bunch of soft plastic dresses and accessories. June loved this toy so much that she needed it to be part of her. Weeks later, I overheard her say “there’s a glove in my nose,” knew immediately what she meant, and rushed her to urgent care where the doctor pulled Polly’s pink plastic glove out of June’s nose like a magic trick.
June is now five and in Kindergarten at the same school as her older sister, so this year she went hunting for treasure too. She picked out a canister of light-up golf balls for her cousin who lives next to a golf course. They’d activate through their wrapping paper at the gentlest nudge, blinking silently under our tree as if possessed.
For me, she selected a claw clip in the shape of a flower. It had Bloom written on it and one petal was broken off. “Thank you SO much, honey,” I said, and put the clip in my drawer. A few days later, I found the same clip, all petals intact, on our dining room table. Feeling insane, I retrieved the broken one and set it next to its twin. What dark sorcery was this? Either it duplicated and regenerated itself, or it was a two-clip set.
I understand why someone donated the clips. For starters, the clipping mechanism is weak as hell, but also it's embarrassing to wear a motivational statement on your head. Are you instructing other people to Bloom, or are you sharing that you yourself are in the process of Blooming? Either option feels too earnest. But I was intrigued by the magic; I truly did not remember seeing two clips in the gift bag. It seemed possible that Bloom had Bloomed.
Every year—I hesitate to reveal this, because it’s so basic-bitch-coded (as is my use of the term “coded”)—I select a ~word of the year~. When I sat down to pick mine for 2026, Bloom was the obvious first choice. I considered it, my pen poised midair. It’s something I’d have written in gel pen in a high school journal, flush with potential and feeling as if my whole life was ahead of me because it was. To write it now, at 40, in scratchy ballpoint in a notebook my kids have already doodled in, seems embarrassing. If I haven’t bloomed yet, what have I been doing this whole time?
I wrote it down anyway. ~2026: Bloom~. I had a brief allergic reaction to the dorky sincerity of it all. But then I thought: maybe this is the lesson that Bloom was sent to teach me. I imagined June browsing the jumble of Holiday Market wares, Mama next on her list. I pictured her carefully selecting this clip, correctly guessing it was the bewitched kind that would grow back its missing petal. It’s exactly right for Mama. It’s treasure.
Against all odds, this piece of broken magical trash is about to grow my heart three sizes. I could stand to loosen my grip, to care less about feeling embarrassed and vulnerable, to put on the sparkly pink purse and the motivational clip and let my petals open gently to the sun. This basic bitch is about to Bloom. If not now, when?
