There is something particularly evocative about an old key once the lock it belonged to has disappeared, because almost all of its usefulness has gone and yet somehow its power to make us wonder has increased.
This one is large and heavy, its surface marked by rust, wear and time, and I know almost nothing about it. I do not know what it opened, whose hand turned it, whether it belonged to a door, a cupboard, a chest or something else entirely, or how many years have passed since it last fitted the lock it was made for.
Without the lock, the key has become strangely incomplete, and perhaps that incompleteness is part of what makes it interesting. Mom
A key suggests access. It implies that somewhere there was once a boundary between one place and another, between what was open and what was closed, what was private and what could be entered. Someone must once have known exactly where this key belonged and reached for it without hesitation, yet now that certainty has vanished and the object remains while almost everything around it has become unknowable.
I find myself thinking about how often objects outlive the purposes for which they were made. A pen survives the letters it wrote, an inkwell the desk on which it stood, a frame the picture it once held, a key the lock it opened. Gradually the practical life of the object falls away and something else takes its place: memory perhaps, although not necessarily our own memory, or simply the sense that another life has touched this thing before ours.
There is a temptation with old objects to want the whole story, to know the date, the owner, the house, the room, the circumstances, but perhaps mystery has its own value too. Not knowing leaves a little space for imagination, and sometimes the questions an object raises are more interesting than the facts we could attach to it.
What did this key open? Was it carried in a pocket, hung beside a door, kept in a drawer, passed from one person to another? Did somebody once worry about losing it? Was the lock changed while the key was forgotten, or did the building itself disappear before the object did?
We cannot know.
And yet the key is still here.
Perhaps that is why old keys hold our attention so easily. They suggest doors, rooms, thresholds and lives we cannot recover, while refusing to tell us exactly what they belonged to. We are left with the weight of the metal, the marks of use and just enough of a story to make us wonder.
This one is now available through Moss & Maye, ready for whatever comes next.