Vermillion Red

e·phem·er·a. /əˈfem(ə)rə/

Ephemera are items not originally designed to be used and discarded, not kept or collected. Train or concert tickets, for example. The word is derived from the Greek ἐφήμερος (ephēmeros, which translates to“lasting only a day“). The word is both plural and singular.

I’m on a perpetual search for the perfect combination of pencil and paper and in the process, I’m accumulating piles of stationary items. It’s the only real world collection in my life. Thankfully, it’s one that costs little, and takes no space.

On the other hand, my digital world is a well organized horde. I don’t delete, I archive. And have copies of copies of copies on cloud servers and disc drives. Every digital bit is sacred! At one point in my life, my entire digital world resided on a work computer.

One morning, it was gone. It had been hacked into during the night and the IT group had taken it for analysis, and sanitization. When it came back it was scrubbed clean. Not a single file, photo, or email remained. It was a hard lesson.