I’ve held onto my CD collection all these years.

It’s one of those accidental relics from the pre-MP3 world. Not nearly as cool as the record players some of my younger friends have in their houses (which I secretly love, so no judgment), but six overstuffed binders of CDs that I haven’t really listened to in… maybe fifteen years? Twenty? The last time I owned a working CD player was probably around 2009.

Then, while clearing out my mother’s room before we moved her into memory care, I found an old Samsung mini stereo sitting on her dresser. Dusty, probably untouched for years. I plugged it in just to see. It worked.

So I packed it.

When we shipped our lives from California to Mérida — books, rugs, kitchen things, Tucker, my keyboard, my favorite coffee mug — I packed the stereo and all those CDs too.

Lately they’ve become the soundtrack to my writing sessions.

There’s something different about listening this way. With Spotify or Pandora, I had access to everything, but somehow I forgot what I actually liked. The algorithm would happily feed me an endless stream of songs that sounded enough like the last one that eventually they all blurred together. I stopped listening to albums. I stopped being surprised.

Now I put on an old CD and let it play. Even the songs I used to skip. Maybe especially those.

This evening it was a disc from an old Flower Power box set I picked up decades ago at Borders on State Street, back when Borders was still a thing. Joe Cocker. The Mamas & the Papas. Steppenwolf. Songs that were already old when I first bought the CDs, but somehow make even more sense to me now than they did twenty years ago.

I write while they’re playing.

Sometimes I look around my office and realize I’m listening to songs as old or older than I am, on a CD player from my mother’s bedroom, in a house in Yucatán that is slowly becoming my own.

It’s funny what survives a cross-border move.

Not just the objects. Its also the versions of ourselves that were waiting inside them.