The things I hold onto: seemingly worthless trinkets can become for us treasures of memories and grace.

Fifteen years ago my mother gave me a night-light, translucent plastic molded into the shape of praying hands, palm to palm except for the white bulb hidden in the center. When I opened it at our extended-family Christmas gathering in western New York, I thought it was a joke. But before I laughed I glanced over at my older brother, and his eyes said don't.

So I said thank you and brought the nightlight home to Virginia. I plugged it into an outlet, and it sat on an end table for a decade. With every passing year, I grew more attached to it, knowing that it reminded me of my mother's prayers in the dark, past and present: prayers of my childhood in the '50s, when she would tuck me under aunt-made quilts while reciting "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." After the rote prayer she would turn to "God bless ..." followed by a litany of family names, three generations including all six of my brothers and sisters--downstairs still doing their homework and the baby already asleep. It was her generation's version of Goodnight, Moon. And prayers of mother's old age, when I was 300 miles away from her "good night" but confident that in her sleepless early-morning hours she reminded heaven of her children's names and needs.

It's happened before and since--objects with little value in themselves inching their way into my life, until they are mementos on my shelf. In the title chapter of A Room Called Remember, Frederick Buechner describes a type of memory, tied to material objects and beyond our conscious will. "Things remind us, and the power is the things', not ours," he says. "There is no telling what trivial thing may do it, and then suddenly there it all is--something that happened to us." A call for mercy. A moment of grace. A memory of Sabbath mealtime.

After my parents' recent deaths, my siblings and I gathered to sort through "the house," as we've come to call it. This is not one of the succession of supplied houses we'd grown up in but the century-old porched home Dad and Mom bought and remodeled for retirement on a hamlet main street unromantically named Route 21.

We spent four days in August, and several since, emptying kitchen cupboards and bureau drawers, clearing off counters and dresser. Save or throw? Sell or keep in the family? Brother or sister? You or me? We smoothly made decisions, divvying heirloom bookshelves and chairs, vases and vanities, hand-woven linens, hand-stitched quilts.

In the whole process I saw only one real contention--two sisters on edge over who would take which and how many of my mother's collection of 50 sets of dime-store and tourist-shop salt-and-pepper shakers. In the shape of brown bears and bean pots. Camels and roosters. Train-cars and gas-pumps. Lamps and ladies. The dispute had something to do with a ceramic set, molded as a fork and spoon with faces and feet poised to run away with the dish toward the moon.

None of those shakers is worth more than five dollars, I thought, initially puzzled at the tension. But then I remembered their part in the Sunday noon ritual of our childhood. If it was your job to set the table for the most anticipated meal of the week, roast beef, usually served festively to animated guests, you opened the china cabinet and chose three decorative sets, which you strategically spread along the three-leafed table.

When I packed my boxes, leaving the house for the last time, I tucked away in an embroidered hand towel the kerosene-lamp-style plastic shakers--red for pepper, white for salt--and a set of painted Santas that will help season my holiday spread.

I value these unremarkable items because they are bridges of remembrance to people, settings, or events that in some past season represented the work and grace of God.

Dinner guests comment on the corroded railroad spike lying on a dining room shelf. I tell them of the solace I found in my troublesome college days by walking a deserted railroad bed on the bank of the Genesee River. One day I picked a few twisted spikes up off the trail. My father, who'd grown up in coal country, noticed a coal cinder melded onto one. "This spike has survived a boiler fire," he said. And his comment nailed my intent to keep the piece.

Until recently a corner table in my dining room held a small cookie jar, its baby blue "made in Japan" crockery textured like a woven basket. But one evening I pulled a cookbook from a higher shelf, and a second book fell. I gasped at the sound and sight: the jar's broken lid. Though it was nothing grand, the jar had insinuated itself into my domestic landscape by virtue of its trigger to a memory. It fondly represented Mrs. Baker, a childhood character who twice a year arrived at our front door, unannounced but not unexpected, her cream-colored Ford Fairlane laden with over flowing boxes of discards presented to us, her favorite charity. Her husband, who never came with her, had gone to college with Dad.

She lived "in the city" and drove out to us in the suburbs. She had no children; we had seven. She was the shortest woman I'd ever seen, with unusually wide ankles and small feet that made her walk like a bird. She talked nonstop, and she (or was it just the stuff she brought?) smelled--neither good nor bad but strange.

She collected items from neighbors and culled them from her own cupboards and closets: vases, clocks, cereal bowls, bibelots, tissue-paper roses, half-empty perfumes, an army cot, a pair of boxing gloves, used paper dolls, typewriters, skirts, coats, worn but wearable nylon slips.

She always left with an optimistic farewell: "If your family can't use these things, I know you'll find someone who can." She didn't realize Mother kept everything, except the clothes of impossible fit, saying, "You never know, we might be able to use it someday."

My older sisters would come home from college for a weekend and notice some new trinket on a kitchen shelf or a dresser. "Where'd that come from?" they'd ask. "Mrs. Baker brought it," my mom would reply. Her boxes brought the delight of piqued curiosity and an occasional treasure. The sight of her car in the driveway did, after all, prompt a whoop: "Mrs. Baker's here," as if she were Mrs. Claus coming off-season.

On one of her visits, she'd brought this blue jar. My mother had never found a use for it, though she kept it 20 years before offering it to me. I took it and dusted it for another 20 years, though I never filled it either, it was just there. Seeing its pastel lattice as I walked past comforted my eye and reminded me of Mrs. Baker's peculiar blessing on my childhood.

For several days after the book fell and broke the lid, I was offended by the sight of the jar's ecru innards. But to reclaim the keepsake, I filled the container with soil and buried the sprouted roots of a sprig of English ivy. A cookie jar lost. A flower pot found.

"Things remind us." There's comfort and value in the memory. But sometimes a memento breaks beyond repair. "Moth and rust destroy. Thieves break in and steal," said Jesus, warning listeners to guard their hearts, because that's where gravity can take its greatest toll.

Several years ago, when I was unloading my car from a difficult weekend with Mother (her own inner light dimming), my suitcase jarred the end table, and the plastic praying hands landed in 30 pieces on the hardwood floor. I think I cried. I know I didn't bring out a broom and dustpan for a week, dreading the disposal of this little light that connected me to my mother.

My praying-hands night-light is broken, lying in a landfill somewhere. And yet through and beyond any sentimental grief, the memory it represented--of my mother's watchful prayers--remains intact. My remarkable treasure.

EVELYN BENCE, author of the children's book The Saint Who Became Santa Claus (Regina Press, 2002).