My night-table has a drawer. In it are spare buttons in teeny plastic bags that were attached to new clothes that I bought over the years and probably don’t own anymore. Also, some white very thin gloves that I am supposed to wear on my hands overnight to help absorb hand cream. One day I may even use them.

There are also two kinds of lint remover, a few random pens, an empty earring box and a tiny scissors that is too dull to use for anything (except maybe to cut the teeny plastic bags of buttons from new clothes).

But what amazed me on Sunday as I looked through the drawer were five pictures of five different sizes from very different times in my life that somehow landed there:

1. A picture of me on a beach in Jamestown, N.Y. when I was four or five years old. I have pigtails wrapped on top of my head. My mother is in the picture, together with a new friend named Barbara, her mother and a couple of other random people.
2. A picture of me and the same (now good) friend Barbara who coincidentally went to the same summer camp and college as I did.
3. A badly damaged picture of Peter and me on our honeymoon—a close- up of us kissing taken with the camera’s automatic timer.
4. A picture of my handsome young husband that I took on Cape Cod more than 45 years ago
5. And our family Thanksgiving picture taken just last year that I posted on the refrigerator in our rented condo in Florida last January.

Of course, I have hundreds of pictures in shoeboxes in the guest-room closet taken with various cameras before we took all our pictures on our phones. But somehow these five ended up in my night-table drawer.

And, on Sunday I loved seeing them.