Not so long ago, or so it seems to me, I was leaf-crunching with delight in the West Tisbury woods or taking Sunday walks down Middle Road into Chilmark. Next to crunching through snow (in the days when we had heavy snowfalls) leaf walks were a favorite outdoor pastime of mine.

But now, between the proliferation of ticks of all kinds, no Gus Ben David to identify the tracks that I see, and because I am 94, my outdoor woods walks have, sadly, been curtailed. But in my dining room is a desk chock full of a lifetime of memories. And so I have been reveling in them.

I find, for example, that I have several China penguins behind the desk’s glass doors. They had belonged to my French great-grandfather, Jean Baptiste Meras, whom I called Pepe. He had come to the Vineyard in the 1890s to teach French at a recently founded summer school — one of the first in the country. Delighted at what he found at East Chop, he had a house built on Arlington avenue. He named it “Mon Plaisir” and it was, indeed, his pleasure. It was no more than a five-minute walk to the bluffs that still existed then. Usually accompanying me on such walks were my German-born great-grandmother and her daughter, my grandmother, who summered with us. They delighted in waving scarves to travelers on the steamships that linked the Vineyard with the Cape.

In front of my great-grandfather’s house was a stretch of woods called the Downs. There, I delighted in picking blueberries and huckleberries. Orange tiger lilies lined the path to Oak Bluffs harbor in summer and, on the harbor front, stood the haunted (of course) wreck of an abandoned hotel, the Wyoming House. My brother, John, and I and assorted friends, would nervously climb into it sometimes to make sure it was, indeed, a haunted hotel.

Later, in teenage years, it was my job to collect empty beer bottles on the Downs. Then John would fill them with root beer that he and his best friend, Steve Chamberlain, made in summer. But one day, they all blew up, pop-pop-pop-in the garage where they had been stored until ready to drink. Too much something had apparently been added to the root beer that year.

From the balcony of Pepe’s house, we could easily see the harbor. And it wasn’t a long walk across the Downs to Oak Bluffs for popcorn bars from Darling’s saltwater taffy and popcorn bar store.

And there, too, was Sone’s Japanese store in the days before World War II. Behind the glass doors of my desk are a child’s cup and saucer from Sone’s — always a favorite stop after popcorn bars in Oak Bluffs. I had a kimono from Sone’s too and paper flowers that opened when you put them in water. Sadly, because they were Japanese, the Sones were sent to an internment camp in California when the war broke out.

And behind the glass doors of my dining room desk is Quimper pottery that my parents had bought in France, where they had met as students. From my own travels is a wooden boy flying on a goose — a purchase I made in Finland. Then there is a jar of sand from some country of sand dunes — Egypt or Israel perhaps. My name is written in colored sand in it.

From a visit to the Azores, I have a woman in a long skirt fashioned from a sea shell. Her hunter husband was also hand-crafted from a shell. The Azorean who had made them offered the pair of figurines to me as a memento when we met on a dock where a whale had just been brought in.

There is an overflowing bowl of wooden, hand-painted, many-colored Easter eggs from Romania and Bulgaria and Hungary that remind me of visits there. One egg I was given was a real hand-painted one. I brought it home in my luggage, not realizing that it was real. It was quite odoriferous by the time it got to the United States.

There are Spode dishes from England, and a leaping miniature green frog from the little town of Vacha where, in the days when there was still an East Germany, I made a lifelong friend.

I have a China scarecrow in a black hat carrying a ladder. It was a Halloween gift from another East German friend. It was cheerily given to me with a “jelly” doughnut so I could enjoy it on the train on which I was leaving for somewhere. When I hungrily bit into it, I found it was filled with ketchup, not with red currant jelly.

There is a puppet from Sicily, a city renowned for its puppets.

There is a white-coated chef sitting in a pottery eggshell. It came from a visit to Italy.

There is red and black clay from, I suspect, the Gay Head cliffs when one could still climb up and down them.

There are chunks of the Berlin Wall that divided the German capital in two in the days of an East and West Germany.

Much as I miss my West Tisbury woodland walks, I am enjoying recollections of my travels that I have behind the glass doors of my dining room desk.

Phyllis Meras lives in West Tisbury.