About The Founder
Linda Padilla
Archive Steward | Recollections Within
All my life, I have remembered people through their stories.
Even as a child, I held onto the things people shared.
Not the polished versions. The ones that slipped out in an unguarded moment, to someone they had only just met. A stranger’s grief in a checkout line. A friend’s quiet joy. A confession during a late shift at work.
I might not remember their names, but I always remember the feeling behind their words.
Over time I began to notice something about the stories that stayed with me longest. They were not ordinary moments.
They were the points where a life was changing direction.
Recollections Within was born from that need to know.
Where This Work Began
For a long time, the instinct had nowhere to go.
I collected stories the way some people collect objects. I carried them. I thought about the women behind them, the ones who had shared something true in an unguarded moment and then walked away not knowing what they’d left behind.
Over time a question took shape: what happens to those stories? Who holds them? Where do they go when the woman who lived them is gone?
This archive is the evolution of that question.
The Women Who Shaped This Work
Two women helped shape the instinct behind this work: my mum, Ruth, and my mother-in-law, Annette.
Both are gone now, but their influence moves through this project still.
Neither of them would have described what they were doing as preserving history. But they remembered people carefully. They held onto family stories. They passed them along so that moments and lives would not disappear.
In their own ways, they were archivists.
The Life Behind the Archive
Rooted in Growth
I’m a lifelong learner with a deep curiosity about how things grow: ideas, communities, gardens, and people.
Over the years I’ve followed that curiosity wherever it led, studying editing, digital communication, and community outreach while also completing Master Gardener training through the University of New Mexico.
Each of these experiences deepened my understanding of something that has shaped everything I’ve built: meaningful work grows slowly, through care, patience, and attention.
Born of the West Coast
Cradled by moss and tide, I grew up where the rainforest meets the Pacific.
Vancouver Island is a place where ancient trees remember and beauty lingers everywhere your eyes land. It taught me to pay attention: to stillness, to seasons, to stories that root and endure.
Today I live in the high desert of New Mexico, carrying pieces of both places with me. I’m a Canadian living in the States, which means you’ll spot Canadian spelling including our famous “superfluous u‘s” in my writing. I consider it a point of honour.
A Long Journey in Motherhood
I have spent nearly three decades raising children through love, mistakes, loss, and growth.
Motherhood has been one of the most complex forms of listening I have ever known. It teaches humility, patience, and the ability to hold space for truths that are sometimes difficult.
Over the years I have raised children with unique needs and deep hearts, and learned the quiet courage required to change your life when it asks everything of you.
Still mothering, always.
The Work Today
This work moves slowly by design.
The goal is not visibility.
It is preservation.
The archive grows one story at a time.
The Quilt exists to preserve stories and art from lives exactly like like yours.