A speaker wanders through antique stores, picking up old photos and postcards that once belonged to other people. They refuse to read the messages on the back, because that would be intruding. Instead, they invent stories: the animals must have been loved, the landscapes must have mattered, and the postcards let them imagine traveling the world beside the senders.
The mood is tender and quietly lonely. The speaker takes on a kind of guardianship, "taking care" of memories that aren't theirs. The people in the photos become an odd comfort. In the most personal moment, the speaker says these faces watch them cry themselves to sleep and "love me anyway." That suggests a longing to be accepted without being known.
The ending is more sober. The speaker guesses these pictures came from someone who died, and the title's "lost and found" fits: memories are lost by one person and found by another, though never fully understood.