My parents like to save things. So much so that my childhood home sometimes feels like a museum dedicated to preserving our family memories, some of which would have long been forgotten in my mind if not for the objects peppering the bookshelves in that house. There are loose photos and yellowed newspaper clippings sitting in shoeboxes in the garage; a dismal 2nd grade craft project constructed with backyard sticks and a heaping dose my 7-year old imagination collecting dust on a living room bookshelf; and a pair of cheap stud earrings from Hook’s Drug Store - which went out of business in 1994 - that I found in the back of a bathroom drawer last year and now keep in my daily jewelry rotation. My parents are certainly doing their part to stop filling up landfills.
While I share my parents’ sentimental tendency to save things, I’m much more organized with my memory objects. Whenever I receive a particularly touching birthday card or bring back a souvenir from a family trip, I put it in one of the white boxes tucked away near the bookshelves in my bedroom. For a few years now, these little boxes have collected my mementos and stored all my good intention to do something with them.
Maybe the Toy Story franchise made me overly-sympathetic to inanimate objects (I’m looking at you Toy Story 3), but the past few months I’d been feeling like my sentimental trinkets had waited long enough for me to organize them in a more meaningful way. So I finally did something with them last week. I liberated my postcards, certificates, and photostrips from their white-boxed prison and gently double-sided-taped them into my very first scrapbook.
Two trips to Michael’s later, and with a new understanding of why scrapbooking supplies take up the first four aisles of that store, my first scrapbook now sits atop the living room bookshelf ready for anyone to enjoy. Even though it’s fun to exercise my creativity with stamps, stickers, and colorful paper like I’m in elementary school again, scrapbooking is more than just a craft project. It reminds me why I chose to keep these objects in the first place: Unlike the newspaper clippings waiting in my parents’ garage with no one to look at them and the earrings that waited 16 years to sparkle next to someone’s cheek, the point of having all these mementos from life is to give them a place of honor and enjoyment in our home.
While I share my parents’ sentimental tendency to save things, I’m much more organized with my memory objects. Whenever I receive a particularly touching birthday card or bring back a souvenir from a family trip, I put it in one of the white boxes tucked away near the bookshelves in my bedroom. For a few years now, these little boxes have collected my mementos and stored all my good intention to do something with them.
Maybe the Toy Story franchise made me overly-sympathetic to inanimate objects (I’m looking at you Toy Story 3), but the past few months I’d been feeling like my sentimental trinkets had waited long enough for me to organize them in a more meaningful way. So I finally did something with them last week. I liberated my postcards, certificates, and photostrips from their white-boxed prison and gently double-sided-taped them into my very first scrapbook.
Two trips to Michael’s later, and with a new understanding of why scrapbooking supplies take up the first four aisles of that store, my first scrapbook now sits atop the living room bookshelf ready for anyone to enjoy. Even though it’s fun to exercise my creativity with stamps, stickers, and colorful paper like I’m in elementary school again, scrapbooking is more than just a craft project. It reminds me why I chose to keep these objects in the first place: Unlike the newspaper clippings waiting in my parents’ garage with no one to look at them and the earrings that waited 16 years to sparkle next to someone’s cheek, the point of having all these mementos from life is to give them a place of honor and enjoyment in our home.
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| A page from my scrapbook, including hiking photos from college and a card from my first Valentine's Day with Ian in 2005. |
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