Who kept a scrapbook growing up? My mom had oodles of them. She had page after page of obituaries, memorial cards from funerals, pictures of people she knew who were in the paper, articles of interest to her. She had book after book of pictures she cut out of magazines. There must have been twenty books of postage stamps. Nothing valuable, mind you. And nothing mounted or preserved in the way of a philatelist. These were just stamps she thought were pretty or interesting that she saw on the letters she sorted over the years of working in offices. She would tear the envelope around the stamps and stick them six to a page in those photo albums with the clear plastic that covered whatever you stuck to that sticky paper. You know, the kind you could never remove anything from 50 years later.

Tuesdays are usually our stay-at-home day. We just hang out and don’t do much of anything. I was writing so Mr. FixIt went rummaging around in a closet and came out with a box marked “scrapbooks”. That piqued my interest. He spent the better part of four hours reading cards, looking at pictures, opening small boxes of treasures. Of particular interest to me were items from high school since we graduated together. Mr. FixIt was the head of the Stage Crew and he had all of the flyers from the shows. I was in the art department and had worked on the sets of many of those productions so it was fun going down memory lane with him.

I took photos of several of the items in the box and posted them on our class page on Facebook. When you find that kind of treasure…you share. We had so much fun last night reading the comments from our classmates as they found their names on programs they hadn’t seen in nearly fifty years. Joy…I’m all about the joy. When I can bring a smile to someone’s face, my world is complete!

When I downsized, I did get rid of a lot of those things of Mom’s. She left the stamp scrapbooks to Daughter #2, her coins and jewelry to Daughter #1. None of it had more value than the sentiment of it belonging to their Grammy. I donated some collections to the library and some genealogy work to the the Hacker’s Creek Pioneers of the Central West Virginia Genealogy Society. I gave some particularly sentimental things to a cousin who will treasure them. And I kept what I could, carefully choosing what to keep and what to let go.

Trimming my life back like that opened up so many options for me. It’s not like my children or grandchildren want any of that stuff. I remember an aunt telling me long ago to not burden my children with the things I wanted them to have. Just give them the choice of what they want, keep what I absolutely couldn’t part with, send the next best things off to those who will love them as I did, and say goodbye to the rest of it. This is particularly difficult when you are a widow because those things often represent you as a couple. Mr. FixIt is a sentimental man. He holds on to things, but he’s learning to let go…little by little. ❤

“I thank my God every time I remember you.”
‭‭Philippians‬ ‭1:3‬ ‭NIV‬‬