Hoarder of Memories

It happens every year. I cannot help it. As soon as December 25^th has passed, I am itching to get everything Christmassy put away. I am just so over it by the time Boxing Day arrives (that’s the day after Christmas and no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sport ) that I am irritable, restless and short tempered.

The big plastic bins are surreptitiously brought in from the garage and I quietly begin the process of removing themed items from around the house. I don’t want to make a big deal of this because my husband grew up in a family that left their decorations up until past New Year’s.   As it is, I have managed, after forty seven years, to persuade him to honor my British tradition of opening presents on Christmas Day and not on Christmas Eve.

The tree is the last to go out and once that is done, I can breathe a great sigh of relief that the turmoil, chaos, stress and hard work of the previous four weeks is finally over. I mean really, let’s face it, try as you can to ignore the upcoming holiday, it is hard to get away from Christmas when you see trees and ribbons for sale in Costco in September, stores are decorated in October and then you have Black Friday in November. It seems to go on forever.

This year the clearing out and cleaning up fever did not abate as it usually does. I took a look around my office/workshop and realized that for the past year items have been accumulating on the long counter top. Time to clean that all off and put those items away in the closet where they belong. Oh, but wait, there is absolutely no room in the closet and I can barely open the door because of the big box of wrapping paper, (how many birthdays would it take to use up all that paper?) easels I never use, a banjo I never play, boxes of decorative papers I think one day I will use in collages, bags of knitting wool (who has time to knit any more) and shelf upon shelf of open shoe boxes, each stuffed with slides and photographic prints. Thousands of prints, still in the envelopes as they came from the store.

I have traveled a good deal the past fifty years and have always taken photos. For quite a long time when you took your roll of film in to be developed, you were given an extra set of prints. What was I supposed to do? Toss perfectly good prints away? Of course not, I put them into shoe boxes and up on the shelf – in the other house.

Yes, those prints lived in our other house for thirty four years and then were transported four years ago to the new house and shoved onto shelves in the new closet and have never seen the light of day until now. Thousands of prints, and I don’t exaggerate (thirty six prints to an envelope and hundreds of envelopes) had to be looked at, considered, and then either they get saved or tossed. The saved ones are now categorized and in clear plastic boxes. Whether the blue lids will eventually go on top, remains to be seen!

Then there are the slides. How shocking to go through those and see the younger me as a seventeen year old riding around in the boy friend’s Bull Nosed Morris (that’s a 1923 open car) or climbing Ayres Rock in central Australia as a 19 year old. There were photos of my student life in Berkeley, my M.A field work in India , our wedding photos from 1971 and our first child.

Around 1974 I made the switch to prints. Most are of places I have visited with a few family photos scattered among them. Apart from family photos, I don’t know why I feel I need to keep the images of cathedrals, countryside, canals, cafes, twisting old stone streets but I just cannot let all of them go. A little part of me is saying that perhaps one day I will sit and just slowly savor each one and relieve the journey. The other more practical part of me says “Don’t me ridiculous. You already have 46,783 photos on iCloud!” Its true. I am obsessed with trying to capture the present and to hold onto it for as long as I can, at least until “death do us part.”

This obsession if that is what it is, has led to my keeping a diary since I was a teenager. That’s the other thing that is taking up space in that closet – dozens of journals of scribblings. But I ask you dear reader, wouldn’t you like to read your diary dating back to 1965? It was the year I came to America and traveled for 99 days for 99 dollars around the United States on a Greyhound bus. Now that makes for a good read!

If I wasn’t a hoarder of the past, all my shelves would be clear of shoe boxes of slides, photos and diaries. Goodness, then I would have no excuse but to clean up that counter top once and for all!