As a child I would always try to collect mementoes while on vacation, sometimes they were as simple as a shell from a beach or a paper napkin from a restaurant. I saved my birthday cards, friends' school photos and letters from relatives. They were little things to help keep the memory of my wonderful childhood alive.
In my teen years I saved movie ticket stubs, concert tickets, and love notes passed in class. In my college years I save menus, cards from boyfriends, I pressed flowers they sent, saved matchbooks from special restaurant dates and collected more movie ticket stubs. Many of these treasures went into scrap books that were piled high in my closet.
When my father passed away, and I sold the home in 2007, I spent an afternoon going through these scrap books, teary-eyed at some memories, laughing hysterically at others and enjoying every minute of walking down memory lane. And then I placed the scrap books in the recycle bin and said goodbye to many years of little treasures.
As many of you, I am spending my self-isolation time cleaning, organizing and trying to be productive.
While cleaning out the large drawer in my hope chest, I came across a bag filled with matches. So many restaurants and clubs used to have these by the door.....
.....looking thru the little collection offered me another trip down memory lane!
And then I pulled out the bag full of swizzle sticks - and oh boy, did that take me back to my college days!
The Night Clubs in Framingham and Boston, many vacations and road trips with friends, beach trips to Cape Cod, date nights and lots of restaurants....
and I even saved some from our wedding:
One thing I have learned for sure, during this time of self-isolation, is that I need to weed out a lot of these little mementoes. I think if we had cell phones back in the 70's I wouldn't have saved all of these, but would have photos of them instead!
But....I am not ready to part with these yet, so they all went back into the drawers to be saved for another walk down memory lane in the future!
