What simple life?

     This afternoon was mild but very overcast and rainy.   To hear rain on the roof and then falling steadily on our yard and garden was such sweet relief after months of nary a drop of the precious precipitation.   I  couldn’t go out anywhere to take pictures, so I decided to go through a box of memorabilia brought over here from my move out of the apartment last month.   Hard to believe it’s all over now and my home of 15 years is just a memory, but rich and abundant are those numerous memory corners I will be briefly inhabiting for some years to come.   Starting with this afternoon.   

     In the hall upstairs, I have a lot of plastic storage boxes that I got from Office Depot and Staples and I use them for so many things, chiefly, storing the flotsam and jetsam of my life, those irreplaceable photos, cards, letters, notes, small books,  bric-a-brac and countless other printed and written-upon pieces of paper that let me go back sometimes as far as 40 or 50 years in my memories.  This does not include separate containers in which are housed such priceless heirlooms as all my report cards going back to third grade.  Yes, I have faithfully preserved those, one of those sacred cows one must never even think of tossing.

     But back to the plastic containers.  These also contain folders where I have torn out and stapled magazine articles from issues of publications I merely browse through but had to recycle.  I figured I would at least save the main article I liked or wanted to read in each one, and store them away.  Over years of doing this, it makes for a considerable collection of folders of magazine articles.   One might say, "Well, you are never going to read them, so why not just get rid of them?  To that I answer this way.  In a strangely satisfying and mysterious manner, each of those articles reflects an intellectual interest, a travel curiosity, a photographic odyssey as simple as a walk in a garden or a hike in a national park.  Each folder tells numerous stories when I open one and look at the contents (albeit not very often).    Now, if I can remember so much about what I have always been interested in from those magazine articles, imagine how much more telling are the treasures from each "memory vault" of a box where I have stored the memorabilia that I absolutely cannot part with.  And the older the material, the more impossible it becomes to even think of throwing it out.   The boxes take us space, yes, but it become precious space.

     I know that one day all this stuff will be unceremoniously tossed out.  And it will be work for someone.  I apologize in advance.  I don’t have any priceless jewelry, valuable stamps or coins, rare antiques or significant artwork by known or lesser known masters.   What I do have has meaning only to me and perhaps possibly to my brother and sister and niece and nephew and their dad, but only some of it and most likely that would include the many albums of photographs I have stored in boxes.   I don’t think future generations will want to see my old report cards and certificates of achievement.   

     What will last, I hope, will be my writing, including what I have posted here at OD and elsewhere, and which I have saved and will print out, and my photographs, many of the best of which I now I have matted and framed and which I have made available for viewing in the present on Flickr and Blogspot.

     What I went through today will likely not have any great symbolic significance to anyone, not even my family.   Curiosities, they might be labeled.  But to record here just a few of the contents of one of those plastic containers is to help me again relive some of those days. Otherwise, I might never recall them again or the people who come alive in those now ancient photos, notes, letters and other first drafts of my personal history.

Herewith a brief list:

*   a photograph I took and placed on a blank note card of a favorite scene in Audubon Park in New Orleans, circa 1983 ( I tend to do this a lot over the years; personalized notecards are very special, in my opinion)

*   a small mounted-on-cardboard photo of me titled, "Self-portrait, S.C. State Fair, 1979."  This is highly significant because it marked the year I came back from an awful series of personal and professional setbacks and terrible period of depression.  I was embracing life again as well as my favorite pastime and passion, photography.  

*   A notecard with a photo of Smith Rock and the Crooked River in central Oregon, bought on one of my trips West 25 years ago and which always reminds me of how captivatingly beautiful the dry desert highlands of central and eastern Oregon are.

*   A birthday card from my dearly loved aunt who died in 2003 and who was like a second mother to me all my life and who was always there for me in the worst of times and the best of times.   The card reads, "There may be lots of nephews/ But just a very few/Are thought about as often/And are as loved as much as you."   This was from 1989 and it was during another very difficult year for me, nearing the end of a decade when, for most of its duration, I was adrift in life and trying desperately and futilely to establish myself once and for all in my chosen career fields of journalism and teaching.   I needed all of the support and love I could get.

*   A photograph of the spare bedroom in my sister’s house in Seattle in 1984 where I lived for a a memorable few months while I worked a temp job,  traveled, photographed and exalted in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, a destination that was the culmination of my first cross-country road trip inspired by reading the book "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon.

*   A quite old, probably from the 1930s, fold-out post card set of scenes of New Orleans addressed to someone in Dallas, Texas, and which still has the one-cent postage stamp which carried it on its way from New Orleans to Texas.

*   A photo of my niece, Kathryn, holding her one-year old baby brother.   What a treasure that photo is, taken in 1993.

*   A postcard of a St. Charles Avenue streetcar in New Orleans, circa 1965, I am guessing.   Never did I enjoy anything quite so much when I was a child as taking a ride on those quiet electric streetcars as they glided along the tracks heading up magnificent St. Charles Avenue, location of the grandest homes and mansions in New Orleans.  This was quite an adventure for an 8-year-old.

*   Photocards of two of my favorite waterfalls, taken about 25 or 30 years ago and including a very rare waterfall in Mississippi.

*   A photograph of a mist-shrouded country dirt road and harvested cornfield, given to me my a photography intern at the first newspaper I worked on in South Carolina in 1975.   I gave him one of my photographs, but unfortunately I can’t remember what the subject was.  Nevertheless, when I look at that picture, I am reminded of how talented he was and how much fun I had working onthat paper, one of my first two "real" jobs after college.   I was young, naive, and idealistic.  How I wish I could recapture more of that in my complicated life today.

*   A letter from a dear friend I have known since 1979 in which she laments the fact that I am leaving South Carolina and might possibly never return, though of course I  did return in 1990, and again in 1993, and am here now almost 20 years since last returning, home at last after years of uncertainty and drifting.

*   A notecard featuring  vintage scenes of Folly Beach, that most mystical and epoch-marking small dot on the map where my history and it’s history have mixed and intermingled over many decades starting with summer vacations in the 1960s and continuing to the present when I drive out there with my mother to have supper with my brother who lives in the same house in which we spent so many golden weeks of summer vacation.

*   A notecard featuring a painting of two Carolina wrens on a branch festooned with purple wisteria blooms, one of my favorite flowers of spring here in Charleston.

     That was just a brief catalog of part of the contents of that storage box.   I think you can see why I can’t part with any of it.

     In her book "Living the Simple Life," Elaine St. Johns wrote this:  "…Getting rid of clutter is not about letting go of things that are meaningful to you.   It’s about letting go of the things that no longer contribute to your life so that you have the time and the energy and the space for the things that do…. [Our] identities are often connected to our stuff.  When we start unloading it, it feels like we’re giving away part of ourselves.   But unloading some of it can also help us move into the self we want to be…"

     I agree with this up to a point.  I have given away countless books and recycled thousands of magazines over the years, but parting with most of the small objects such as those I wrote about above is out of the question.  It’s unthinkable.  I will store them for as long as I live because to me, my identify is not just connected to that "stuff" it IS that stuff.