Part 1

“The Sum of Trifles,”
Title of a book By Julia Ridley Smith

Here in Part 2 I continue my inventory and annotation of the contents of a selected storage box, one among many personal memory vaults I have tucked away in my apartment and storage unit.

I have lots of boxes of books and memorabilia stacked up in various strategic spots in my small apartment. Space is at a premium, so I have to be careful where I place the boxes so that I can see them and try recall what they might contain, but it’s futile. So when I get the urge, I pull up and burrow down into a box to go through and perhaps inventory as I am doing now.

Some of the boxes contain various books that I have no shelf space for and which I will probably donate to the library. I have no idea what’s in them. But I do know what is on top of them. I use the space there to just “put things” when I have no other place in mind to put them. It’s an odd thing to do, but I use it as one would a tabletop or the surface of a dresser drawer or coffee table. Things just accumulate.

I am a packrat, so it’s tough to throw things out. Objects will, in the near future, have some “use.” Books will someday get “read.” Those three-year old cough drops are still good, eh? I don’t know, but it’s very true that the interiors we habit tell a lot about us: our tastes in furniture, books, what brings us comfort, our artistic sense, personality traits, etc. To me a home bereft of books is like an empty shell. I don’t care how much other junk is there or how tasteful the furnishings are. I love to see books everywhere. The other extreme is having too many books and not enough shelf space for them. What to do? Things pile up. In my case, books.

One’s personal library is a direct glimpse into the mind and soul of the books’ owner. Books are like a person’s biography — they tell a story about the person who has them in his or her possession. Ever glance at the titles of the books in a friend’s house or even in the house of someone you don’t know well, or hardly know at all? It’s very revealing. I have boxes in the spare bedroom and closet of memorabilia from years and decades past. Souvenirs from trips. Papers from grad school. Tests and creative writing of students from my English teaching days. Files full of clippings, each of which tell a story from the year they appeared in various newspapers and magazine.

I have lots of stuff I’ve never been able to part with. However, I have been able to discard a lot in the past, but mainly because I moved so often and I absolutely had to. Now I’m staying put., and, as I said., things stick around. They don’t go anywhere.

This is the continuing list of memory-inducing keepsakes in a box I recently went through, cataloging the memorabilia within:
m.

— A guide to Ninety-Six National Historic Site in South Carolina, 1700 to 1781. I visited this fascinating historic park in the 1980s with a friend and former co-worker. Pleasant memories come back to me of our drive through scenic rural South Carolina countryside to get to the park. It was not too far from where she lived in Saluda County taking care of her elderly parents.
https://www.nps.gov/nisi/index.htm

— Brochure for an exhibit of southern photography titled “Southbound: Photographs Of and About the New South,” at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston campus. I went to see the exhibit twice in 2018. I have a lifelong interest in photography of the South since I first saw the photographs of Depression-era poverty, specifically, in Hale County, Alabama, made by Walker Evans, who greatly influenced my earliest forays into black and white photography. That recent exhibit of the works of many notable photographers, was unforgettable, and I can revisit it in the pages of the gorgeous coffee table book that is the official catalog of the exhibit. It’s now one of my most prized books.

https://halsey.cofc.edu/travel-exhibitions/southbound-photographs-of-and-about-the-new-south

— A map of Shoshone National Forest, in Wyoming. (https://www.fs.usda.gov/shoshone) Wyoming to my mind is the most vast, open, empty, and irresistibly fascinating and alluring state of all. At least that’s what vivid memories from my travels there 40 years ago still tell me. If you truly want the freedom of endless open plateau vistas, desert vastness, Western history, majestic and scenic wooded mountains with beautiful streams and rivers, Wyoming is the place to visit. I could never live there, of course.

— Photo of a tiny creek in Tennessee. To me, the tiniest creek, even if it’s only a couple of inches wide, and slowly trickling along in its bed, is utterly captivating and beguiling to me.

— Print of a painting of a boy in a treehouse reading a book while his dog is asleep at the base of the tree. These types of nostalgic paintings of scenes from days long gone, strike a deep chord in me. I never have had a dog of my own or been up in a treehouse, although that certainly was a childhood dream, I feel sure. My brother and I and another friend did build a dirt and tree limb fort atop a huge mound of earth created when builders cleared the woods in back of our house for expansion of the suburb we lived in. That was when I was 11 or 12. The clearing of our “jungle,” was one of my earliest realizations that our wooded little paradise was gone, and with it a chunk of our childhood.

— Stack of saved letters from the old friend and former coworker I’ve known since 1979. I still keep in touch with her 45 years later when we exchange Christmas cards with brief updates on our lives. Like me, she took care of her mother for many years as she declined and suffered from Alzheimer’s
Portion of a daily page-a-day calendar featuring the photographs of Deborah DeWitt. I’ve long admired this photographer whose quiet eye and compositions always convey an air of life lived simply amidst everyday things. Each page has an inspirational quote.

— A newspaper article from 2019 about clutter entitled “Bless this mass: people are overwhelmed with stuff so junk calling businesses are booming.” Needless to say, I saved this article.

— My mother’s check stub book from 1991 to 92. She was fastidious about balancing her checking account every month until she couldn’t do it anymore. Up until about two years before she passed away she was able to sign insurance documents until her signatures slowly became totally illegible, and I had to start using my power of attorney to sign them. Dementia was slow-moving for her, but cumulatively devastating.

— Originals of seven watercolor paintings done by my students in 1982. Every time I look at these I am amazed by the startling boldness and brilliance of the colors. And, of course, I think about that long-ago time when I taught for three years. The older I get the more that experience seems like a different life.

— Small spiral-bound book of quotations from St. John of the Cross. I tried reading his book “Dark Night of the Soul,” after my experience with depression in 1978-79, but didn’t get far with it. The selected quotations from his writing spoke more directly to me because I certainly had my own time of mental anguish, my personal “dark night of the soul.”

— Booklet about an old country store. I’ve always been fascinated by general stores that dotted the countryside in the 19th and early part of the 20th century. Always the hopeless romantic and hungry for the pleasant nostalgia of an imagined idealized past, I could picture myself back in those days sitting around a pot-bellied stove, sharing exaggerated tales with other old timers, while cold winds blew the snow in drifts outside. Or maybe it was Autumn in the country and golden yellow, red and orange leaves floated down to the ground from their former perches in venerable old oak and maple trees. Decades ago I never failed to visit a general store. Most were re-created stores in living history and small town museums out west. Many old stores still operate today, in vastly diminished number, often maintained by faithful descendants of the original owners. Writing about this now calls to mind several of my favorite old stores, visited and photographed many years ago, the interiors coming back vividly in those memories.

— Road guide to Mount Rainier National Park. This magnificent national park in Washington State, 100 miles south of Seattle, is my favorite park of any kind that I have visited over a lifetime of road trips. Its ancient forest, waterfalls, and countless opportunities for the best kind of Nature photography, left me thrilled and awed when I visited back in the 1980s. I also have a detailed topographic map of the park and a few matted photos. The road up the mountain to the main visitor and lodge, ends at 5,400 ft elevation at the Paradise Visitor Center. The top of the mountain is at 14,400 ft. Any visit to this park in decent weather when you can clearly see the snow-capped summit of the ancient, dormant volcano, is a lifetime memorable and awe-inspiring experience.
A notebook with jottings, which I started in 1998, listing websites from early in the history of the World Wide Web and the Internet m, which has changed our lives in so many ways. I was an early devotee, enraptured by the novelty and awe of the sci-fi technology come-to-life and available to everyone.

— A photo of a state forest in Wisconsin from a photography magazine I used to subscribe to
A photo of a church and an old country store that I have wanted to visit and photograph for a long time.
A booklet featuring 10 American painters and artists from the Hudson River School of Art. For as long as I can remember I have treasured and admired the work of these 19th century artists who created peaceful and beautiful landscape paintings, some on enormous canvases, of the maintains, rivers, waterfalls and farmsteads of the upper Hudson River Valley in New York.

— A brochure and guide to the Land of Waterfalls in Brevard and Transylvania County North Carolina, There are probably more waterfalls in this area than anywhere else. In three trips to this part of the Blue Ridge, I’ve only seen a fraction of the waterfalls, although I have daydreamed and fantasized about walking or hiking to them many times, poring over detailed maps and atlases. Now, I’d probably spend most of my time in Google maps. What a place of enthralling and enchanting beauty. If Charleston were not my home of 30 years, I really believe I would be living out my retirement years in Brevard.
An Audubon Society guide to the Biedler Forest in central South Carolina. Over the past 25 years, I cannot even count the number of times I’ve visited this quiet nature sanctuary with ten-story tall, and 1,000 year old bald cypress trees. It’s a 45-minute drive from where I live.

— “Gifts of the Lotus,” a book of meditations

— An Autumn landscape with waterfowl. Often I cut out pictures from wall calendars and magazines that I like, and which resonate deeply with me, and affix them to cardboard backing.

— Four letters from a high school classmate, part of a renewed acquaintance 50 years after we graduated from high school in 1969. We sent each other an original copy of the first letter each of us sent. We corresponded as pen pals for several years until she found a retired Marine ten years older than her. A widow, she wrote to me thst she never expected to fall in love again.

— A CD of rock ‘n’ roll hits from the late 1950s. How quaint that seems now when most music is streamed over the internet, and I listen to basically every favorite song of mine on YouTube or in a Pandora station.

— A booklet of old-fashioned poems and illustrations mcreated by the Salesian Mission. I no longer get any mailings from them.

— Travel brochures for Saluda and Pilot Mountain State Park, both in North Carolina. I’ve been twice to the charming and historic mountain town of Saluda, and have Pilot Mountain on my list of NC places to visit someday. (Low probability now, but who knows.)

— A Vaughn Williams CD, “Lark Ascending.” Majestic, stirring instrumental music.

— A Christmas card from a family friend— A photo I took of a log cabin somewhere on my travels.

— National Geographic Guide to Civil War National Battlefield Parks. I’ve been to a number of these, and it’s always a very sad and moving experience. My highest priority next is to visit Gettysburg National Military Park.

— Palmetto Trails Guide to Favorite Canoe and Kayak Trails in South Carolina. This is purely nostalgic. It’s been ages since I’ve canoed any stream, and that was Black Creek in southern Mississippi decades ago. We have a very beautiful canoeing and kayak stream in South Carolina, the Edisto River, and although regretfully I’ve never canoed it, I have walked along its banks at state parks and other spots and have gotten great pleasure from that by itself.

— An art gallery guidebook from 2012, which featured an exhibit of my Nature photography. I’ve had three solo exhibits of my photography in Charleston, one of early black and white photos, and two of my later and recent color photography. It was a thrill I will never forget to see people looking at my framed pictures on the gallery walls, and to read comments about them in guest books. All three exhibits were very positive experiences and enhanced my interest in continuing to take pictures, which is every day now in retirement. Taking photos and studying the works of the masters both past and present, have long been my main passions.

— A letter from an old friend in in 2013 that accompanied a classic book of South Carolina, black-and-white photos

— Christmas card from the old friend I mentioned earlier. We go back to 1979 and were coworkers on one of my short-lived jobs. She is one of my dearest friends, although we are only in touch at Christmas through an annual exchange of cards with briefs notes. This friendship that has lasted so long is a good example of a blessing that can come from difficult circumstances, such as a job that was not destined to work out.

— A packet of View-master 3-D photo reels titled “Scenic USA.” The handwriting on it is by me sometime in the late 1960s. I used to endlessly look at these reels when I was a kid, fascinated at the 3-D photographic world presented.

— A brochure about South Carolina Natural Heritage Corridor garden destinations.

This concludes the inventory and description of the contents of one box. There are many others as well as various file containers full of various documents, papers, photos and more, all of which I can’t part with. I firmly believe our books and valuable belongings, keepsakes and assorted types of memorabilia tell the story of who we are, and what we treasure and value.