pauses&clicks

I’ve never outgrown my love of bulletin boards.  I had one in my room when I was growing up and I continue to hang them in my home to collect the things that come my way and catch my eye as I move through my life.

Refrigerators count too.  What ends up on them is a bit more transient, as they tend to collect things that I need to be reminded of in the near future so notes, etc. tend to go up and come down as events pass by.

The refrigerator in our new home has a wood front and isn’t magnetic. As a result, I  hung a magnetic board in my back hallway so I could continue to enjoy the magnets I’ve collected over the years.

Because we moved every year or two these transient collages of my life changed often.  Many of the magnets transferred from house to house, and some of the pictures and memorabilia from past houses served as a backdrop until they got covered up by new things.  Right now these are somewhat orderly, as we’ve only been in this house since March.

Moves often found me gathering the things from my boards and refrigerator and storing them in Ziploc bags which, at some point,  I started tucking away in a storage box.  Over time I realized they were a collection of time capsules, each one reflecting what happened to be going on in my family’s life at that very specific point in time.  So I kept doing it.

Yesterday I went through some of them, these time capsules, these little collections of what caught my eye and warranted a place on a bulletin board or refrigerator at some point in my life.

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This note, especially, made me smile.

Angie eventually became our daughter-in-law, proving you never know what will happen when you offer to rent a room for the summer to one of your niece’s classmates!

Jim tends to roll his eyes when he realizes the kinds of things I keep and carry and move around with us but how fun was this, to find that note yesterday in one of my Ziploc bag collections?  And really, he’s come to appreciate this quirk in me.

The older I get the less I trust my memory and had I not kept this note that once hung on a bulletin board or was placed on a refrigerator, I would never have remembered it.  But I did, and as a result, my sentimental heart enjoyed a nice memory yesterday.

Now that my husband is retired we won’t move as often so I might have to periodically empty these visual spaces before a move makes it necessary but I suspect I’ll keep creating these little time capsules, these collages of our life.

My apologies in advance to my sons and daughters-in law, who will someday wonder what the heck they’re going to do with them.

You have my permission to throw them away.

They will have served their purpose for me and you need not assume the burden of keeping them!