I need to confess. I’ve been purging. I look around me at all the….stuff….I’ve accumulated over the years, and quite frankly, I’m tired of looking at it. I’m tired of it being in my house. I’m tired of stubbing my toe on it, hitting my shin on it, tripping over it, and putting up with it. It’s time. Out with the old.
OK, maybe it’s not quite as bad as all that, but when you have a home, you just tend to accumulate stuff. I don’t really know where it comes from. I’d like to think that when it’s quiet and we’re all asleep, the little “stuff” fairies come in and leave things. Here’s a magazine from 1982, here’s a report card from when you were in high school….here’s a bunch of college notebooks you packed up and never looked at again. Ugh. Stuff.
Once in a while, though, when you’re going through all that stuff, you run upon a happy memory; a brief time in your life when you were part of a group or a club or you did something really stupid with your best friend and you’re standing there holding the proof.
This is my old sticker album. Back in the day when we lived in town, a friend of mine lived a few houses down from us. We got into collecting and trading stickers. Weird, right? I was probably in the third grade? Fourth grade? I’m not sure now, but I always thought I had lost this book somewhere along the way and it made me kind of sad.
Today, while purging my closet, I found this book in a box that also contained my graduation cap from high school along with some other things that meant a lot to me. And I couldn’t help but stand there and look at these stickers and remember a simpler time.
I remembered a time when we were happy just listening to AM/FM radios or our favorite record on the record player. Trying to time it just right so we could hit record as soon as the DJ stopped talking so we could record our favorite song on the cassette tape was not easily done.
I remembered a time when playing jump rope or chase or skating in the street was how we had fun. I remembered playing football, running through the sprinkler, and catching lightning bugs at night.
I remembered riding my bike up and down the street, playing in the rain, and eating mayonnaise sandwiches. The sky was the limit, and the only thing that held us back was our own imaginations.
Funny how one little book can bring back so many memories.
What about you? Have you ever found something you thought you had lost and been transported back to your childhood?