Storage Wars

Nothing says get organized like January! Ever since Christmas, stores have been displaying all kinds of storage containers, from tubs to huge cartons to small boxes. "Oh, look!" I said to my husband the other day, "I could use some of those cute boxes!" They were sturdy, strong, and covered with bright, graphic designs.

I wasn't really sure what to put in them, but when I got home, I realized they were perfect to hold pictures overflowing from tattered shoe boxes. I had put them there years ago after removing the photos from old, yellowing, photo albums. Unwrapping the clear, outer covering from a colorful box and opening the lid, I saw a tag that said, "Picture box." Duh! There were even little slots on the ends for labels identifying the contents.

One box easily held all the photos, leaving the other free for mementos. I am a saver, I admit. Besides birthday and Mother's Day cards and such with sweet sentiments, there was a small manila envelope with my name on it in my late mother-in-law's graceful script. All kinds of treasures were inside, from another small envelope labeled, "Howard's curls," to fragile, brittle drawings from his and his brothers' school days.

I recognized an envelope we had discovered in her things at her passing, addressed to her in her maiden name with a 3 cent stamp on it. It was from my future father-in-law, pressing his sweetheart for a decision on the all important question a young man proposes to his intended. She was a saver, too.

The soft, brown curls neatly tied with 75-year-old thread that spilled from the envelope reminded me of when our red-haired son was little. I had let his beautiful hair grow long, finally giving him his first haircut at 2 or 3 years old. I said, "Let's save your curls and send them to Grandma." My mother had red hair, and I knew she would love them. This must have made an impression on him, because once when he was probably six, watching me sweep up his red curls from a haircut, Trevor said, "Aren't you sending my hair to Grandma?"

With the advent of Facebook, I don't get many physical photos from my children any more, just the fleeting, electronic visual images that appear on the screen of my phone, computer or iPad. While I am grateful for those, which I faithfully "save," they don't make it into my scrapbook.

Scrapbooking pictures with artistic embellishment was my passion for several recent years, for which I have a dozen bulging albums. Now that, too, seems to have been replaced by Shutter-fly, a book of bound pages produced on the computer and professionally printed with magazine-style photos and script. A wonderful improvement and a treasured gift when I receive them, but I would like pictures to hold in my hand, and take out of a box, studying them for storage in my memory.