Treasures

Today I started to clean out my drawer at work. Amongst the paperclips and antacid packets are pine cones that look like Christmas trees, a scattering of rocks collected at various times by Jake and Sam, little notes and artwork done for me by each of the kids, and more.

Other mementos include things like those in the picture above. There is way more than what I show here, but this is the kind of stuff I hang onto. To most people, it looks like junk. To me, it's memories.

I must have well over a hundred Dilbert comic strips. It used to be Jake's "job" to cut those out for me when he would visit. I have stacks of these.

There's a little hair barrette that used to belong to Rachael. It fell out on one of her visits to work with me many years ago, and I didn't notice it until the next day. I kept it in my pocket for awhile, but eventually, it ended up in my drawer.

There's also a half of a ticket stub. On the back of it I wrote: "Helaina's Field Hockey Game at Turners 10/20/05". This was in my wallet for the longest time, and then became part of the collection.

There's even a couple of those electrode connectors. These were on Sam when he had his long stay in the hospital. I can't deny that this is a pretty weird thing to keep, but there was something about these things being on him for so long, and so physically close to his heart, at a time when he almost died... it's pretty stupid, but I couldn't get rid of them.

All of these things have meaning to me. In the back of my mind though, is that at some point after I'm long gone, someone else will be looking through this stuff.  They'll probably wonder what in the world I was doing with all of it.

And because they won't know any better, they'll probably assume that it's nothing but junk.