I have been one to collect “keepsakes” for most of my life.  Keepsakes include photos and especially cards if they were made by my children.  But I have many, many cards and letters which I’ve saved for a very long time.  

It used to be that telephone calls were so expensive, if they were long distance, and letters and cards were the way we communicated.  I was a fabulous correspondent and I had saved cards and letters for years.

So, they were packed up in large totes and stored with many other things, and I thought that maybe I had gotten rid of them. It had been so long since I had seen them, decades in fact.  So when we decided to take them out of storage, that’s when I found the totes, 6 of them.

They included things the kids had made, and evidence of the committees and projects I had been involved in while they were in elementary school.  We lived in California for 7 years.  I was determined to stay in touch with the people we left behind in Indiana, and I wrote many, many letters.  Therefore, I had many, many responses to my letters.  My mom wrote to me at least once or twice a week.  And I had saved all of them.

Christmas cards were in large envelopes marked with the year they had been sent to us.  I looked at every piece of mail and decided to save some of them.  In the end, I threw away the contents of 4 totes and am down to 2 of the 6.  It’s taken me two full days to do it.

Now some people may think that I was silly to save so much stuff.  But these were treasures I thought were long gone and there had been times when I had missed them and wondered what I had done with them.

My mother’s letters from the time we lived in California, letters from my long-time pen pal, correspondence with many other friends, the kid’s artwork and some of their school work were all so special to me.   I even had a term paper from college that had made me especially proud.

I think it would have been a real shame had I not found these precious memories, while I can still enjoy them.  Who knows whether I would have been capable of going through these treasures in the future.

Soon, I am going to sift through them again, and perhaps, read and pitch some of the cards and letters out.  But each time, I will have enjoyed a memory again, and that’s why keepsakes are treasures worth saving in the first place.