Scrapbook

My mind is like a scrapbook

With pages full of you

I gently touch its well worn contents

A life of mine and ours to view.

I linger at one remembrance

While others I must skip

Seen from the corner eye askance

For now, I let them slip.

These days the book lies open

Waiting to be added to

I'm collecting for the second half

The first part done, now starts part two.

~~~~~~~~~~~

My grandma was a scrapbook aficionado before it was cool.  When we were little, she would collect things that she loved and save them for us.  She'd find snippets of paper from books, magazines and newspapers, keep them and paste them into a blank scrapbook from Woolworths, Newberry's or 'K-Mark' .  I never appreciated her efforts, I'm sorry to say.  She presented me with my scrapbook very proudly with cut outs that she lovingly saved.  Lots of horses, of course, but also things that she liked about little girls, dolls and funny stories about animals.  Her own scrapbooks were more interesting to me, but still it was pretty much lost on me what she found so fascinating about collecting these things.

Scrapbooking has become so abstract.  The end product for modern scrapbooks is limited only by one's ability to pay for the most interesting precut stick-on Doo Dads that one can find at some mega craft store. Even the captions for photos can be purchased instead of printed with pen onto the page.

When grandma read something in her Work Basket or Wallace Farmer's magazines that she liked, she would grab the nearest shears and cut it out and put it in a drawer or stick it onto the refrigerator. She may have slipped it in between the glass and the edge of a picture frame where it would curl and yellow before it could be put onto the pulpy paper sheet of the large string bound square books she had.

Grandma was always on the lookout for things that interested her.  Recipes of course, but only the ones where she would write, "These Are Good" on the side and underline it.  She also saved and really appreciated poetry.  She would be so disappointed in today's newspapers which don't print anything remotely poetic or thoughtful the way they did throughout the 30's to the 70's.

I never realized it at the time(who does?), but my grandma really appreciated the arts and writing.  She encouraged me to draw because she liked it herself.  She was a gifted china painter, and she always had little ways of writing in cards with an extra flourish to our names and hers.

I think I started thinking about scrapbooks this afternoon because I spent some time talking to my brother-in-law today and going back in my memories of all the dogs he had.  He said "I didn't think that you would have remembered that one!" and "I didn't remember that until just now when you said that."
The little things we can remember as stories or tiny movies are pasted in our memories waiting to be opened and looked at over and over again.  Like scraps of newsprint, they yellow and curl and get pressed and wrinkled as more things are stuffed into our memory books. Some scraps are painstakingly brushed with paste all the way out to the edges, while others may get slapped in with a piece of scotch tape that comes off and gets put in the wrong place.

All of the things we saved are there whenever we want to retrieve them, though.  You have to first find the big square book that grandma started for you and you are still finishing. If you take the trouble to start looking through it, it can be a lot of fun and can make you feel a lot better about your day.
I never said it before to her, so now I will: Thank you Grandma, for starting my scrapbook for me and for helping me remember its the little things that are the most important.