Sometimes it's nice to be a pack-rat

Today I was looking through a lot of my packed up junk (to get rid of some stuff--AAAGH) and I found a tub FULL and I mean FULL of old cards (when I say old I mean like cards people sent my Mom and Dad when I was still making Mom crave pickles) and newspaper clippings, old report cards from kindergarten, postcards, pictures, etc. I looked through a good bit of that stuff and you know, I had a lot of fun. There were all my 3rd place ribbons (ha ha) from track and field day in elementary school, my first squeaky clown toy (who apparently deflated when I used my brand new teeth to bite a hole in his head), letters from people I had forgotten had ever written me letters, and newspaper articles about people like Frank Mullen, the 81 year old man who used to take our class on hikes on the Stoney Lonesome Trail in Gardners and tell us about flowers and animals and the CCC camp that used to build roads and stuff back in the "olden" days. I found old pictures of my friends from elementary school through high school, and notes we had written to each other when we were supposed to be listening in class, ahem. I found a little New Testament that was given to the 9 year old version of my Dad and a prayer book that belonged to my Pap (my Dad's Dad) when he was a little kid. I saw a book called "Expecting?" that had a picture of a pregnant cartoon bear on the front, and inside was kind of a diary of what Mom was doing, thinking, and feeling while I was busy growing hands and feet and a circulatory system inside her. It made me feel good to remember that stuff. And the truth is, if I hadn't kept that stuff, I would have forgotten a lot of it. Not because I want to forget, but because I don't have a great memory, and I never really have. Having this stuff brings back memories for me that I'm so glad that I have, and although people always say "you can never go back," I think you can. Not for real, obvy, but I know that when I laughed at the references to our boring psychology teacher in a letter from one of my high school friends, and laughed at the pictures of my 19 year-old self acting goofy with my 19 year-old friends, I didn't just remember what we did back then, I remembered what it felt like. It felt really, really good and really, really free. I don't know what point I'm trying to make, exactly, except that the older I seem to get, the more grateful I am for all the stuff I've saved and kept and put away in a box, where I keep it until I feel like I need it. And looking through it all never makes me wish I could go back. It only makes me grateful to have been there. So I guess gratitude is the moral of today's story. And I'm very, very grateful for almost (had to put that in there, heh) everyone who's ever crossed my path. So if you have ever crossed my path, May God bless you, and I thank you for the good mood I was in today. It was quite nice.