Day -261

One of the traditional homecoming activities my mom enforces is Editing My Stuff.  I've always been a collector of things small and useless which have important symbolic, sentimental meanings.  I tuck them away in shoe boxes and suitcases and rubbermaid tubs piled up on the top shelf in the guest room closet.  Eventually these things (plastic skeletons, pens that have run out of ink, advertisement badges, ribbons of all sorts, notes scribbled on napkins:  "I was here, you weren't.  Call me!") lose meaning.  Mom doesn't like to store these boxes of garbage, but she's sensitive, so the getting rid of process has taken years.  This year my assignment was "Get rid of all those old t-shirts and boxes of crap upstairs"  Ok.  Turns out those boxes of crap were my old journals from about 6th grade on and all my papers from junior and senior English. The titles were things like "Connie Chatterley: A Woman Awakened"  or "A Journey Worth the Loss of Six Toes:  A Review of Pride and Prejudice",  in which I concluded Pride and Prejudice gives the reader a satisfaction upon actually finishing the book that I think can be compared to the satisfaction of a mountain climber reaching the summit of Everest...and though one may have lost six toes along the way, when asked why the journey was undertaken--why this book, why that mountain--"because it is there."  Oh boy. 


I also found these scrawled notes from the first backpacking trip my dad took me on when I was about 11.  [sic] througout

Fig. 1.  On the river age 11

It was a rough morning. Trees down all over the trail. Landslides and crawling up hills. But nothing as beautiful as this treasure goes ungarded. Lucious greenery. Thimble berries. The rambling of the river. The wind. The dew.



It is about 9pm. Everything is all buttoned up and ready if it rains. It rained earlier about 6 or 7. We can't go down the trail any further so we are going to hike out in the morning. We are spending the night on a little beach. Dad built a campfire. [blah blah blah nature is lovely and beautiful...unbridled 11 year old enthusiasm]