Just for fun, we brought a plastic tub of memorabilia to Mom's place in Alexandria today. We explored treasures from trips taken to Israel and Greece (1968) and Norway (1999). Mom had kept itineraries and seat assignments, maps and scraps. We looked at her notes and class lists from when she taught Bible school in 1968, reading the names and the grades each had earned. We examined her gold monogrammed diploma from Concordia College (1944). We read a history of her achievements that ran in the Echo on Jan. 3, 1973 and we pinned on ribbons that she had won shusshing down Andes Mountain. We looked at a collection of "popular music" from the mid-1800s that had been gathered and bound by her grandfather Ralph Brown. She had a trove of charms and jewelry in her squirrel box, as well as this fine collection of watches that stopped running, along with a Nov. 29, 1996 receipt from Target proving that she had paid $13.83 for one of them. Mom's never really been a pack rat, but we've all kept stuff we can't throw out and that's probably a good thing -- good for something fun to do on a Sunday afternoon.
