It's All Treasure

When I first started scrapbooking, I wanted to cut up paper and make pretty pictures. Then I started to think more about what scrapbooking really meant to me and I understood that it had to be about the words too. And there can be no doubt that the pages I return to, and the ones anyone stops at if I'm asked to show an album, are the ones with the writing on.

But that writing takes up space: it can fill the background, flood the view. And the kind of pages I'm most often attracted to are the ones restful to the eye, pared back, easy to relax over. So I circle. I make pages with lots of story, then I think I want the picture and the pretty, so I stick the story on the back. Then I shake my head and ask myself what's the point of that? If I find a happy medium, that's a good scrap day.

Maybe this one? It's a page I made for Get It Scrapped's new blog article Six Ways to Create More Room For Journaling on Your Scrapbook Pages. I took a story I told for Storytelling Sunday back in 2013 and fitted it onto a 8.5 x 11 background by layering the text, one typed sheet over another, as if I were adding layers of patterned paper. That way I managed to find room for all of the story and here it is:


...our chest of mystery. Everyone here likes to believe that it once belonged to Harry Potter; and that would be because it has his initials H.P. placed on the lid. But it's clear he has no more use for it since it has washed up with us. Truthfully, I wouldn't be trying to grab it if I had to flee from here in a hurry: it's cast iron - I think - and I can't lift it. (Though I guess that means it might survive fire, flood or plague and I could come back for it? ). But I know you want to find out what's inside...

Well, earlier in the year I'd been planning to tell you about its quirkier contents for Halloween...Great Grandpa's false teeth, anyone? Or how about the owner-less glass eye? the locks of baby hair or the Victorian mourning envelopes? there are letters and certificates going back a century or more. The Fair family owned a grocer's shop through the years of the Great Depression; and I could show you the shop ledgers. Tucked inside you'd find letters from customers who were struggling to meet their accounts. It could break your heart, even from this distance. All of these things have their own stories.

But when I started to sift through it all this week, the thing which really spoke to me was a little blue notebook, full of numbers still recognisable as being in my Father-in-Law's hand: "Money Spent Each Term at T.C.D." His college accounts from his years in Dublin at the end of the 1940's. How much he spent on "digs", on a new saddle bag, on train fares and "outside meals": a strange world of gowns and Punch Magazine. You know why this has fascinated me right now, of course. I'll be emailing his namesake, modern day student grandson who has spent the last couple of months wondering how his student loan will stretch and I'll be telling him how lucky he is that he doesn't have to buy his own coal. I think that will give him a smile. And then I'll be tucking that notebook back into the chest, in the hope that another generation will use it as a reminder of what came before. I hope someone else comes across it at exactly the right time. Just as I did. 

Maybe now I've scrapbooked one story from the chest, I'll go back and find another. It's all treasure: the words, the pictures, the pleasure we take from adding the extras. And the finding of the stories, of course. That's the best part.