More from the Pack Rat

For about five years now, I've had an apple box underneath the stairs, collecting dust. Inside, the following:

• A brittle vinyl record of relatives speaking in Dutch.
  
• A half-completed child's stamp collection book, also in Dutch. (I'm half-Dutch myself.)
  
• A binder of letters I wrote home from France.
  
• Six binders of journal entries.

We're trying to reduce clutter in the house, so I've taken to scanning the journal pages into the computer and saving them as jpgs or pdfs. While I've been able to toss most of the paper, I'm having a hard time getting rid of the hand-written journals (the others were just printed copies of electronic journal entries, so they were easy to pitch). I'm also dealing with an enormous box of newspaper clippings (was a journalist once, have long since left that happy little world for the happier world of writing procedures at a nuclear waste landfill).

Part of what makes the pitching difficult is that in addition to journal entries, I've collected years of detritus, including the page you see here, a "surrealist" art experiment from the single art class I took in college. (When you see the quality of the art, you'll understand why I'm not an artist). Of the stamps on the page, one seems to have relevance today:

I call it "Wow. She Can See Russia From There."