The Most Important Stuff

Since several weeks ago, when Ashley Jones first alerted me to its existence, I've been occasionally looking at the blog The Burning House and attempting to assess just what possessions of mine have the most immediately practical or sentimental value to me. Besides the obvious choices of my wallet, which contains credit cards and pieces of personal identification, and my back-up hard drive with all my pictures and documents from the past ten years or so, what would I choose to take with me if everything else I owned were about to be destroyed?

For all my pondering and walking around my room, looking at my stuff, here's the best I could come up with:

1. My high school yearbook
2. A bottle of wine
3. My big backpack

If you're surprised to see that my high school yearbook made it to the top of the list, you're not alone. It was, by no means an object that immediately jumped to mind when I began inventorying my most prized possessions. I hated high school. By the time I reached my senior year, I was of the mindset that this was just a necessary evil I would have to suffer through before moving on to the much more desirable state of being known as college. But riffling through the autograph pages of my yearbook and reading the things that past friends and acquaintances wrote to me provides a very self-affirming reminder of my best and most basic character traits--the stuff that people were noticing about me even when I was seventeen. I'm deeply encouraged to read one girl's note: "You made me feel the most welcome out of anyone in our class." A few wrote that I was probably the nicest person they knew. If people saw me as a nice person when I was seventeen--when I was, for the most part, much more insecure and much less willing to extend myself on behalf of others than I am now--then maybe I really am a nice person. The possibility of such just makes me want to work even harder and being kind and welcoming to those around me. My high school yearbook proves itself to be a memento worth hanging on to.

The bottle of wine and the backpack are, of course, practical choices. I need the backpack to store and carry my stuff and the wine to wash away the pain of losing my house to a fire.

Would anyone like to start our own little Flickr page to share which few possessions of ours we consider worth hanging on to before all others? I believe Ashley was the one who suggested the idea first, but I'd really be interested to see what my friends would choose. Let me know.