After my mother’s death, I discovered that one thing she and I have (had?) in common is a bit of sentimentality, although I wouldn’t call it that. She simply saved important things, the same kind of things I’ve saved; tons and tons of photos from her life, from her parent’s lives, from their parent’s lives, the college yearbook she edited, newspaper clippings of high school awards she won, marriage and birth announcements, my Social Security card and birth certificate (thank God), her father’s typewritten manuscript of a never-published book, postcards, a rosary, my first published poem (“The Sympathetic Rose”; fourth grade, school newsletter, full of big words that didn’t make a lot of sense strung together), my old report cards (Michael hands in wonderful assignments, but he can sometimes be disruptive in class) my seventh-grade “autobiography” (wherein I predict I will be single, a seventh-grade English teacher, and the adoptive parent of a daughter), copies of the lit mags that published my poems, a program from an event in which I won the Rose Rees Award for capturing the spirit of international peace as a senior in high school, etc, etc, etc. I had to leave a chest full of these things in Minnesota, promising her partner I’d come back to retrieve it. This…stuff, it matters to me. I thought of her today as I printed out some of the emails I’ve received through the Campfire, adding them to the binder I’ve started, behind the hard copies of my blogs that I print out monthly. You never know.