curator

According to M-W.com, "curator" comes from the Latin "curare", to care.  Caring as a concept has been all over my life lately, from a recent spate of caregiving narratives to my own care for the artifacts that have risen to the top of the household.

This fall, I was seized with a notion to clear out our basement, get it a little tidier.  Lots of trash went out, and, even better, there's lots of good stuff to donate.  A pickup was duly scheduled, and I await the charity truck.  There were a great deal of photos down there in all sorts of conditions.  I kept "inheriting" these informally, mostly passed along by relatives uninterested or unsure what to do with the things.  Thankfully, now I have both a scanner and a computer that can handle heavy use, so I have begun the archives.

I'm sitting on (well, metaphorically) a boxful of late 60s/early 70s snapshots, another box of 20s-40s photos, a handful of earlier prints, a box of WWII memorabilia and letters, and transcriptions/xeroxes of Civil War letters.  Whoo! 

Time has left its mark on many of these items, since they were not carefully stored.  Some of the snapshots I found today were stuck together and would not be separated.  Most I was able to pull apart with minimal damage, if any.  I scanned Christmases, Confirmations, birthdays, Easters, and all manner of everyday life in the American middle class.  About an hour in I discovered the tag function in the Windows pictures folder, and things went swimmingly after that, since I could scan and save in batches, instead of painstakingly naming each photo with a small summary. 

Wonder what I'll do when I scan everything...many of these really should go into albums, but there's hundreds of photos and cheap albums aren't much better than leaving them in boxes.  

The little white flecks are from being stuck for years to another photo.  Tho they look like snowflakes!

So I'm tagging, labeling, and preserving these images the best way I can at the moment.  Since this is a pretty big project but not too taxing, it leaves me time to puzzle out the other nice collection of family artifacts somehow in my possession:  the linen stash.

I'm not sure how, but I'm in possession of a selection of linens - tablecloths, napkins, handtowels - that tells the story of the women in my family.  This one was for a wedding, this was hand embroidered for a new house, this one was for a baby....and so on.  But they are folded in an old toy chest for the moment.  What to do, what to do?

It hit me today when I was walking the dog:  A Chuppah!  A secular Chuppah!  This should be pretty simple to prepare, and there's plenty of time to figure out where to find/how to make 4 identical poles.  Plus, it's an easy setup/take down item for the place we're getting hitched :)

So when I'm done with the scanner, it's off to the sewing machine.

Having projects lined up has cheered me up considerably!