You never know what you’ll bring home from traveling. I’m not talking about the occasional cold or COVID, which we have brought home on a few occasions. I’m talking about memories, which tend to inevitably fade or morph a bit over time. It helps to recount those stories to keep from losing them altogether. We also bring home journals, photographs, and souvenirs, all in an effort to remember. It has been our practice to collect small items which we can display in a printers letter tray which has hung on our wall for longer than I can remember. At least it did until two years ago when we turned our home office into a guest room. At that point the letter tray was stuffed into a closet and all its contents wrapped and placed into a box.

You might not think it from my prior statement, but this letter tray is special to us. It was part of my father-in-law’s printing business, which was housed in their basement in Maryland. It’s probably an antique – maybe not when he bought it though. When he stopped using the trays, he gave a few of them to us. We kept one and gave a couple of them to friends. That brings me to our Scandinavian cruise which we took in July with two of those friends, Mike and Moggie.

As Moggie and I perused the Scandinavian shops, she pointed out a few things that would fit in the letter tray. Apparently, I had stuffed the memory of it in the closet with the tray itself; but Moggie awakened the idea of filling it anew with things from this trip. We had a great time together searching out small items. By the time we got home, I had quite the collection.

As we went through our stash of stuff, I showed Bob all the treasures which would go in the letter tray. He was very (read – moderately) excited and asked me where I would like to hang the tray and did I even know where it was. Of course, I knew, I told him. I was pretty sure anyway.

I would not put it in the guest room because some of our guests are young and it would be too tempting for them to completely rearrange things and/or break them in the process. The hallway seemed to be the right place. Yes, the hall. Only thing, I’ve been wanting to repaint the hall. We have been in our house for eight years now and down that hall we had hung a decent number of pictures of our kids growing up. I was ready to make the change from these 30- to 40-year-old pictures, which was kind of a big deal for me.

To be clear, I don’t paint. I have tried that in the past and I am stunningly bad at it. So bad that it is far easier for Bob to paint than it would be for him to fix the mess that I would make with a paint brush and live with me while I attempted the job. He was happy to paint the hall, but the rest was on me. I was fine with that arrangement.

I took down the pictures – over 20 of them. Most of them were 8×10. I didn’t want to rehang them, but I didn’t want to pitch them either. A trip to Hobby Lobby yielded a photo album with pages I could slip my 8x10s into without having to agonize over them. One larger picture I simply photographed with my phone and then threw it away. I was on a roll!

I chose my favorite paint color – Universal Khaki, aka taupe. By now the paint job had grown into our foyer area, but in a couple of days, Bob had it looking great. It took me two weeks to finish my part. We had company coming in and I couldn’t have my dining room looking like this when they arrived. That gave me a helpful deadline.

I wanted fresh pictures on display. The section of the foyer wall with our grandchildren’s pictures was also pitifully dated, so that had to change. My idea was to hang a variety of pictures which would warm my heart when I looked at them. They didn’t have to be professional quality. They just had to make me smile and there had to be a representation of all of our kids and grands.

On one of my many trips to Hobby Lobby, I took the original artwork for the cover of my book, Always Look for the Magic. They were very helpful in picking out a mat and the perfect frame to display this prize that had been in my drawer for five years.

(If you’d like to order my book, here is a link)

In addition to trips to Home Goods to buy new frames, I also pulled out several frames which I had purchased over the years with the good intentions of filling them with pictures. Some of these frames had made the move from our old house and I decided it was use them or lose them. So, while I was at it, I made collages of Bob and me in our travels for our bedroom walls.

In another closet were shelves that a few years ago Bob and our friend, Al, had fixed up for me to display some of the painted rocks from the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive. Somehow, I remembered them and now they are part of my hallway display. After all was said and done, I had redone pictures in seven rooms in our house.

When the grandkids came to visit, they all liked finding themselves on display down the hallways, even if they didn’t necessarily love the photo choices I made. I asked them which ones they didn’t like and assured them with a smile that I would not be making any changes for another eight years at least. They really didn’t mind. They are the best.

One of the toughest parts of this project was getting the letter tray, which started the entire process, hung in the proper place. Funny thing, after all the painting, shopping, agonizing, and framing, it seemed the hall was not the best place for it. I ended up hanging it in the living room. Bob didn’t say a word.