2.18 Favorite Memories - Patchwork

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the eighteenth day of each month is "Favorite Memories."
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I’m not a person who collects things.  I don’t have a collection of local cookbooks from places I visit, I don’t have a scrapbook containing all the tickets to movies, concerts, and events I’ve ever been to, and I don’t own many decorative items that don’t serve a useful purpose.   This “favorite memories” theme is hard for me because my memories rarely have tangible items associated with them.  There are occasional photographs, of course, and the decorative items in my house that don’t serve a purpose are almost entirely made up of photographs, but, in the tradition of every grown adult I know who grew up in a home with hoarders, I throw things away rather than keep them.

But what I do is collect patches from places I go and then I put the patches on my LL Bean backpack. I take this backpack everywhere I go. It’s been on many a trip with me and I have enjoyed watching it take on a life of its own over the last couple of years.

There are patches for all the colleges I attended and taught, patches from trips I’ve taken with my family, and, of course, a patch from the Grand Ole Opry.  There are patches I’m still looking for (an ear of corn for all our trips to Iowa, a saguaro cactus for the Arizona trip, a bicycle to represent MSP, and a Chicago city flag, not to mention Detroit Lions and Detroit Tigers patches), but patches are not all the rage right now, so it’s not as easy as you might think.  

But I did find a patch to represent the Great Lakes Lighthouse Journey of 2014 (GLLJ '14).

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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.