What if Memories Were Money?

I saw that question last night, and it stopped me in my tracks.

What if memories were money? Would you be rich?

A couple of days ago, my latest scrapbook arrived in the mail. It covered April-June of 2020, which should have meant that it was a pitifully skinny little book. Quarantine meant no county tours. No evenings out with friends. No events.

Even so, that book was one of the thickest quarter scrapbooks I've ever made, because even though our outside world was shut down, our life was full and memorable.

I flipped through the pages and saw pictures of Ryan busy with his proning team, all our projects at home, and the many things we did to fill those at-home hours. We camped on the sun porch. We went for walks around the neighborhood. We cooked. We attended Zoom meetings and jammie church.

If memories were money, quarantine made us oh so very rich.

This week I started working on the scrapbook of our long-weekend birthday trip right when things started to open back up. Everything about that weekend went differently than planned. We went to the Hocking Hills in Ohio and the state park was closed entirely. But even though our whole trip's plan was thwarted, we still had a great weekend. We found other trails. We took a million naps. We enjoyed the hot tub at our cabin. We grilled and drank coffee. We had a great weekend, even though it was absolutely Plan B.

Our move and new job have given me a beautiful new perspective on money, possessions, and yes, even memories. We sold a fair amount of superfluous things before our move, and I told Ryan that we could just as easily have a sale now to downsize even more. There is a freedom in having less that I never fully understood until it applied to us.

And yet we're loving all the memories we get to make in the gift of working together. Walks through town, coffee dates, kayaking down the river...these are things we've not had the privilege of soaking up to the degree we do now. We are grateful for those memories and the richness they add to life.

We probably all dream (at least a little bit) about what we would do if we had money to spare. Dreaming is fun, isn't it? But most of us probably won't ever experience an unlimited flow of funds. All of us, though, have a chance to enjoy an unlimited flow of memories.

I hope you're rich in them too. And I hope you're remembering them somehow...words, pictures, a combination of both.

Let's be rich in memories!