On Baby Clothes, Letters, and the Digital Age

January 2018

I have this room above our garage. It's connected to my "office" in our home. The room is not insulated, although the door that connects and separates our rooms is a sturdy steel door. The temperature of my study rises and falls with the seasons, and after a couple of years of this, we decided that insulating the garage attic was a top priority.

As a result, I’ve been cleaning out the room. It has to be cleared before the insulation is blown in. Since Christmas, I’ve been pulling in a box every night and going through it. Many of these boxes haven’t been touched since I moved from college to my first apartment in Indianapolis, or my second in Frankfort. Others hold college memories — lovely reminders of friends, roommates, classes, and wistful notes from a beloved ex. I get lost in them for hours. A historian by craft, I am grateful that I didn’t throw anything out then, and undoubtedly, I probably never will.

I have boxes of baby clothes that bring back memories of when my children were little. Some outfits are nearly new — things the kids didn’t like wearing, or grew out of too quickly. Others are so worn, the footies are thin from all the running and stair-scooting they endured. I get lost in those boxes, too.

Some boxes are simply collections of things thrown together. Last winter, while searching for cookie tins to hold my holiday baking, I discovered a gooey mess of water and ice, with pictures and papers ruined beyond saving. The culprit: a busted Paris snow globe I had packed away too hastily when we moved. It had frozen that first winter and leaked over everything, leaving behind mold and sticky paper. I was crestfallen — my daughter’s photos and mementos were mixed in that box.

This winter, in one of the coldest seasons on record, I uncovered another casualty: a box that smelled suspiciously “nice.” Inside were tax returns coated in spilled essential oil. Luckily, nothing of sentimental importance was ruined. (And yes, I have my tax returns backed up digitally.)

Still, as I sift through these boxes, I find myself lost in the context of my own history. I’ve uncovered memories from trips to New York, Alaska, Boston, and the coast of New England. There are souvenirs from Germany, Switzerland, and France — boarding passes, ticket stubs, and even travel journal entries reminding me that I’ve been to France three times, a fact I had nearly forgotten. I have love letters. I have notebooks from history classes, filled with doodles and to-do lists in the margins. I am so grateful these have survived all my moves.

But I worry about all the memories that will not survive in our digital age. Even as a historian and someone who saves everything, I am guilty of this, too. Instead of printing pictures, we post them on social media and keep them on our phones until space runs out. Journals are no longer maintained on paper but typed into Word documents, Google Docs, or scattered across apps — easily deleted in haste or embarrassment. And if the person who wrote them dies, will anyone even know they existed, let alone preserve them?

One lesson is for sure: I am protecting the memories that have been spared. They are now in new boxes and folders, safely stored away from liquids, heat, or cold. I keep them in my study alongside photo boxes of my children and recent travels, because I still make a point to print pictures out.

But I also worry. Much of our life today is lived online—on phones, social media, and cloud storage. Journals are typed instead of written, photos are scrolled past instead of printed, and memories can disappear with a single accidental delete. What will be left for our children or grandchildren to hold in their hands?

So I’ve made a quiet promise to myself: to keep safeguarding the tangible artifacts of my life. Letters. Journals. Photos. Ticket stubs. Baby clothes. Because one day, long after the hard drives crash and accounts are gone, these are the pieces of a life that will remain.