Holding Onto Yesterday

I have a collection of old magazines. Not People magazine from the Tom & Nicole days. Old magazines. American Needlewoman from 1914. Family Circle from 1956. Good Housekeeping from 1968. Even a few movie magazines with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. I dragged these from their trunk on a wet, rainy, Saturday recently and sat down by the fire for a good read. I've read them all a dozen times, but once or twice a year I find it comforting to look through them again.

This mystifies the husband. He is the type that prefers his news on the internet or CNN and only picks up a book if he is facing a long flight. Recently on a flight from Detroit to San Francisco, he finished the novel he was reading on our honeymoon (we've been married almost 13 years). So inevitably he will shake his head and ask, "Why do you keep those things?"

Why do I keep them? I don't consider why. Perhaps I like to remember my childhood. Could be I like to think of all the women that have taken enjoyment and advice from just such pages throughout the past century. Maybe I just like to envision a world where men wear hats. I just know that the pictures and words comfort me somehow.

I have books that do the same. I may have read them a hundred times over, but I can slip into them like a pair of ratty flannel pajamas and there I am safe from what can be a scary and worry-filled world.

The magazines are back in their trunk now. At the end of January, when ice covers everything and we've been under a foot of snow for what seems like forever, I'll dig them out again and sit in front of a fire with a cup of hot tea and the world will slip away again for me. For now it's enough to know they are there.