
A Georgia O’Keeffe Travel Box
In some ways, writing this Daybook is a bit like keeping a diary. Not quite as chronological a record, perhaps, but occasionally I can find an entry that reminds of something that has been gone from conscious thought for years. Take, for instance, this paragraph from a June 2o16 Daybook entry written when we were visiting our friends Susan Haynes and Bob Borson in Santa Fe.
Later we spent a few hours at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum which was featuring an exhibition of her ‘Texas Period’ paintings – done in the years before her marriage to Alfred Stieglitz and long, long before she found her ‘spiritual home’ here in New Mexico. Part of the exhibition may have been life-changing for me – if you can have such a revelation at my advanced age. It was seeing O’Keeffe’s “Travel Boxes” that I think will change my scrapbooking obsession forever…
Obviously, that thought went right out of my mind… forever. The evidence is six (or more) unfinished scrapbooks and the boxes upon boxes of “stuff” to cull through in order to complete them. I haven’t yet brought myself to simply dump the entire kit and kaboodle, but that urge is getting stronger .
But what about O’Keeffe’s “travel boxes?” I can find dozens of pictures of them online but, so far, I can’t find any written description of them. And perhaps I knew at the time… but now? Not so much. How did she organize them? Were they for sharing with others? How could they take the place of scrapbooks? Were they easier to store? And would they only work for a travel experience — not for day-to-day keepsakes?
I don’t know if I am truly interested in the answers to those questions or not. I’m actually delving deeper by the day into a new book which, if I let it, will probably gobble up all my “free time” for the next year or so. At the rate I’m going with those scrapbooks and boxes, they’ll still be there jammed to overflowing. And I’ll be another year beyond remembering why I kept all that “stuff.” The only positive thought along those lines is that I’m no longer keeping new stuff. I think the last scrapbook (if I ever get to it) will be for 2019. But… maybe a variation on O’Keeffe’s Travel Boxes might work.
I do believe Scarlett had a point. I’ll think about that tomorrow…