Collect (Five Minute Friday)

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What do you collect? As a child, I collected stamps. Used postage stamps from the United States. I remember combing through all the places Mom had stored old mail, looking for interesting postage stamps. Mom wouldn’t mind if I gently tore the stamp and the paper around it off the old envelopes. If she did, she never said anything. I tried to tidy the area I was digging through and make sure I left the papers and mail neater than they had been when I found them. Maybe this is the reason she never complained.

After collecting a decent number of stamps, all still on their little snips of paper, I would get a foil pan and put a layer of stamps in it and fill with tap water to soak the stamps off the paper. Eventually, some of the stamps would slide right off the paper. Others would need a little longer to soak. It was an enjoyable step in the process.

I had little glassine gummed hinges to attach the treasure trove of soaked off and dried stamps into the proper places in my album. My album was perfect bound and thus not expandable. It was nothing fancy, kind of like a workbook. It showed all the stamps in gray and black ink. My job as a collector was to cover each gray picture of the stamps with the real stamp to add color to the album.

I loved seeing how detailed some of those older stamps were. Any most cases, they had only a single color of ink, but the details were amazing! A magnifying glass showed all the tiny lines the artist had made to give the inch-square piece of art its details.

I still have my stamp collection though I probably stopped adding to it in the late seventies. Thinking back, the fact that the newer stamps weren’t included in my album may have had a bit to do with why I stopped adding to it. I still save the interesting and not overly heavily postmarked stamps from my incoming mail. I’ve noticed more and more things come with meter marks instead of postage stamps or if they do have postage stamps, they are bulk mail stamps. The designs are more colorful now and there are tons more stamps to collect, but the old ones with the single ink color are still my favorites, because of the details.

Life is in the details, it is up to you to notice them. What do YOU collect?

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Collect
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

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