I have to admit, I can be a rather annoying hiking partner. I'm always stopping to pick up a rock I think looks neat, or a bird feather or pine cone. Add a beach to the equation and I'm hopeless, two hours later and my pockets are jammed with small objects. Treasures as I prefer to call them.
This is all well and good, but the real problem comes from trying to find a place to store all these treasures safely, as well as find some sort of order in which to keep them.
That's why I employ a variety of methods...
Nature journals are of course a must. That way I can write down what I see, hear and even smell. Like the other day I was walking along a path on a rather warm day and I could smell the pine needles. Not like the fresh cut pine of winter, but the warm aromatic scent of pine needles in summer. It stopped me dead in my tracks and I had to write it down.
A good box can also do the trick. I used have a variety of boxes on my dresser as a kid, each filled with my most recent finds. To this day I can go back to the box and remember the day and the place I found each object. Its like a mini time machine.
In my house growing up there were two built-in cabinets with glass fronts as you entered the house. My mother always called them the "keepsake cabinets", and whenever any of us kids made or found something special it went in the keepsake cabinet. Later in school I leaned about cabinets of curiosities, from the Renaissance to the victorian age. These could range from small assemblages of objects to whole rooms filled to the brim with every kind of oddity imaginable.
Perhaps I should start my own cabinet of curiosity, or keepsake cabinet. The lovely objects I found on my most recent outing left me with these fun treasures, I think I'll start with them.
~ Jordan
*Last Time in Nature: Super Moon