My sister, Queen of the Scrap, Empress of the Album, is having a scrapbooking weekend at her house. I am among the lucky invitees. At first, I blithely planned to get prints made from my wedding photo negatives and get that guilt off my back. However, my anniversary trip put the kibosh on that enterprise, so I fell back on my unfinished album of my trip to Ireland and Wales in 1998. Yes, you heard that. I have an unfinished album from 1998. Two, if you count the small album of the musical I was in that year.

So, last night, after ambushing dragonfly-riding barbarians in Matt’s Exalted game, I set about packing to drive from lunch-hour to Seattle, trying to avoid gigantic traffic snarls in between. The first thing I started to pack was my photos, et cetera. They were in a large box in my workroom labelled, PHOTOS AND SCRAPBOOKS! VERY PRECIOUS! NOT FOR STORAGE UNIT! There, as I remembered, were the bags of photos, the bag of postcards, brochures and tickets, and indeed my travel diary, which was hilarious (almost any given page more than halfway through included an inventive curse on yellowjackets and their progeny. This was the trip that heightened my hatred of the little things to near phobic levels.) and remarkably complete. I piled all this up, added the scrapbooking paper and punches I own (not many) and looked at it critically. Something was missing.

The album. The album I’d started in 1998, which I had blithely assumed was packed with this stuff. The album which extends only 2 days, if that, into the trip. Urrrrrgh! I ripped apart my workroom looking. I searched the closet of the guestroom. I searched the closet of the computer room. I delved into boxes in the garage, and found a few things I’d been missing, but no album. I looked under the stairs. No, no, not under the stairs! I tried to find somewhere else to search, but there was nowhere else. I had to accept my fate.

I searched the first, the only easy-to-reach box. No. I dragged two boxes out into the hall, negotiating past our wine rack delicately. I searched the next boxes. I manhandled a suitcase approximately my own size out into the hall. I got a flashlight. The next thing I know, I’m hunched over in the depths of the cubby under the stairs, sweating profusely and jumping everytime my clothes brush my skin like a spider. I unpiled and repiled, crouching in the hot, rebreathed air, until I’d looked in every eligible box, and then I lugged all the boxes and suitcases back in. All the time, the delicately cultured accents of my audiobook regaled me with a social call on a breezy terrace with cups of sherbet.

Sweaty, dusty, and full of subliminal impressions of brown recluses crawling in my clothing, I finished my packing and crawled into bed, abandoning the idea of running before work next morning. I’m just going to do album pages (which I have) without an album in which to put them. Who knows…in another 6 years, maybe it’ll turn up!