Well, here we are – we’ve finally reached the end of this dreadful year. Maybe 2021 will be a better year for you. Maybe it’ll just be more of the same kind of monotonous drudgery and utter bullshit that 2020 smeared all over our faces. Maybe it’ll be the kind of year that makes you rip whole months off your wall calendar.

My husband made me a wall calendar through Shutterfly several years ago because he’d run out of Christmas gift ideas for me and Shutterfly was having a promotion. He filled it with pictures of our kids and our friends and added special days like birthdays and anniversaries. I loved it so much that now he makes me one every year. I keep them all, and all the store-bought wall calendars that came before, because together they make a diary. I’ve never been good at keeping a diary (my “Daily Diary of the Coronavirus” lasted until the end of March), but the stack of old wall calendars in our attic closet tells the story of my life, with the details kept to a minimum. There’s our family trip to PCB, there’s my in-laws coming to visit, here’s when I cut and bleached my hair and had to schedule an emergency appointment to fix it. There’s the first time I set up a dinner date with a woman who has turned out to be the best friend I’ve made in years, here’s the first time I saw a roller derby bout, there’s the good-bye party for my friend who moved away.

At the end of every year, after I have received my new calendar, I take the old one off the wall and go through it again, so I can copy onto the new calendar any important dates that my husband missed. I relive the year, for better or worse, and then I store it away with all the others, telling myself that one day I’ll be happy I did.

Tell me how you store memories at Kate@KateLanders.com.