Postage Stamps and Selkies

Thanks to Melangell, who sent me a link to the Santa Fe Library blog that features the new 39 cent stamps celebrating Favorite Children's Book Animals. The post lists the books featured, so I shall let you follow the link. Of course, I have an urge to own a set of these stamps and never use them. I don't actually collect stamps in any official capacity, but every now and then I go through old boxes of stuff and find children's book themed stamps that I kept because I liked them so. I have this problem with stickers, too, in that I want to share them, but I also want to keep copies. I don't actively want to collect anything for the sake of collecting it-- I just want to know that it's going to be there when I look for it later. There's no guarantee that it will be there later, but I want it anyway.

In a sense, I am recreating the selkie story. I do not like the selkie story. In essence, a fisherman spies selkie women bathing in the sea, with their seal pelts on the beach. He takes the seal pelt of one of the selkie women, and she has to become his wife. He hides her pelt, fathers children with her, and all seems well until the selkie woman discovers her pelt locked away in a storage chest. Every time someone tells the selkie story, part of my brain shuts off. I have heard it over and over, but unlike other stories, for me it becomes even more tiresome and boring with each telling. If I'm going to be truthful, it's not because I identify with the selkie woman, but with the fisherman. I want to keep things safe in boxes, but when things are kept safe in boxes, I don't appreciate their beauty because (this is the clincher) I forget they're there.

This is one of those extemporaneous posts where I set out to write about one thing, and ended up thinking about something else. Really, I'm not going to fret over wanting to keep a set of postage stamps to admire in a box every now and then, but I do have some more insight into why I like to acquire objects and then give them away.