Most of us collect mementos, souvenirs and bits of significant litter from our travels. How we enjoy it later varies. Right now I have a French toothbrush sitting idle in the bathroom from last year's trip to Paris, some postcards from the Maritime museum framed on my wall, and some gorgeous low-denomination British coins sitting affectedly in my dayrunner. These things started as necessities and turned into souvenirs after a bit of artistic placement. Lots of everyday things lend themselves to collections and weirdly decorative items; some, like antiquities, should stay where they are. If we all took unique old bits of Europe with us, Europe would soon look like Peoria.

Collecting manmade inorganic matter requires ethical judgment - a friend from architecture school collected a Robie House brick from this Frank Lloyd Wright remodel but the brick was on the rubbish heap to be hauled away. He flaunted it on his desk for years. Thus inspired, I carted an entire Roman brick around in my backpack at the Roman Forum, having heisted it without being caught. It had the neatest positive/ negative key shape front and back that locked the bricks together, far cooler than any 20th century hunk of Robie House. Guilt got the best of me; it seemed criminal (and it actually WAS criminal) to separate them after two thousand years of nesting together, so I took a picture and put the brick back with its ancient brethren. I suspect that even if I hadn't ended up in an Italian prison, that keeping the brick would have cursed me like volcanic rock from Hawaii's Kiluea

So what about collecting bits of geography instead? I used to collect water in film canisters. Visually it was a pretty stupid collection. Water is water. For a while there I had water from the Firth of Forth, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, Lake Erie, and the North Platte River. It hosted the possibility of strange microbes and dire diseases, and it got tossed out accidentally.

So I started collecting sand. I was amazed at the subtleties of sand from all over the world, and displayed it all in six-sided jars. The jars were expensive and hard to find, so I eventually ran out of them and stacked plastic bags of sand on top of the jars. Last week I dismantled the collection because it was disgusting: rusted lids, unidentifiable contents, rotting labels. I could easily part with the jars, but the sand itself... well, there was the Mount St. Helens ash I scraped off my windshield in 1980 and sand from a lovely Cape Cod week... I couldn't just dump it.

At a stamp and paper shop I found tiny aluminum glass-lidded tins. They're about an inch and a quarter across, meant originally for watchmakers' parts. I moved my sand collection (minus the shells and rocks) to these little tins and discarded a grocery bag full of jars and grit. Little 3/4 inch round labels on the back finish them off. I bought enough empties for lots of future trips, never imagining...

Our own Riverman has a far more exotic sand collection - diamond sand from the Skeleton Coast, red sand from the summit of Mt. Sinai, salty sand from the shore of the Dead Sea, brown sand from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, rocky sand from the shores of Gitchigummee, and soon, sand from the Arctic Sea. He's gotten some new sample jars to organize it, and soon will have a souvenir collection Martha Stewart will envy, and I will have to try to live up to, exotic grain by exotic grain...

Get Lost Magazine editor Leslie Strom now has to figure out what to do with ten baggies of tiny watch parts...