They’re a little dusty, and often shoved in the back of closets or under beds, often seen only when you move or come across them while looking for something else.

They say Red Wing, or Nike, or Florsheim or Adidas. A lot of folks have shoeboxes tucked away somewhere, filled not with shoes, but with mementos like old letters, old pictures and keepsakes. These are reminders of family members or past relationships -- folks you’ve known in your life who have meant something to you and maybe left something behind. They’re things you picked up on your travels to exotic and not-so-exotic locations. Concert tickets, foreign coinage, the receipt from the restaurant where you first tried sushi and decided wasabi was a curse word.

In these shoeboxes, you keep things you want to keep, but don’t know what to do with, or don’t want them sitting around your everyday life.

In this day and age, the types of letters and pictures that go in these shoeboxes are becoming a bit scarce. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a rate hike to battle a longtime slump which has a lot to do with the ubiquitousness of e-mail. Family members, including some of my own, keep up with each other on Facebook. Acquaintances send each other e-cards, and snap-happy shutterbugs post pics to Flickr and other sites to share.

This type of communication often doesn’t leave behind a permanent record in the same way a printed picture or handwritten letter or card does. You can put a CD-R or a memory stick in a shoebox, but it’s not the same. You can archive a photo album on a content-storage web site, but how would you ever stumble across it 10 years later in the same way you would a shoebox under the bed?

Sadly, you have to seek that stuff out.

You sort of miss that moment of quiet reflection you find when you’re digging through a closet and come across that dusty old shoebox full of photos and cards and letters and start to thumb through them. Remember that time you went to Ireland and stayed in a hostel? Remember strolling along the Thames and having someone take that postcard shot of the Tower Bridge with you and your friends underneath?

And what was up with that Dali sculpture?

Collecting a permanent record also has historical value for those who come after you.

Years ago, sitting for a portrait was a special occasion and often, folks may have only sat for one in their entire life. Think about that:: having your picture taken only once in your entire life. Talk about a treasured piece of the past.

These days, families find that those portraits of great-granddad, or cousin Betsy’s side of the family on the front porch of the farm house, are just about the only physical evidence of their forebears’ existence that they can put their hands on.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if what we leave behind is a collection of photos and e-mails scattered across cyberspace? Or worse yet, if it were a handful of discs in a shoebox discovered when the drives to read them no longer exist?