Buried Treasure

The yellowed newsprint is dated 1999, the treasure wrapped inside the brittle paper has waited twenty years for the light of day – now it’s spread across the kitchen counter. This is the first of the booty making its way out of the attic, the contents of one box  – one of the many waiting to be dealt with.  This mess hardly makes a dent in the mountain accumulating at the foot of the ladder leading to the forbidding black hole in the playroom ceiling.  But it’s a start.

The child this particular box was packed for was twenty years old in 1999.  The items inside are a collection of memorabilia from her younger days – stuff long forgotten.  There was a day, back in the day, when these treasures warranted real estate in her forever box – today they are but sundry from the past.  These are items with history and little else – no purpose, no returned sentiment – just stuff. 

There’s a lot of stuff like this making its way down that ladder; bins, cardboard boxes, disintegrating plastic bags; containers speckled with insulation and the evidence of unwelcome visitors. The visitors have long since been dealt with, aside from some secretive spiders hiding in the rafters there’s not much living in the attic attic these days, only muffled memories.

I feel a sense of commitment to this hazy past, to the people relegated to memory and yet still loved; a lot of these things were gifts to my children from my parents long passed.  I am but a middle man, the keeper of the treasures belonging to the yesterdays of this family. I remember the items better than the kids who packed them away – in the light of today they mean more to me than to them.

In truth everything in my house is a whisper from the past, everything has a story, an ‘I remember’ attached to it and I am attached to every memory.  I have accumulated a lot of memories over the years and a lot of stuff.

I’m not sure it’s fair to burden my kids with their childhood paraphernalia but I don’t think it’s fair to turf it before they have a chance to claim it either. So here I am unwrapping the past, letting it breathe and live again for a moment before it takes its step into tomorrow.  I know it will never hold the value to anyone else as it does to me, never be loved like it was back in the day, but I also know that my tomorrow doesn’t have the space to save anything more than the memories this stuff inspires. 

I’m going to take a moment to reacquaint myself with these objects, to recall their stories and then I’m bidding them farewell.  I’m going to allow myself to feel nostalgic but not sad while I do it.  Treasures have no emotions they simply inspire them – I need not feel guilty when I part with the object because the actual value of the treasure is in its story and I’m taking all the stories with me.