Another Man's Treasure

One man's junk is another man's treasure - an exploration in to aging alongside your memories.

    I keep a box in my hallway closet. I’ve labeled it ‘Life’ and inside of it there are a certain amount of dreams and failures, romances and disgust. I never take this box out, I barely even acknowledge it’s existence. Sometimes it’s better that way, as the honeysuckle nostalgia beats down on my head like a hot summer day whenever I crack the lid and my stomach churns and I feel like I am missing out on something important. Sometimes when I think about the past and what it contained, I feel like I am going to be sick with such a sense of urgency I don‘t know how to contain it. I see moments that I can not grasp again, friends that have passed away or moved too far to introduce to my children. I see family members who I’ll never speak with again, some who I do and don’t appreciate them as I should. I see gatherings, missed opportunities, pets. Goals reached and some that never will be. In one corner is a collection of my childrens hair, their first haircuts; the memory for that would be sloppy faces from the lollipops they got after for being good, sitting still.
    When my children became of the age to peruse the hidden reaches of our house, I fully expected the box to be discovered and it’s contents rummaged through. I  had stories, metaphors, and monologues to share, pictures to expound upon and laughter ready for those funny moments that you know they would never understand, but you hoped to impress on them anyway. Years passed, and the box collected so much dust, became a skeleton in the closet. Eventually, I too forgot it was once a being capable of devouring your thought process. I disregarded that I used to throw all  my mementos inside of it’s gaping maw, then fold it’s lips closed gently and pat it on it’s head, like a monster, reassuring it I would return momentarily to rid it of it’s contents. More years still, and it started sagging in the middle, old age, liver spots and gray hair. When we moved from our sprawling home of our earlier years of marriage (lives) I almost left it behind, and believed it really had no place in my new tenth story apartment building. Somehow it ended up on the moving truck and made it’s way in to a new closet, smelling faintly of renovation and limes, and the process began anew.
    Eventually, the box became a myriad of damp cardboard colors, tucked away on it’s tiny shelf on top of and underneath a knitted blanket, pink though it used to be red. Completely forgotten,  it surprised me when my seven year old granddaughter carefully distributed the contents of the box on to my lap one evening and asked me to explain their origins. I spread out the photographs, the acceptance letters and the hair clippings. I massaged life back in to the love letters, Grade School report cards, a Post-It note declaring my daughter hated me, then the apology written on the back of a cereal box with a smiley face, as if it made everything better just to have that doodle taking up half of the space, it‘s eyes underneath I‘m and it‘s mouth wrapping around to the front of the box, completely bypassing sorry. My eldest daughter, when she arrived that evening for dinner and to retrieve her own child, appeared to be as surprised as I was when she saw the soggy, dilapidated box gutted and empty on the coffee table, memories like entrails surrounding it.
    “Mom,” she said, quietly, “I thought you threw that away after Dad died.” I gazed at her, past her…draped in my own recollection of that particular moment in time, when I had inserted his funeral schedule through the top, but never actually opened it up to place it in gently and with all the care I could muster as my final offering to the man I loved.
    “How could I do that?” I asked. “How could I remove from my life the last piece of him, the last piece of you, the last pieces of a younger, brighter time? What purpose would my life serve in a dump, landfill, garbage can?” I stopped as I felt the tug of a tiny hand on my shirt.
    “Grandma,” my beautiful grand daughter asked me, her miniature voice making my heart leap and flutter. Every time I heard her speak it was like rewinding to when her mother was her age, silky sweet hair, baby powder smell, goodnight kisses.
    “Yes sweetheart?”
    “When I grow up, if I keep a box like this, with things in it like you have, do you think I would grow up to be like you?” Her mother sighed behind her, ready to leave, to get away from this spotless white interior, the 6 o’clock dinner followed by bed, the starched linen and the geriatric aura of this place, her Mother’s.
    “You can be like anybody you want to be, my dear. If you thought you’d like to be like me, then you could do that with or without a box.”
    “But the box is you. I want to be just like you,” she stated. Now it was my turn to sigh, my breath like butterflies whispering towards the ceiling. A tear came to my eye, and as I wiped it away, I realized that of all the fruitless endeavours in my life, this box was not one of them. It had taken forty years of collection and contemplation, but I had reached one person, one tiny, wisp-like soul. I would not be forgotten, all thanks to the explorative hands of a child.
    I was somebody to someone.

    Footnote, addendum;
    My grandmother passed away today, at 6:45am, quietly in her sleep. She dutifully collected every shred of her life inside the walls of a cardboard box, alongside this one last letter which she wrote, her final addition. The box is now mine, to hold, peruse, empty and refill.
    On the side of this old container she had scrawled ‘Life’ in capital letters, perhaps she forgot to put ‘My’ in front of it. I choose to believe that she did not omit this on purpose, but clearly she was stating that what is one mans junk is another mans treasure.
    And I will treasure this forever.