Your life in a box
We’ve been reading chapter books to Emma at night now; it makes my voice scratchy and I never can read aloud without feeling out of breath, but her eyes are sparkling, her imagination piqued.
I hunted around for books I knew, and couldn’t find them. Today, I dug out a couple of unpacked boxes from the back carport. Aha! A gold mine treasure trove of friends she hasn’t met yet.
The to-read stack for Emma is quite large.
Then we foudn a box of her childhood – funny, since she’s eight. But in there, a lot of her favorite picture books, storytime with Daddy and even a few Meaghan exclaimed over. Ones we can recite by memory, the whole family. “Bear in bed. Bear OUT of bed. Bear at the window…”
I dug some more, just curious as to what I’d forgotten, and what was still relevant. Funny how stuffing things in boxes and leaving them there for two years highlights what you really need or miss.
At any rate, a pile of notes, a score of inventory sheets I’ll be glad to burn, a mess of instructions, some hastily scribbled sketches. “I used to own a craft store,” I tell people, “but it was just a little one”. Not terribly successful financially, but I suppose it’s only looking at all the paperwork left behind, I think I made a teeny difference to the people around me with nothing to do in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. there’s a piece of paper listing every single craft class I taught – 62 the circled number says at the bottom. Sheesh, I’m tired just thinking about it. The dates are 1996, 1997 – a four year old, a six year old and a nine year old. How on EARTH did I do it? And we were homeschooling! Can I get that energy back?
I find some scrapbooks – newspaper clippings that Ron had saved and I have carefully placed in a scrapbook, as that is “what you do”. I find another with pictures of my grandmother’s quilts she made. Photos, notes, newspaper clippings. All going yellow.
Every time I lug a box back in the house, I walk by another pile of boxes with my grandfather’s kitchen in it. I still have to finish going through that.
It’s almost yard sale season, and we’re making a pile, but the things I’m keeping – the things with meaning, real meaning – to any of us, those things should be in some place of honor, or at least somewhere we can see them use them, have them participate *in* life. Not sit in a box.
Some things though are for sharing. Some things – the pictures, the notes, the important stuff with details people won’t remember 50 years from now unless somebody writes it down – those things I’ll scan and upload. Useful bits for some people, record keeping for family. Sharability.
I use my blog to remember, and sometimes I forget there was a before. But I can fill in a lot of that.
