Here in the Pacific Northwest the forsythia is blooming, swollen buds are bursting open, raspberry canes are sprouting new leaves. It’s also cold and rainy (except when it’s not), and the mountains are getting much-needed snow. Perfect weather for indoor projects. I have a growing list.

I’ve been looking for a stack of Little Golden Books I squirreled away in 2020, when clearing a bookshelf in preparation for hosting Family Pandemic School—The Shy Little Kitten, Scuffy the Tugboat, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. (Remember those days? Who would have thought times would get more “interesting” than that?) What I found instead, in the antique trunk my mother and I bought for five dollars at a yard sale nearly fifty years ago, were letters.

Finding letters in old trunks seems to be a thing with me. First was the Army footlocker, full of letters my parents wrote to each other during WWII. These are letters written to me—mostly by family—in the final third of the last century. Unlike my parents’ letters, I will not be transcribing and compiling these. But what to do with them? I really didn’t need another project.

My sisters and I are striving to get our family home ready to sell, so we aren’t caught flat-footed when opportunity knocks. But this is my stuff, not that of my parents. It’s somehow easier to hold, reminisce, and discard what our parents saved, which was everything.

I pulled out the letters, and decided I will leave the rest of the contents of the trunk intact for my children to discover when I’m gone—my high school scrapbook, magazines, my red-metal grade school lunch box. Who am I to decide what I leave behind is burden and what is of emotional value? Besides, why should they escape the left-behinds? Where I will put it when I move from this big house is mystery. Not knowing what to do with it all is probably why my parents never left home, held hostage by trash and treasure.

But the letters . . .

Unlike my mother’s neatly stacked and tied bundles, my musty missives were thrown willy-nilly into plastic grocery bags. I’ve put them in a plastic box to contain the smell. I do have a plan, which involves returning to my sisters letters they wrote; they’re about them, after all. But I can’t help reading them first, which takes time. They say something about who we were. I had forgotten how five-years-younger sister, Rebecca, sounded off to me about the unfairness of it all via the U.S.P.S. when she was left at home, absent her sisters, and long-distance calls were expensive. I recall my awe of five-years-older sister, Jo Ann, being off into the world on her own while I was in college. I’m glad to be reminded of our relationships.

The letters from my mother are revealing of who she was—and I won’t say more about that, other than I don’t misremember. More letters from my father than I thought he’d written. Postcards of Mount St. Helens before she blew her top. Crayon-scribbled “congratulations” cards from the children in my preschool class when my son was born, almost forty-seven years ago. Stunningly, their names call up many of the small faces and personalities. I’m not saving them, or the many greeting cards.

There are letters from my husband-to-be and from the early years of our marriage when he was out of town for an extended period. I don’t know if I’ll read those. It feels somehow intrusive after being unmarried for more than thirty years. I will return them to the trunk for our children. Just as I am grateful for the treasure of meeting my parents before I knew them, perhaps they will appreciate seeing theirs in a different light, before the end of our marriage blocked the lens of what came before. At any rate, it’s their history, and not mine to erase.

When we resize our lives (and don’t you love that word better than downsize?), we don’t need to put all of our past in the landfill. There is treasure amidst the trash. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. There are the two shoeboxes of postage stamps my mother kept, for example, thinking they would be valuable someday. They are not. Some will be set aside for a creative venture, many duplicates and tattered ones will go to the trash or be passed on to other creators, some will be saved for next gens—because relics of a time gone by are interesting, though they won’t realize that for many more years. Maybe it is our task to store the treasure for now. Sorting is another project.

P.S. I haven’t found the books.

🌷 🌷 🌷

I would love to hear from you! What are your experiences of and philosophy about things left behind, yours and that of others? Leave a comment below.

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