The Treasure Chest

  

Having spent more than 30 years researching my family history, I've learned a lot about my people. 

I'm a little bit Irish, a whole lot of English, some French, a touch of German and, somewhere, one percent Native American.

I also know that I descend from a very long line of packrats -- people who keep everything and don't know how to throw anything away. This was not a surprise, really. At least I know I come by it honestly.

This notion was recently reinforced when I inherited "The Trunk," a very large steamer trunk that belonged to my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and, finally, my sister, who decided it was hers (dammit). She took it and put it in her garage, which sadly flooded a few years back. But let me say this about those old turn-of-the-century trunks -- they were built to last. Remarkably, everything was very well preserved except for a few photo albums that stuck together. 

The Coach and I dragged it home, and it took me a few weeks to get up my gumption to go through it. Once I opened it and got past the musty smell from the flood and the many years, I spent a week strolling down other people's memory lanes and sifting through the memories and mementos of four generations of very sentimental women. 

They kept everything.

Bills. Receipts. Checks. Check registers. Newspaper clippings, especially of classmates who married, had babies and died. Tickets. Programs. Dance cards. Birthday cards. Sympathy cards. Congratulatory cards and telegrams.

And every letter ever written to them.

I found the funeral book from my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my grandfather, to add to the one from my mother-in-law and my father-in-law.

I found my grandmother's high school scrapbook, filled with blurry black and white photos of young flapper girls with bob hairdos. She attended Sophie B. Wright High School in New Orleans and was a member of the Terrible Tooters, a music and drama group. I have a ticket to her graduation, the program, and her senior yearbook.

   

Grannie married a boy who went to Warren Easton High School. I have a ticket to his graduation as well. He was the son of a politician in Algiers who served as a Councilman and as a State Representative. There were a few papers of his and some stationery from his role as the Union Head for the Railroad Conductors.

My other great-grandmother, Lena, was a registered nurse. There were lots of identification cards, membership cards, and calling cards from the early 1900s and many letters thanking her for her kind care.

When I was about 2 years old, my family loaded up the old white Rambler station wagon and took a trip to New York for the World's Fair, with stops all along the East Coast and D.C. We stayed in a hotel that had little Indian tepee tents. Sadly, that was one of the photo albums that got almost ruined, but there were a few fun mementos from the trip I was on but of which I have no recollection.

This was an intensely emotional journey for me, looking at the photos of my entire family who lived, kept a bunch of stuff, and died. I remember seeing these photos, hearing the stories. I enjoyed looking at the scrapbook from my grandmother's retirement after 31 years with the Louisiana Employment Agency and Grandpa's 45 years with the telephone company. 

I loved seeing the young ladies from the 1920s and a bunch of Grannie's beaus, along with her completely filled dance cards. (I have no idea who this beautiful young woman was.)

A few leftover tickets from our trip to Disneyland. 

Old physician's tools, including a very scary-looking primitive syringe. (I donated these to my own doctor, who has a display case with other similar items.)

Photos of my grandparents' house when they first bought it, with the white fence and rose-covered trellises at the end of the driveway.

My sister's high school yearbooks from the 1960s.

It was a wonderful walk down memory lane.

But here's where some of you are going to disown me....

While I did keep quite a bit of it, along with the trunk, I threw a lot of it away. I had to throw away the check registers and bills and cards and letters, along with many of the photos of people who have long gone and I never knew. 

 I have already carried on the family trait enough with my own treasure trove of stuff -- keepsakes, high school scrapbooks, things from my college years, my wedding. 

Then I became a mom. So now I have trunks and boxes of her stuff, none of which she seems to want.

Then my mama died and left me a bunch of her stuff. And a lot of her stuff was stuff that had previously been her mama's stuff, and her grandmother's stuff, and her great-grandmother's stuff.

It has gotten to the point where I need my own museum!

And someday in the not too distant future, my adopted daughter and my step-children, who have no connection to any of these people or any of their stuff are going to have to go through all of it. And they won't know what to do with it either. None of it is really worth anything (I don't think). It's all just memories at this point. And yes, some of those are priceless. 

But mostly, it's just other people's stuff. 

My family supported education!

Grandpa's retirement gift from the telephone company.

The bill for my mother's birth at St. Mary's Hospital in Patterson. 

 

Quarantine Week 2: The Nest is Full Again

Whaddaya mean you're coming home three months early??? 

Regular readers of this little blog (both of you) may recall that, last August, I wrote a very tearful (well, I cried) post about our baby girl leaving the nest and going off to college.

Although my heart was having a hard time letting her go, my brain recognized that it was her time to spread her wings and fly. Yes, I did cry. A lot. But then the Coach and I had a cute and funny photo shoot showing off our new empty nest.

Don't worry, everyone said. She will be back. I knew she would, I just didn't expect it to happen so soon. Or that she would come back with so much STUFF!

The spread of the Corona Virus has forced colleges to shut down across the country. Classes now are being held online and students are no longer required (or even allowed) to live on campus. Lora didn't hesitate; she booked it home as soon as she could following the announcement. But she only brought a few things with her. Yesterday, we had to go back to move her our of her dorm room four hours away.

It was quite a difference from Move-In Day.

For one, it wasn't 1,000 degrees outside. It was a nice, cool morning with clouds.

Also, there weren't 1,000 people there doing the same thing as us and trying to find the best parking space.  In August, there were student volunteers directing traffic, welcoming new students and befuddled parents, pointing the way to go, telling us what to do. Yesterday, there were about five cars in the parking lot and no one there directing traffic. Inside, there was one young lady, who obviously had nowhere to go during her spring break, waiting to take the keys when we were done.

In August, I was sad but also thrilled to help my daughter set up her new living space. I tried not to be  one of those overbearing moms, offering my help and advice only when asked and allowing her to do her own thing.  Yesterday, I was only sad at the thought that she was losing such a large chunk of her freshman year of college. And she pretty much let me take charge of the packing and the cleaning.

In August, we spent hours unloading Coach's minivan and hauling everything into her room. Yesterday, it took us about 90 minutes to put it all back in. (And I am still the reigning Tetris champion of the universe!)

Now it's all piled up in the spare bedroom downstairs, awaiting her attention. Meanwhile, I'm wondering where in the heck we're going to put it all.

But, as I did in August, I'm letting her do her own thing. Gotta give 'em their space, right?

Remnants

"Life sucks, then you die...

      Then someone comes and takes all your stuff."

It's an old joke, I know. Maybe it's not funny, but it is true.

My mom left this earth a little more than a month ago. She lived 84 years, the last 11 or so in a cute little house around the corner from me. For about 10 1/2 of those years, she bitched every day about needing to sell that house, needing to get out of that house, needing to get rid of all her stuff.

Then, one day in May, she did. Put a For Sale sign right in the front yard. She had an offer the next day. She sold it to somebody else a few days later. The buyers, acquaintances of ours, told her to take her time moving and cleaning it out.

It took a while.

From May to August, Mom spent hours sorting through the remnants of her life, trying to decide what to keep, what to toss, what to sell, what to give away. She tried to give lots of it away, too.

She managed to downsize enough that she was able to move into a nice little one bedroom apartment in May. But she wasn't there very long. It quickly became obvious to our family that mom wasn't going to be able to live alone. Her brain wasn't as sharp as it used to be.

Then she got sick.

So in August, she came to live with me, in a pretty small bedroom. I told her to bring whatever she wanted; the rest we put in storage.

After she was gone, I left it all alone until our family get-together, when I basically told everyone to take what they wanted. Then, I finally worked up the courage to start going through the leftovers, the remaining remnants of my mother's life.

You think you know someone until you have to empty their junk drawers.

Scotch tape. Rolls and rolls of it. Some of them empty.

Pens.

Scissors. I now have a German beer stein (hers) full of scissors. (I had, maybe, three pairs of scissors before and never could find them when I needed them.)

Her gall stone.

A letter I wrote to her for Mother's Day, thanking her for everything she had ever done for me.

The eulogy I wrote for my brother's funeral, along with his accident report.

My wedding and engagement announcements.

Her divorce papers. All three of them.

A check for $25 my grandmother wrote to her in 1979. Uncashed.

Her elementary school autograph book, filled with those cute little poems we all used to know. It's all written in pencil, though, so it's hard to read a lot of it.

A wonderful scrapbook of photos and clippings about former LSU football player Jim Shoaf. She and he were "friends" back in the day. I'd love to get this book to his family if anyone knows how to get in touch with them.

A few of my sister's report cards.

Lots of costume jewelry.

Lots of black clothing.

And, I think, every check register she ever kept.

I sorted through it all, keeping some, tossing  --- a lot. I could hear her in my head saying, "Don't throw that away! I might need it!"  I now have a "Mama box," filled with her keepsakes. It's next to the two boxes that contain my own. And Lora's. And Marty's.

I guess someday, someone will have to come go through my stuff, which will now include so my of my mom's and others.

I'm guessing they will be very confused.

They probably will wonder why I have six portraits of me. No, I'm not that vain. My mother was a painter and had me pose for her often. And her art classes. She also studied with the artist Henry Hensche and paid handsomely for him to do a "study" of me. But she was totally pissed that the one that I hung over my piano wasn't the one by her or him.

They probably will wonder why I have all of my grandmother's genealogy notes. Well, that's because, when she died, mom gave it all to me to go through..... Yeah. I still have lots of it.

They might wonder why I have my great grandmother's pie safe, my other great-grandmother's boudoir chair and settee, my grandmother's wicker screen and my mother-in-law's dresser. They won't know where the four-poster bed came from.....

They probably will find a few surprises somewhere. But no gall stones.

However, they now know why I have so many pairs of scissors.